In November 2009, the late Charles Krauthammer gave a seminal speech, titled "Decline Is a Choice." In it, Krauthammer stated, "The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no ... Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice."

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Last week, President Joe Biden chose decline.

That choice was not inevitable. It was foolhardy in the extreme, a symptom of Biden's commitment to his own idiotic ideology – an ideology that crashed headlong into the steel wall of reality in Afghanistan. Former Presidents Obama and Trump both wanted to remove the United States from Afghanistan, but both recognized the reality on the ground: that removing all American support from the Afghan military would result in the Taliban – the terrorist regime responsible for providing aid and support to Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida in the run-up to and aftermath of 9/11 – taking over the country.

Biden knew this. He just didn't care. As he reportedly expressed in 2010, while speaking with Richard Holbrooke about American responsibility in Afghanistan, "F*** that, we don't have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it."

And so, Biden destroyed the stalemate in Afghanistan that had allowed America's counterterror mission in-country to continue successfully. The Afghan military was built to work with U.S. close air support; Biden withdrew that support. In fact, he went so far as to bar American contractors from entering the country to help the Afghan air force maintain its equipment. He cut the Afghan military off at the knees, then blamed them when they left the battlefield.

And Biden lied. He lied that Afghanistan represented an "endless war" carrying the possibility of "endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery"; in reality, the United States ended its combat operations in Afghanistan in 2014, had just 2,500 troops on the ground before Biden's unplanned pullout, and has not suffered a combat casualty since February 2020.

Biden suggested that his hands were tied by a tentative agreement between the Trump administration and the Taliban, though he has had no problem abrogating Trump's agreements, and despite the fact that the Taliban had obviously failed to fulfill any of the contingencies under the Trump agreement. And he lied that the Afghan military's collapse simply reflected a lack of willpower: The Afghan military incurred 55,000 deaths since 2015, compared with nearly none from NATO.

Why did Biden do all of this?

Because American strength is not Biden's priority. He wants America's footprint on the world stage minimized; he wants America focused as much as possible on building a Nordic-style social welfare state accompanied by racially inflammatory equity programming at home.

The result of Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan will be a reconstituted terror threat as our enemies recognize we are a paper tiger; renewed Chinese aggression against Taiwan and diplomatic overtures toward the Taliban; and new offensives from Russia and Iran. Foreign policy abhors a vacuum. Biden has willfully created one. What's more, in abandoning an ally of two decades, Biden has sent a clear message: Those who rely on American support can no longer do so securely. They'd be better off making realpolitik connections with America's enemies in order to hedge their bets.

Meanwhile, Biden presses forward toward American hospice care. With the economy under inflationary pressure, he continues to foster trillions in spending, extraordinary new entitlement programs and a complete rethinking of the relationship between individuals and the government.

If there is a Biden doctrine, it's simply this: surrender abroad, bloated dotage at home. Decline is a choice. And Biden has made that choice.

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America has a crisis of empathy. That crisis isn't expressed as a lack of charitable giving: Americans give approximately seven times what Europeans do to charity per capita. And it isn't expressed as an unwillingness to spend on a governmental level: The United States currently spends more money than any nation in the history of the world.

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The crisis of empathy isn't even about an inability to walk in other people's shoes: America is one of the most racially and religiously tolerant nations on earth.

The American crisis of empathy rests in a simple fact: America is now divided over two mutually exclusive definitions of empathy. That divide is unbridgeable, and it's tearing the country down the middle.

One group of Americans – call them Neutrality-Driven Empaths – defines empathy as treating people as individuals capable of free choice and deserving of equality under the law. In this view, empathy manifests in respect for the capacity of other human beings, and in understanding that they make different decisions than you would. This version of empathy doesn't require that we agree with anyone's decisions, but that we understand that it is not our job, absent significant externalities, to rule them.

The other group of Americans – call them Emotion-Centered Empaths – believes that empathy means mirroring solidarity with subjective feelings in policy. In this view, empathy means expressing agreement with someone else's specific feelings, refusing to assess whether those feelings are merited or justified and then shaping policy around assuaging those feelings.

Neutrality-Driven Empaths believe that politics ought to be about solutions geared toward equality of individuals before the law. Policy and emotional empathy may come into conflict in this view. Emotion-Centered Empaths believe the opposite: They believe that politics ought to be about emotional solidarity rather than finding solutions. Policy must follow emotional empathy in this view.

To take a rather stark example, consider the question of black student test performance. Neutrality-Driven Empaths will suggest that meritocratic standards are in fact the only neutral rules that can be applied to education, and that such standards have acted as a ladder for a wide variety of human beings of various races; that if a disproportionate number of black students underperform on such tests, that may merit empathy, but it doesn't merit discarding the standards. Emotion-Centered Empaths will, in direct opposition, suggest that the mere fact of black student underperformance requires discarding testing regimes – to do otherwise would be to abandon solidarity with those who underperform, to ignore the myriad factors that undoubtedly led to the underperformance in the first place.

The battle between Neutrality-Driven Empaths and Emotion-Driven Empaths creates a massive political asymmetry. That's because Neutrality-Driven Empaths acknowledge that while people may disagree over policy, that does not mean they are uncaring or cruel. But for Emotion-Driven Empaths, the opposite is again true: If policy is directly correlated with empathy, failure to agree represents emotional brutality and cruelty. Not only that: There can be no agreeing to disagree because to suggest that people bear consequences for their actions is in and of itself uncaring and unempathetic. It lacks solidarity.

The empathy gap is a crisis. If you believe that empathy means treating people as individuals capable of reasoning and acting under neutral rules, we can have a society. If you believe that empathy means shaping policy around solidarity with subjective feelings, rules become kaleidoscopic, variable and fluid – and compulsion is generally necessary in order to effectuate such rules.

Empathy for people as full human beings means recognizing their agency, understanding their differences, and holding fast to equality before the law. If we reject those principles in favor of a high-handed and paternalistic approach to power politics, freedom will not survive.

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This week, President Joe Biden was asked whether he had any message for social media amidst a dramatic rise in the number of diagnosed COVID-19 cases thanks to the delta variant. Biden immediately responded that companies like Facebook were responsible for murder: "They're killing people – I mean, they're really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people." Meanwhile, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said Facebook had not stopped misinformation thoroughly enough on its platform, calling misinformation a "serious threat to public health."

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None of this is accurate. Facebook is, first of all, a platform; it is not a publication with the same responsibilities of editorial oversight as a publisher. To treat Facebook as such would be to transform its purpose.

Furthermore, on a purely factual level, it is simply untrue that Facebook users are disproportionately likely to avoid vaccination – in fact, according to Facebook's statistics, vaccine acceptance in the United States among their users now stands between 80% and 85%.

So, what's driving the Biden administration's finger pointing? Its agenda to utilize the massive market dominance of the social media platforms to squeeze alternative media sources out of existence. Before the rise of social media, most Americans who used the Internet for news bookmarked pages and visited them individually.

As social media grew, Americans used social media for news. This centralized the mechanism for information dissemination.

Now, the Left sees an opportunity: If all the news is accessed in one place, by restricting access in that place, the news monopoly once held by legacy media can be re-established. All that will be required is labeling everyone they don't like "misinformation."

Kara Swisher of The New York Times, who has spent the past several years attempting to pressure Facebook into exactly such censorship, says as much openly. According to Swisher, Biden wasn't wrong to say Facebook was killing people. Actually, writes Swisher, the problem is that Biden restricted his analysis to the coronavirus: "Attempting to stop falsehoods by claiming to offer good information is like using a single sandbag to hold back an impossibly fetid ocean. It's like that when it comes to a range of once-anodyne, now divisive issues, from election integrity to critical race theory to whatever."

"Whatever." Literally any topic on which Swisher disagrees is now dangerous misinformation. NPR went so far as to pressure Facebook to suppress traffic to my website, Daily Wire, on precisely this basis. NPR admitted that we don't print falsehoods, that we don't spread conspiracy theories and that we are honest and open about our conservative perspective. So, why should we be suppressed? Because, according to NPR, we cover "specific stories that bolster the conservative agenda." And, quoting an expert, NPR reports, "If you've stripped enough context away, any piece of truth can become a piece of misinformation."

There it is: Even truth can be misinformation. And misinformation kills. The authoritarianism of the left is in full swing. Americans must spot it and fight it before it destroys our ability to see anything other than that which the left wants us to see.

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Last week, thousands of Cuban dissidents marched against the repressive communist tyranny that has subjugated the Cuban people for three generations. They chanted "Libertad!" and called for the end of the regime. And they carried aloft a symbol of freedom: the American flag.

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This isn't a rarity. It's a common sight among protesters for freedom worldwide. Before Hong Kong was turned into yet another municipality of the Chinese communist tyranny, freedom-seeking dissidents marched by the tens of thousands, carrying the American flag. When Iranian protesters stand up against the mullahcracy subjecting their nation to theocratic despotism, they refuse to deface the American flag.

They do so for a reason: people all over the world understand that the American flag stands for freedom. The people of Britain and France understood it in 1917 just as they did in 1944. The prisoners of Auschwitz understood it; the freedom fighters in Hungary and Poland and Czechoslovakia understood it; South Korean patriots understood it; the Kurds understood it. For generations, the Stars and Stripes has been a symbol of liberty to all those across the planet who dissent from totalitarianism.

Which is why it is so striking that while foreign dissidents risk their very lives for their liberty to carry the American flag, American citizens who live in the freest, most prosperous, most racially tolerant nation in world history kneel for the flag, or burn the flag, or turn their backs on the flag. What do those abroad know that those at home don't? That totalitarianism is far more common throughout the world, and throughout world history, than freedom; that individual rights may be universal, but they only manifest when those with the courage of their convictions fight for them; that in a world of darkness and chaos, America – for all of its flaws, both historic and present – has been and remains a force for good.

And yet today's domestic Left can't say that much. When White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about the obvious disparity between Cuban dissident treatment of the American flag and American Leftist treatment of that same flag, she stammered, "Well, I would say first, the president certainly values and respects the symbol of the American flag. He's someone who certainly waves it outside of his house, or does in Delaware and other places where he's lived throughout his time. He also believes that people have the right to peaceful protests, and he thinks both can be true."

But that's not the question. The question is whether it is morally right to scorn the flag, not whether Americans have the right to do stupid things. The fact that the White House cannot simply acknowledge that foreign dissidents have it right about the American flag, and that many on today's American Left have it dead wrong, is telling and tragic.

It's tragic because a country that doesn't believe enough in its own principles to defend its flag on moral grounds – especially the flag representing a country that has freed hundreds of millions of people from tyranny and poverty – will cease to project its core principles. And freedom fighters abroad will pay the price. The American flag will stop being a symbol of freedom and hope, and instead become just what its critics now say it is: a symbol of weakness and solipsism.

If Americans believe that our flag is less a beacon of hope than a looming specter of oppression, we will withdraw from the world stage as we tend to the business of undermining and extirpating our foundational ideals. Which, of course, is the goal of the American Left. And the global power vacuum won't be filled by liberal elites, but by totalitarian powers who aren't nearly as apologetic about their own ambitions.

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This Independence Day, a poll from Issues & Insights revealed that only 36% of adults aged 18-24 said they were "proud to be American," compared with 86% of those over the age of 65. This shouldn't be surprising. America's children have been raised in a system dedicated to the proposition that America itself is evil, a repository of discrimination and bigotry, a country founded in sin and steeped in cruelty.

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This week, for example, the National Education Association, the single largest teachers union in the country, passed a resolution pledging to "Share and publicize ... information already available on critical race theory (CRT)"; "Provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society"; and "Join with Black Lives Matter at School and the Zinn Education Project to call for a rally this year on Oct. 14 – George Floyd's birthday – as a national day of action to teach lessons about structural racism and oppression." Meanwhile, the American Federation of Teachers is hosting radical grifter Ibram X. Kendi, who preaches on behalf of overt racial discrimination.

Now Americans are banding together to fight back against the indoctrination of its children. States have begun to ban the indoctrination of CRT in schools, for example. But some thinkers are fighting back, suggesting that such content standards undermine the notion of a liberal education. In the pages of The New York Times, for example, a bipartisan group of thinkers excoriate such legislation as "un-American." They argue, essentially, that the educational mission of "helping turn students into well-informed and discerning citizens" is undermined by such restrictions.

But this completely misreads both the purpose of American education and the state of American education. First, the purpose of public education is to create "well-informed and discerning citizens." But "citizens" is a specific word with a specific definition. According to Aristotle, a "good citizen" is a person who upholds the Constitution of his particular polis.

If we teach our students to be bad citizens in the Aristotelian sense – citizens who disparage the polis with lies, who engage in tribal politicking rather than civic friendship, who insist that truth be subsumed in favor of intersectional sensitivities – we will wind up as a country with no future.

Second, American public education has all-too-often become a tool of those who wish to produce anti-citizens: those who wish to tear down the systems in the name of some higher or lower purpose. No society can survive this in the long term. K-12 public education was not designed to be a free-for-all; standards and practices must be established.

The only question is whose standards and whose practices. For the past several decades, the answer seems to be the radical left's standards, undermining key American principles like individual rights and equality before the law in favor of a utopian redistribution of outcome based on group identity. It is one thing to discuss the ideological perversion of CRT in order to combat it; it is another thing to indoctrinate in its central tenets. Our education system is currently far more likely to do the latter than the former.

That must stop. Good citizens have an obligation to stop it. Whether that happens through the mechanisms of civil rights lawsuits or through the mechanisms of local school board elections or through the mechanism of state legislation – all appropriate tools when it comes to defining how our children ought to be educated at public expense – radical indoctrination of our children must stop. To do anything less would be un-American.

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This week, heretofore nearly anonymous hammer thrower Gwen Berry made international headlines when, during the podium ceremony for winning bronze in an Olympic trial, she turned away from the United States flag as the national anthem played. The anthem wasn't played for her, or for the other competitors in the hammer throw; every day during the trials, a pre-scheduled anthem went out over the sound system.

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Berry turned 90 degrees from the flag, stood with her hand on her hip, and glared directly into the camera. It was a deliberate provocation and a deliberate attempt to raise her own profile. "I feel like it was a setup," she later complained, "and they did it on purpose."

Actually, Berry just saw an opportunity to maximize her profile, and she seized it with alacrity. In the United States, there's far more money to be made and fame to be achieved by spurning the American flag and the national anthem than by embracing it: Colin Kaepernick makes millions because he failed as a quarterback but succeeded as a self-aggrandizing symbol of supposed racial bravery. Meanwhile, the thousands of athletes with track records superior to either Kaepernick's or Berry's who stand for the national anthem remain anonymous.

That's because America currently rewards an entitled sense of grievance. Most Americans know little about foreign countries; they somehow believe that the United States is inferior, or that the prosperity, health, and free lifestyle to which they have become accustomed is the global and historic norm.

It most assuredly is not.

While Berry was protesting the national anthem, the Chinese government was busy arresting the editor of the pro-democracy Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily. That arrest came on the heels of the arrest of one of Apple Daily's columnists for "conspiring to collude with foreign countries or foreign forces to endanger national security." While Berry was protesting the national anthem, the Taliban was busy spreading like a metastasizing cancer over Afghanistan, preparing its new subjects for the tender mercies of brutal Islamist rule. While Berry was protesting the national anthem during an event at which she threw heavy objects for sport, billions of people were living in absolute privation the world over.

None of this means that the shortcomings of America should be ignored. But to protest the flag or the national anthem as particular symbols of grievance is to demonstrate full-scale your own ignorance and ingratitude. "I'm here to represent those who died due to systemic racism," Berry said. But she herself is an excellent indicator of just how much promise America holds for its citizens. She grew up in the home of her grandmother, with 13 people in the house; she had a baby out of wedlock at 15 and then earned a college scholarship. She got two jobs and helped support her extended family. Now, she's going to the Olympics. And presumably, there, she will turn her back on the flag and the national anthem if she makes it to the podium.

In doing so, she'll become a hero to millions. She'll get richer; she'll get more famous. Perhaps, like pseudo-Marxist Patrisse Cullors of Black Lives Matter, she'll buy herself a few houses; maybe, like Kaepernick, she'll make the cover of Sports Illustrated. Like self-declared Marxist Cullors, who currently owns three separate houses worth over $1.5 million each, Berry is in it for the attention and the profit. Yesterday, nobody had heard of her. Today, everybody has. It's that simple.

One thing is certain, however: Those who spend their days championing their own ingratitude at a society that gives them extraordinary opportunities – opportunities unavailable to nearly all humans for nearly all of human history, and unavailable to most people on the planet right now – aren't likely to live happier lives. And they're unlikely to make their nations better, either.

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According to the establishment media, critical race theory, or CRT, is a distraction. It is a right-wing smear. It is a conservative attempt to quash the dark side of American history. Most of all, according to the establishment media, you must never – ever – pay attention to the infusion of CRT into the nation's institutions of power.

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According to MSNBC's Chuck Todd, controversy over CRT is a "creation ... It keeps people watching or it keeps people clicking." According to CNN's Bakari Sellers, CRT is just "America's history." According to The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart, those who criticize CRT are merely attempting to prevent "us from learning our history."

Critical race theory, of course, is not America's actual history. It is a perverse worldview, unsupportable by the evidence, in which all of America's key institutions are inextricably rooted in white supremacy; it is an activist campaign demanding the destruction of those institutions.

The founders of CRT have written as much. According to CRT founders Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, CRT is founded on two key premises: that "racism is ordinary, not aberrational – 'normal science,' the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country"; second, that "our system of white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material."

This means, according to Delgado and Stefancic, that "racism is difficult to cure or address" and that a formal commitment to legal equality on the basis of color-blindness is merely a guise for further discrimination.

Furthermore, CRT founders say that whites are unable to understand racism, and that "minority status ... brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism."

CRT, therefore, holds that racism is embedded deeply in American life, unconsciously into white American psyches, and that it is impossible for white Americans to understand their own racism or that of the system, let alone to remove it.

The only solution: tearing away the only systems that have ever provided widespread liberty and prosperity. As fellow CRT founder, Derrick Bell wrote, "The whole liberal worldview of private rights and public sovereignty mediated by the rule of law needed to be exploded."

CRT isn't merely a tool of legal analysis, either, as many of its dishonest defenders claim. Delgado and Stefancic are clear: "Although CRT began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. Today, many in the field of education consider themselves critical race theorists ... Political scientists ponder voting strategies coined by critical race theorists ... Unlike some academic disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension."

So, what has CRT accomplished? The near-complete subjugation of our higher educational system, which now traffics regularly in CRT-related theories; the corruption of our establishment media, who parrot the anti-Americanism of CRT as "just history"; the infusion of CRT into nearly every area of the government, under the Biden-esque Newspeak of "equity." And yet, if Americans notice this – if Americans lobby school boards to bar indoctrination in the cultish nonsense of CRT – these institutional actors tell those Americans that there is nothing to see.

The grassroots pushback against CRT is rooted in the best of the American tradition: a rejection of racial essentialism in favor of individualism, an enthusiastic endorsement of agency rather than determinism, a willingness to stand united against tribalism.

We all ought to fight those who have hijacked and weaponized our institutions against all of these traditionally American ideals. Anything less would be an abdication of the trust we have been given – a trust that has resulted in liberty, equality and prosperity beyond imagining for nearly all of human history.

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This week, a video from a San Francisco Walgreens went viral on Twitter. The video depicted a man standing next to his bicycle, loading up a garbage bag with products. The man then rides his bicycle down the aisle, past a security guard, who limply throws out a hand to try to grab the bag; the shoplifter simply brushes past him, then rides out the door.

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This sort of thing has become exceedingly common in San Francisco. In late May, Thomas Fuller wrote in The New York Times, "At a board of supervisors hearing last week, representatives from Walgreens said that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain's national average and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable." Employees at Walgreens had been told to stand aside as shoplifting took place because security officers had been assaulted repeatedly.

All of this is the result of a 2014 California ballot measure that reclassified nonviolent theft as a misdemeanor, so long as the thief took less than $950 worth of material. Thieves quickly hit on a strategy: Hit up different stores for less than $950 worth of stuff. Then, amid the Black Lives Matter protests and riots of 2020, San Francisco decided to crack down on the police.

Mayor London Breed announced that booking photos would no longer be released, lest the prevalence of Black and brown faces lead to stereotyping; she announced a $120 million cut to the police and sheriff's department over the next two years, in the interest of "prioritizing investments in the African American community"; in the first six months of 2020, 23 officers resigned from the force.

Property crime has skyrocketed. It's not just shoplifting: Burglaries increased nearly 50% year-on-year in 2020, and car theft jumped 34%. Meanwhile, the streets are littered with garbage and have been for years thanks to lax law enforcement. In 2018, a survey of 153 blocks in downtown San Francisco showed trash on every block, 41 blocks "dotted with needles" and 96 blocks with open human feces.

This form of governance has become all too common. Los Angeles, my former hometown, has steadily declined in terms of livability. Suburban areas have been inundated with homeless vagrants, often openly shooting up, while the police have been directed to do nothing; Venice Beach has become an enormous open-air homeless encampment. Seattle has morphed from the Emerald City into a refuge for those living on the street, regardless of the risks to other citizens.

There is a reason why Americans are fleeing America's major cities. The problem predated COVID-19, and it will post-date it, too. Americans like having a Walgreens in their neighborhoods. They enjoy being able to walk down the sidewalk without severely mentally ill homeless people – who should be in institutions where they can receive actual care – urinating on curbs. They should not have to instruct their children to hop over used needles on street corners.

Yet the governance of "compassion" continues. So does the migration away from such foolhardy policy. The top outbound states in America, according to North American Moving Services, were all deep blue: Illinois, New York, California, New Jersey and Maryland. The top inbound states were all red or purple: Idaho, Arizona, South Carolina, Tennessee and North Carolina.

At some point, there will be no more Walgreens in San Francisco. Then we will undoubtedly hear about how this is the product of systemic racism and white privilege; we will hear tell of the brutality of American capitalism. The truth is far simpler: Where leftist governance reigns, criminality thrives. And where criminality thrives, Americans flee.

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Last Sunday marked the 77th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. On that day, Operation Overlord began, launching the Allied invasion of Europe that would spell the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime. At least 4,400 Allied troops died in the Normandy landings, and another 10,000 were wounded.

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As the invasion started, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the radio airwaves to ask Americans to join him in prayer: "Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity ... let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be."

Nearly eight decades later, President Joe Biden had nothing to say or tweet about the D-Day anniversary. Breaking with bipartisan precedent, Biden remained silent on that topic. The next day, however, Biden did tweet something noteworthy about bravery: "To transgender Americans across the country – especially the young people who are so brave – I want you to know your President has your back."

Bravery circa 1944: young men charging from the choppy seas of the English Channel onto the corpse-strewn beaches of Normandy, hellfire raining down upon them, to liberate a continent.

Bravery circa 2021: young men identifying as women, and vice versa.

Our definitions of bravery have shifted rather dramatically.

Our old definition of courage used to comport with the Aristotelian notion of virtue. The virtue of courage – andreia, or manliness, in Greek – lay in recognition of serious risk in pursuit of a heroic telos, a final end. "The courageous man withstands and fears those things which it is necessary (to fear and withstand), and on account of the right reason," Aristotle explains in "Nichomachean Ethics." Courage is calculated and calm risk-taking for the sake of the noble and the good.

Not anymore.

Now, courage lies in authenticity. Authenticity has not been, until recently, conflated with courage. In fact, authenticity very often cut directly against the virtue of courage: After all, wallowing in the solipsistic generally involves ignoring the demands of a higher noble goal. But now, our higher virtue isn't in upholding and defending some standard for civilization at risk to ourselves. Higher virtue lies in finding our personal truths, and then demanding applause from the rest of the world. Heroism lies in forcing the world to bow before our subjective ideas of truth and decency.

Or perhaps there's another possibility. Perhaps the new definition of bravery does serve some higher goal: the goal of tearing down the old definition of the good. True courage lies in personally rejecting old systems of thought and objective truth and in joining with others to demand that all systems of power be brought low. In this fight, the personal is political: Subjectivism isn't the enemy of courage but a new form of courage, since the final good to be sought is the destruction of truth itself.

It remains to be seen whether a civilization obsessed with tearing down its most powerful institutions can long remain civilized, or whether a civilization that discards old-fashioned courage in favor of the newfangled "bravery" of authenticity can long hold. The early evidence is unpromising. When called upon to face true enemies of freedom, civilization requires men willing to charge beaches on behalf of higher truths, not men focused finding their "inner truths," many of which bear no resemblance to reality. To use the same terminology to describe both phenomena is a betrayal of true courage.

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This week, a clip of America's most prominent racial grifter, Ibram X. Kendi, began making the rounds on Twitter. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, has undoubtedly made a fortune by indicting those who disagree with him as complicit in American racism – and by providing partial absolution to those who repeat his cultish ideas.

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In one particular clip from a recent interview, however, Kendi was asked to do one very simple thing: to define racism itself. Kendi failed signally in that task. "I would define it as a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas," Kendi stated.

The audience laughed out loud.

Kendi then reiterated his definition and added: "And antiracism is pretty simple using the same terms. Antiracism is a collection of antiracist policies leading to racial ... equity that are substantiated by antiracist ideas."

This, of course, is utterly nonsensical. No term can be defined by simple reference to the term itself. If someone asked you to define an elephant and you quickly explained that an elephant is, in fact, an animal known as an elephant, you would be adding no new information. If someone asked you to describe anger and you then defined anger as the feeling of being angry, you would leave the listener in serious doubt as to your sanity.

Yet the Left not only nods along to this; it champions it. For deep thoughts like Kendi's, CEOs pay millions: Jack Dorsey of Twitter gave Kendi's Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University $10 million last year; The Vertex Foundation of Vertex Pharmaceuticals is giving Kendi's center $1.5 million over three years; Bank of America has brought in Kendi to deliver his insipid message; The Boston Globe has teamed with Kendi's center to create a new media platform.

To date, the Center for Antiracist Research has generated precisely zero research; its website reads, "We are now accepting proposals for our research and policy teams." The center is also accepting applications for its "Antibigotry Convening." And, of course, the center has merchandise, including Antiracist Book Festival face masks (for just $25!).

The goal of many on the Left these days is not clarification but obfuscation, particularly on racial issues. Data is not only unnecessary; it's reviled. If the left wishes to promote the argument that racial inequalities are the result of historic injustices, one would hope that someone would bother quantifying to what extent those inequalities are the result of individual decisions versus the result of other factors.

If, for example, differential poverty rates by community are highly related to single motherhood – and if single motherhood can only be avoided through personal decision-making – then focusing on historic racism to the exclusion of personal decision-making not only does little good; it does active harm. Yet that is precisely what Kendi proposes – and he calls you racist if you suggest otherwise.

Kendi's solutions are the sorts of solutions the left likes. He has proposed a federal Department of Antiracism with the power to pre-clear "all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won't yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas." In other words, it's authoritarian dictatorship to establish Kendi's vaguely defined antiracism.

The Left embraces this loose thinking because it promotes a broader agenda: blaming institutions broadly for all problems and then remolding those institutions. In this task, obfuscation becomes profoundly important, lest Americans recognize that in a free America, the best path toward alleviating inequity is individual rights rather than a top-down rewriting of American society.

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