Dumber and dumber.

Texas A&M brought a robot to a culture war to scan syllabi for “gender ideology.” Their censorship AI flagged Plato’s Symposium, a 2,400-year-old dialogue where the phrase “platonic love” comes from.

The administrators wouldn’t overrule their own robot even while it was kicking them in the nuts. They told the professor to censor the classics, to delete Plato or be reassigned to teaching MAGA hat tricks.

This is the whole story.

Texas spent years building a political brand around defending the classics of “Western civilization” against the woke academics. The enemy of the people was defined as someone who won’t teach the classics anymore.

Then they built an enforcement robot to kill liberalism and it killed Plato, because their robot can’t tell the difference between woke training and the foundational text of Western philosophy.

Neither can they.

That’s the deepest cut here. The “classical education” thing was all hat and never any cattle. Cultural signaling for people who never read books. Hillsdale markets their Great Books programs. The Texas Public Policy Foundation runs “Western Civilization Summits.” The political network meant to save the classics built the robot that red-flagged the Symposium, just because Aristophanes’ speech from thousands of years ago mentioned a third gender.

They are not hypocrites, because that requires knowing what you claim to value. These are cargo cultists. Their cowboy affectations, the “defend Western civ” rhetoric, the Great Books branding… all of it just big empty hats.

Tribal markers, without commitments.

The rattlesnake just ate itself.

The American government is spraying disinformation about Panama history in order to cover current crimes in Venezuela.

Some reporters foolishly repeat this disinformation and invert the actual sequence and legitimacy markers. Here’s an example from Politico:

The closest recent analogue for the Maduro prosecution is the trial of former Panamanian President Manuel Noriega, who was seized by U.S. troops in 1990.

No, no and no.

Invasion of Panama was condemned as illegal because it violated international law. But it used several obvious procedural markers of legitimacy: triggering events (American killed at a checkpoint), an elected president to install, stated limited objectives, actual withdrawal. Panama also lacked congressional authorization since Bush acted unilaterally. These are grains of truth being used to build the propaganda comparing it to Venezuela. The differences matter far more than the similarities. Congress subsequently acquiesced to Panama partly because of those legitimacy markers.

Venezuela has none.

Or to be more precise, Venezuela’s claimed justifications are all contradictions and self-destruct on contact: “law enforcement” meant a “War Department” bombs military bases, “not an invasion” is followed by “we now run the country to ‘rebuild’ the oil.” What’s the plan? The closest actual precedent is Hitler’s 1938 Lebensraum. The story can’t survive a single press conference because there is no coherent legal theory—only force.

“TAKE THE OIL,” [self-proclaimed Nazi] Fuentes posted on social-media app Telegram on Saturday. “THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE IS OURS.”

Venezuela uses the outcome of Panama (courts accepted Noriega’s prosecution after Delta Force failed to assassinate him) to justify skipping everything that gave Panama even its thin legitimacy. The reasoning becomes that courts won’t review how illegal custody was obtained, therefore any indictment at the end justifies any means of military action, even 1938 Nazi doctrine.

That’s not precedent, that’s laundering state crimes into military dictatorship. American media are taking the grain of truth (courts deferred) and stripping the context (why they deferred) to authorize something structurally opposite.

Opposite.

Think about what it means when opposites are presented by a government as the same. Inversion of meaning is definitional to fascist rhetoric.