"This fight isn’t reason vs. chaos. It’s humanity in full vs. cold, mechanical control. We must defend democracy not just with reason, but with feeling. Because the alternative isn’t just autocracy—it’s a world where algorithms rule, and people obey. A world where emotion is a defect. A world not worth living in." Yes. When we find ourselves hurtling towards a world where emotion takes a back seat to algorithms, we are chasing a dystopian nightmare, to be sure.
This is an excellent article, and mirrors so many of my own thoughts these past few weeks.
It started with reading about H.Res.7 119th Congress, proposed by Andy Biggs, that cites a “Pro Woman’s Healthcare Centers” as the standard for National Women’s Healthcare centers. As I dug into it, it was subversively a pro-life organization, but oddly, despite Biggs filing the resolution on 01/03/2025, PWHC is a 501c3 incorporated in Missouri in 2021 and dissolved in 2022. And in 2024, the IRS revoked its 501c3 tax exempt status for nonfiling. So I looked into who founded this NPO? What names are on the filings?
I found a Christine Accurso, prolife, conservative, Catholic, education savings allowance Director of Arizona Department of Education (who was heavily criticized for her performance and essentially ran out of town, so to say), but I also found a Jeff Pauls, PhD. Dr. Pauls more popularly comes up as the Research Director for Vitae Foundation, another pro life 501c3 NPO, although less covert. Their mission is “to make abortion unthinkable.”
His work is largely helping to rebrand the pro life movement to “pro woman” using “research” and “methodology” from Charles Kenny, an unlicensed psychologist (since 2001), who got in hot water for a contract with TN doing state employee mental health evals, while unlicensed, and received $40,000 for his unlicensed activity.
What is odd is Dr. Pauls and Dr. Kenny have no real verifiable, relevant, studies, research, or publications to back up anything they do or say. Dr. Pauls’ only peer reviewed project that is published is his dissertation, which is unrelated and about language immersion classroom management practices (or something along these lines).
Charles Kenny has a few researched studies published from the 1970’s, but really nothing very exciting or ground breaking. And yet, he has a company and a booked called Right Brain People, in which he touts significant studies for a proven methodology and having had a hand in many Fortune 500 companies major successes. His research is old and in the Journal of Social Psychology and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
But Vitae makes epic claims of their studies and evidence, based on Kenny’s work and Paul Swopes, who also has no studies published — only opinion pieces and qualitative reviews that are deeply flawed.
Yet, Vitae and Swope go into depth about how pro life must be rebranded to pro woman and use commercial psychology methods that subvert the left brain (logic) and influence the right brain (emotion) to generate the desired impact (the woman does not terminate pregnancy and gives birth and gives the baby up for adoption as a last resort). (Note: left brain/right brain is not objectively true — it is pop psychology stuff). They brag about their “conversion” rates getting women to give birth.
It seems rather manipulative to outright use methodology to undermine someone’s logic entirely, exploit their emotions (including using their own guilt against them — which Swope discusses in one article), and force them to give birth and mother or give away their child. It’s clouded in “compassion” but it rejects rational reason — other than the rationale of wanting to control women’s bodies, or to think like Musk who uses the term birth rate hundreds on times on X, along with economy and societal collapse, but also strangely both makes the claim that poor people have more babies but a country with a low birth rate is a collapsing economy (in both scenarios, there is not a strong economy; also note, babies are implied as a GDP commodity).
Lastly, I’ll just touch on the connection between Musk, Thiel, Vance, and finally Yarvin, who says things in his Substack “Grey Mirror” like “Your Kantian moral imperative is to feel nothing at all — no emotions whatsoever… These feelings are evil. They come from a bad place. You and the world, you and the Arabs and the Jews and everyone else, will be better off with your feelings deleted… If you give ordinary people a nest the size of the world, in a few weeks it will be a nest full of billions of moral cuckoos. The lesson is: turn off your feelings… You need to turn off your feelings because you are a mother bird feeding a cuckoo… Have you heard of Peter Singer? He wants you to work on your feelings until they’re rational. Peter Singer wants you to care about a kid on the other side of the world as much as a kid in front of you — as much as your own child… Peter Singer is a monster. God created Peter Singer so that we did not have to invent him — so that we could use him. And we will.”
He is truly one of the most glaring personas of Antisocial Personality Disorder on public display. Right out in the open.
All this to say, you are spot on in your insight, your understanding, your wisdom, but most importantly, drawing out emotion in a meaningful way that also operates as the liminal space of the brain we call the corpus callosum, the thick bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain.
The right is factioned off, disconnected from good logic and reason. The left is factioned off, disconnected from the meaning and value of emotion. Meanwhile, psychopaths who have some neurological impairment to the empathy center of their brains (the most evolved part of the brain) has hijacked the limbic system of many brains, and exploited the Right Brain People…
I have a very small Substack following—114—with a read rate of about two-thirds. Every person matters right now. I now post about twice a week. Only 4 pay me something, but I did not solicit them. I'm retired and don't need the money. I just shared this piece, with some introductory comments. One of my readers said he had to research "Humean emotivism." Maybe you will get some subscribers out of that. I had a recent AI experience. I had been using Blue Mountain now and then. I couldn't find a Valentine's day card I liked at Target, so I found a funny video for my wife on Blue Mountain. When it came time to add a message to the video, Blue Mountain offered me an AI option. I clicked on it only out of curiosity. It pretty much sucked. I sent the e-card, but then cancelled my subscription. I also recently parsed your "The Plot Against America," with full credit. Good to discover you. I think it was via Thom Hartmann. See you on the barricades.
Great article. Political groups on the right leverage emotions to shape public opinion, more often than not in ways that foster division or hate. They use fear and anger to mobilize support, drive people to action, and reinforce tribal loyalties. At the same time, they weaponize the emotions of the left against us by dismissing our calls for empathy, justice, and equality as 'woke' or 'soft.' This is a deliberate tactic: while they stoke fear, resentment, and nostalgia to galvanize their base, they undermine the left's emotional appeals by framing them as irrational, overly sentimental, or out of touch with 'real' issues.
The right understands the power of emotion better than anyone—they just refuse to admit it. They evoke visceral reactions to immigrants, LGBTQ+ communities, or progressive policies, bypassing rational debate entirely. Yet when the left speaks to the heart—when we talk about the pain of systemic racism, the urgency of climate change, or the moral imperative of economic justice—they mock us as 'emotional' or 'divisive.' It's a double standard: emotions are valid when they serve their agenda, but illegitimate when they challenge it.
This hypocrisy exposes a deeper truth: the right isn't opposed to emotion in politics—they're opposed to emotions that threaten their power. They fear the kind of emotional resonance that fueled movements like civil rights or LGBTQ+ liberation because those movements channeled collective feeling into transformative action. They don't want us to feel the weight of injustice in our bones because they know that when we do, we fight back.
Absolutely brilliant piece. Thank you Mike. AI bred for only efficiency in government is evil. For those old enough to remember. AI is “I’m sorry Dave I can’t open the pod bay door”.
We’re narrative creatures, yes. And the fundamental problem you’re gonna keep running into is that the narrative underlying your entire political project is deeply unappealing.
“Help me prop up the corpse of an incumbent system which has become irredeemably cruel, reckless, unaccountable, and destructive, or else you’re a very bad person” is a narrative that an ever-dwindling sunset of humanity finds compelling, no matter how loudly you keep shouting it.
Experts of various flavours have been telling us for *many years* that trying to change someone else's mind with facts 'n figures often doesn't work, even if they, as you say, nod in agreeance, it's so often not enough to get them over the line. I like your 'style'; as someone described you on a comment on another substacker the other day, your writings are like 'smelling salts' that can jolt people awake.
I think this is an excellent piece. There seems to me to be an emotion that the Silicon Valley tech bros are attuned to that is very understandable: Greed. It’s not coincidental that Musk will walk away from his DOGE guerrilla operation with a complete map of the internal makeup of the Federal payments structure. He can sell it back to the US by allowing X to become a player in management of Federal funds flows or he can sell it to any number of players overseas.
"This fight isn’t reason vs. chaos. It’s humanity in full vs. cold, mechanical control. We must defend democracy not just with reason, but with feeling. Because the alternative isn’t just autocracy—it’s a world where algorithms rule, and people obey. A world where emotion is a defect. A world not worth living in." Yes. When we find ourselves hurtling towards a world where emotion takes a back seat to algorithms, we are chasing a dystopian nightmare, to be sure.
This is an excellent article, and mirrors so many of my own thoughts these past few weeks.
It started with reading about H.Res.7 119th Congress, proposed by Andy Biggs, that cites a “Pro Woman’s Healthcare Centers” as the standard for National Women’s Healthcare centers. As I dug into it, it was subversively a pro-life organization, but oddly, despite Biggs filing the resolution on 01/03/2025, PWHC is a 501c3 incorporated in Missouri in 2021 and dissolved in 2022. And in 2024, the IRS revoked its 501c3 tax exempt status for nonfiling. So I looked into who founded this NPO? What names are on the filings?
I found a Christine Accurso, prolife, conservative, Catholic, education savings allowance Director of Arizona Department of Education (who was heavily criticized for her performance and essentially ran out of town, so to say), but I also found a Jeff Pauls, PhD. Dr. Pauls more popularly comes up as the Research Director for Vitae Foundation, another pro life 501c3 NPO, although less covert. Their mission is “to make abortion unthinkable.”
His work is largely helping to rebrand the pro life movement to “pro woman” using “research” and “methodology” from Charles Kenny, an unlicensed psychologist (since 2001), who got in hot water for a contract with TN doing state employee mental health evals, while unlicensed, and received $40,000 for his unlicensed activity.
What is odd is Dr. Pauls and Dr. Kenny have no real verifiable, relevant, studies, research, or publications to back up anything they do or say. Dr. Pauls’ only peer reviewed project that is published is his dissertation, which is unrelated and about language immersion classroom management practices (or something along these lines).
Charles Kenny has a few researched studies published from the 1970’s, but really nothing very exciting or ground breaking. And yet, he has a company and a booked called Right Brain People, in which he touts significant studies for a proven methodology and having had a hand in many Fortune 500 companies major successes. His research is old and in the Journal of Social Psychology and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
But Vitae makes epic claims of their studies and evidence, based on Kenny’s work and Paul Swopes, who also has no studies published — only opinion pieces and qualitative reviews that are deeply flawed.
Yet, Vitae and Swope go into depth about how pro life must be rebranded to pro woman and use commercial psychology methods that subvert the left brain (logic) and influence the right brain (emotion) to generate the desired impact (the woman does not terminate pregnancy and gives birth and gives the baby up for adoption as a last resort). (Note: left brain/right brain is not objectively true — it is pop psychology stuff). They brag about their “conversion” rates getting women to give birth.
It seems rather manipulative to outright use methodology to undermine someone’s logic entirely, exploit their emotions (including using their own guilt against them — which Swope discusses in one article), and force them to give birth and mother or give away their child. It’s clouded in “compassion” but it rejects rational reason — other than the rationale of wanting to control women’s bodies, or to think like Musk who uses the term birth rate hundreds on times on X, along with economy and societal collapse, but also strangely both makes the claim that poor people have more babies but a country with a low birth rate is a collapsing economy (in both scenarios, there is not a strong economy; also note, babies are implied as a GDP commodity).
Lastly, I’ll just touch on the connection between Musk, Thiel, Vance, and finally Yarvin, who says things in his Substack “Grey Mirror” like “Your Kantian moral imperative is to feel nothing at all — no emotions whatsoever… These feelings are evil. They come from a bad place. You and the world, you and the Arabs and the Jews and everyone else, will be better off with your feelings deleted… If you give ordinary people a nest the size of the world, in a few weeks it will be a nest full of billions of moral cuckoos. The lesson is: turn off your feelings… You need to turn off your feelings because you are a mother bird feeding a cuckoo… Have you heard of Peter Singer? He wants you to work on your feelings until they’re rational. Peter Singer wants you to care about a kid on the other side of the world as much as a kid in front of you — as much as your own child… Peter Singer is a monster. God created Peter Singer so that we did not have to invent him — so that we could use him. And we will.”
He is truly one of the most glaring personas of Antisocial Personality Disorder on public display. Right out in the open.
All this to say, you are spot on in your insight, your understanding, your wisdom, but most importantly, drawing out emotion in a meaningful way that also operates as the liminal space of the brain we call the corpus callosum, the thick bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain.
The right is factioned off, disconnected from good logic and reason. The left is factioned off, disconnected from the meaning and value of emotion. Meanwhile, psychopaths who have some neurological impairment to the empathy center of their brains (the most evolved part of the brain) has hijacked the limbic system of many brains, and exploited the Right Brain People…
I really like this piece.
I like its analysis
And
I like its passion
Good job
I have a very small Substack following—114—with a read rate of about two-thirds. Every person matters right now. I now post about twice a week. Only 4 pay me something, but I did not solicit them. I'm retired and don't need the money. I just shared this piece, with some introductory comments. One of my readers said he had to research "Humean emotivism." Maybe you will get some subscribers out of that. I had a recent AI experience. I had been using Blue Mountain now and then. I couldn't find a Valentine's day card I liked at Target, so I found a funny video for my wife on Blue Mountain. When it came time to add a message to the video, Blue Mountain offered me an AI option. I clicked on it only out of curiosity. It pretty much sucked. I sent the e-card, but then cancelled my subscription. I also recently parsed your "The Plot Against America," with full credit. Good to discover you. I think it was via Thom Hartmann. See you on the barricades.
Great article. Political groups on the right leverage emotions to shape public opinion, more often than not in ways that foster division or hate. They use fear and anger to mobilize support, drive people to action, and reinforce tribal loyalties. At the same time, they weaponize the emotions of the left against us by dismissing our calls for empathy, justice, and equality as 'woke' or 'soft.' This is a deliberate tactic: while they stoke fear, resentment, and nostalgia to galvanize their base, they undermine the left's emotional appeals by framing them as irrational, overly sentimental, or out of touch with 'real' issues.
The right understands the power of emotion better than anyone—they just refuse to admit it. They evoke visceral reactions to immigrants, LGBTQ+ communities, or progressive policies, bypassing rational debate entirely. Yet when the left speaks to the heart—when we talk about the pain of systemic racism, the urgency of climate change, or the moral imperative of economic justice—they mock us as 'emotional' or 'divisive.' It's a double standard: emotions are valid when they serve their agenda, but illegitimate when they challenge it.
This hypocrisy exposes a deeper truth: the right isn't opposed to emotion in politics—they're opposed to emotions that threaten their power. They fear the kind of emotional resonance that fueled movements like civil rights or LGBTQ+ liberation because those movements channeled collective feeling into transformative action. They don't want us to feel the weight of injustice in our bones because they know that when we do, we fight back.
Absolutely brilliant piece. Thank you Mike. AI bred for only efficiency in government is evil. For those old enough to remember. AI is “I’m sorry Dave I can’t open the pod bay door”.
We’re narrative creatures, yes. And the fundamental problem you’re gonna keep running into is that the narrative underlying your entire political project is deeply unappealing.
“Help me prop up the corpse of an incumbent system which has become irredeemably cruel, reckless, unaccountable, and destructive, or else you’re a very bad person” is a narrative that an ever-dwindling sunset of humanity finds compelling, no matter how loudly you keep shouting it.
Experts of various flavours have been telling us for *many years* that trying to change someone else's mind with facts 'n figures often doesn't work, even if they, as you say, nod in agreeance, it's so often not enough to get them over the line. I like your 'style'; as someone described you on a comment on another substacker the other day, your writings are like 'smelling salts' that can jolt people awake.
I think this is an excellent piece. There seems to me to be an emotion that the Silicon Valley tech bros are attuned to that is very understandable: Greed. It’s not coincidental that Musk will walk away from his DOGE guerrilla operation with a complete map of the internal makeup of the Federal payments structure. He can sell it back to the US by allowing X to become a player in management of Federal funds flows or he can sell it to any number of players overseas.
feelings are intuitive responses to situations.