Taken literally, “turn the other cheek” is a losing strategy. Radical non-resistance is suicide in competitive environments, so Christianity survived by developing doctrines that permit force. We can call it theological development or doctrinal fudging, but something had to give.

On the other hand: If we actually believe AI is civilizationally significant, then anything short of total commitment would be bizarre.

Walsh thinks AI art will be meaningless because it lacks 'soul.' He's claiming humans have some metaphysical property that creates meaning, which AI can never have. But this misunderstands what meaning is. Meaning doesn't come from having a soul or divine spark. It exists in

Performative guilt converts others’ suffering into currency for your own status games. Who’s most aware, most morally anguished, most righteously miserable? For a narcissist hiding behind an empathy mask, every global crisis is an opportunity to gain favor in the virtue economy.

When elite institutions capture consensus and lose touch with reality, voters select for whoever can withstand their attacks. Surviving maximal vilification proves he can’t be controlled. Populism, at least in our case, is a democratic immune response to elite cultural drift.

The petty cruelty substitutes for the large one they crave. When reality won't conform to their will, ressentiment moralizes the rage into justice. Revolutionary ideology frames envy as equality, impotence as virtue, and destruction as liberation. One day, the collar on everyone!

Nietzsche saw it: the weak don't defeat the strong by becoming strong. They redefine strength as sickness and sickness as strength, then wait for the strong to internalize the lie.

The university system produces credentialed mediocrity animated by moral fervor. They can't achieve excellence, so they've learned to call it oppression. Now (or at least, until recently) they staff every institution with the power to enforce their envy as policy.

We no longer ask whether something is true, only whether believing it makes us good. Thus we have become a civilization of liars who pride themselves on their virtue.

Moral condemnation converts weakness into social power. Can't achieve? Call it 'privilege.' Can't be strong? Call it 'toxic.' Can't be beautiful? Call it 'oppressive.' The mediocre acquire status by making the excellent guilty.

Fertility collapse isn't a policy problem or an economic problem. It's a civilizational fitness problem. A culture that can't reproduce doesn't get to debate whether it had better values. It just disappears.

This is cultural drift at civilizational scale. The institutions are actively driving maladaptive beliefs into the culture, then using their power to crush anyone who notices. It took a democratic revolt to force any course correction at all.

How many other institutional positions follow Gardner's logic? How many 'scientific consensuses' are really just 'we decided who the bad guys are, and we're not changing our minds regardless of evidence'?

When institutions respond to questions not with evidence but with accusations of bigotry, destroying careers instead of engaging with arguments, the strength of their response is inversely related to the strength of their evidence.

The tell is what you can't question. Not what you shouldn't question because the evidence is strong, but what you cannot question without being punished for moral crimes. Real scientific confidence invites scrutiny. Ideology requires enforcement and suppression.

So you get Gardner's approach at institutional scale: start with a moral conviction, hire only people who share it, call the resulting agreement 'scientific consensus,' destroy anyone who questions it.

Part of the underlying mechanism is that academia has become ideologically uniform. Many departments are 95%+ Democrat. Hiring often requires diversity statements. Scholars with heterodox views get filtered out. When everyone shares the same moral framework and conclusions are

When European health systems review evidence and reverse course while American institutions accelerate on the same data, at least one side isn't following the science. The side that destroys careers and retracts papers under activist pressure rather than engaging the arguments

Or look at pediatric gender medicine. The UK shut down its main youth gender clinic after whistleblowers revealed they were rushing kids into irreversible treatments with minimal assessment. Sweden and Finland reviewed the evidence and sharply restricted these interventions.

When you compare police shootings to population, Black Americans appear overrepresented. But when you control for violent crime rates or arrest rates for violent offenses, multiple studies find no anti-Black bias. Some find the opposite. The narrative used the wrong benchmark.