Jonathan Bowen dot Boston

Tag: Sikhism

  • A Right-Libertarian Thought Leader

    Only My Thoughts

    I’m a right-libertarian thought leader. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t published many of my right-libertarian-leaning thoughts because they’re only thoughts. I plan to change that now.

    A right-libertarian may be identified as Ron Paul, Thomas Massie, or Javier Milei. We’re all a bit different. I don’t think I’d be a libertarian, but I looked into and studied Ron Paul’s ideas and platform prior to the 2008 presidential election and liked what I saw.

    I’m an atheist. Ron Paul is not. Ron Paul believes that abortion should be legislated; he’s used his training as a doctor to inform his decision,1 but I think his religious beliefs help to push him to his ideal.

    Ron Paul and I agree that abortion is an ethically and morally lacking decision to undertake, but I’m not willing to make abortion illegal before the first trimester ends or in the rare case wherein a mother’s life is in danger.

    I have immense respect for those three politicians because they’ve been incredibly consistent with their beliefs.

    The Individual Unit

    Robert “Bob” Kraft

    As a right-libertarian, many outsiders may think that I’m taking a torch to entire groups with my incendiary writing, but I always leave space for the rare individual within those groups. I will never disregard the Amish, the Jews, Foundational Black Americans (FBAs), or members of other groups. That is part of my right-libertarianism that isn’t understood by the majority of the world’s population.

    For instance, I see a man like Robert “Bob” Kraft as a compilation of parts. I respect his business acumen through his expansion of the Rand-Whitney Group.2 I am grateful that he’s helped the New England Patriots win multiple Super Bowl championships. I see the real estate growth of Patriot Place. I see a guy who’s shown up to work every day while having the brains to make consistently good decisions.

    At the same time, I see his work with the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, formerly the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism,3 as a dystopian affront to America and all that it stands for as an unpatriotic effort to put Israel first. As a right-libertarian, I do believe in national, state, county, and municipal sovereignty. I believe that we’re at a point where the State of Israel is wagging the tail of the American politician.4 I also feel as though Bob Kraft is leading that charge on American soil, from Patriot Place — a ridiculous irony — to every student of Revolutionary War history. If I were to ever meet Bob Kraft, I’d treat him with respect because he’s earned respect. At the same time, I wouldn’t hide my feelings from him. Just like me, he’s nothing but another human being.

    The Sacrosanct Unit

    I do believe that people are the sacrosanct unit of humanity. The individual is the most high, the exalted, the perfection of billions of years of evolutionary creation. I don’t believe that any god has interfered with science, but I see the godliness of the universe.

    Science Weakens Evolution

    I also believe that science is weakening evolution. When the first eyeglasses were fitted, when the first antibiotics were developed, when the first mRNA treatments were inserted into human beings, we deviated from the plan; it means that we’ve stopped selecting out the legally blind and the chronically ill, and we’ve started to insert changes into the very essence of life. This is not to say that I disagree with these advancements, but I do believe that we’re weeding out the strongest through the denial of natural selection. A human being’s brain will never be more intelligent than the march of time and the evolution of the universe. We’re only along for the ride through the cosmos; we can’t DNA our way to perfection.

    The Cult, Not the People

    I do believe that groups can be evil. The Pride monument is the latest iteration of that grouping — it’s akin to Jim Jones’ People’s Temple — where mass suicide ended the lives of hundreds.5 With the rise of social media as its pretext, the LGBTQ+ movement has gained apostles and letters at an alarming rate.

    As I’ve said, I love all human beings as a baseline. I don’t want to see any human beings hurt by a cult, and I truly believe that the Pride movement has morphed into a cult. Like anorexia and bulimia, which tore through the lives of young women in the 1980s,6 the LGBTQ+ movement is doing the same to many of the same victims.

    At this point, the word “homophobe” may be percolating through the minds of some readers; it’s the easy route to moral superiority and self-salving treatment, but it’s weak.

    There are many gay men who’ve rightfully walked off the LGBTQ+ parade route; they’ve quietly been listening, but the movement has gotten too crazy for them. When Pride was reaching critical mass in the 1980s as a show of solidarity in the face of the burgeoning AIDS epidemic,7 the movement largely comprised gay men. There were always lesbians and other sects of gay-adjacent factions that glommed onto the scene, but AIDS was swallowing gay men, and they needed to revel in that brotherhood while being frightened out of their minds by homophobia and a deadly disease with no treatment.

    Somewhere down the line, the bisexual grouping was added to the parade. The transsexuals, the queers, and the others were recently added to the movement, but it wasn’t by choice; those groups were shoehorned into the marches by an aggressive leftist coalition of groups and politicians who needed to add more victims to a largely settled legal framework. Governor Michael Dukakis and Governor William “Bill” Weld led the charge with legislation in the late 1980s and early 1990s.8

    At some point, more and more gay men, as they’ve gotten older, have become more conservative; they don’t want to abandon the fight for humanity, but some of them are starting to question the goal.

    I support the individual rights of every human being, but the politicization of victimhood is destroying the fabric of America. Those gay men have seen that mental illness, highly associated with transsexuals, has started to leak its way into questions of mental health within the gay community. If transsexuals have a high prevalence of comorbid mental health disorders,9 does that mean that gay men have the same issues? That’s a rhetorical question. It’s the exact question the newly expanded alliance must ask, but it won’t because the answer is anathema.

    Greatest Black American

    I’ve touched on Foundational Black Americans (FBAs); that group needs a lens focused on its deteriorating reputation. The FBAs are having a detrimental effect on the idea of America. The fight for reparations is self-serving and will never legitimately lead to anything positive for the whole of our country, which includes every Black American.

    The rhetoric of FBAs flies in the face of the greatest Black American of all time. His name was Booker T. Washington. The boy was literally a slave; the man became an American icon.

    Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers — it’s now Tuskegee University — and he did that by hard work. He traveled throughout the United States and the world looking for benefactors. He targeted White people in Northern cities like Boston and New York City, where he found open checkbooks. He did all of that without relying on public monies.10 A fuckin’ Black slave became the greatest Black American because he persevered through personal tragedy that the vast majority of human beings could never endure.

    The Group Is the Issue

    As you can see, I can slice and dice groups of people, but I can also see that smaller groups or, sometimes, individuals within those groups can be ridiculous outliers within the realm of basic logic and reason.

    The group is the issue. The group is a natural extension of humanity’s evolution. Without the group, humanity might’ve ceased to exist. The group was built as a unit that afforded protection from predators like lions and bears. The group then grew to form smaller subgroups once its members learned they were safe from those natural predators. Those groups began to grow into tribes, and those tribes began to kill members of other tribes. This evolution has made sense until recent days because the group rallied together whenever invaders, natural predators, or other groups of humans threatened to attack.

    I want to be absolutely clear. I don’t see the Pride movement group or Foundational Black Americans group as fully formed groups. I see them as splinter cells that are actively capturing the voices of uninitiated and unknowing group members by the force of a U.S. Census Bureau form.

    I believe the world has passed the past power of groups — group dynamics, group identities, and group loyalties — because the world has become smaller with the advent of sailing ships, airborne vessels, and underwater cables.

    We are one, although globalism is a disease, and group identities are doing nothing but continuing to tear man from man. We’re all a little different, but evolution and science have shown that we’re all genetically the same. There should be nominally nothing between the individual and the evolution of the species because any distinction is friction that destroys inertia.

    Affinity for Some

    I have an affinity for some groups.

    I have an affinity for Buddhists. After my son died of SIDS, I truly understood the suffering of man. Buddhists believe we should embrace the suffering of man because we have no choice. We are nothing but individuals born in a world where suffering is the norm. When we embrace that suffering, when we internalize it, we’re forced to become more compassionate and empathetic.

    Sikhs believe that our bodies are divine. In that way, Sikhs don’t believe in plastic surgery because that practice destroys divinity. Sikhs also believe in the practice of langar,11 which is humanity personified. Within the practice of langar is the idea that we feed our brothers and sisters free food as a testament to the power of living sacrifice. The idea that our bodies and the bodies of other human beings are divine in their construction and that nourishment is equal to the endurance of the spirit is an empowering ideal.

    I can see that some groups are naturally predatory while others are compassionate. I feel an affinity for some groups while despising others, but I will never refuse to fight for the lone individual within every group. I fight for that individual. I fight in hopes that those individuals may see a glimmer of light in personal darkness — that they’re open to history as a guide, to self-care as a means of survival, and to change as a future. I’m hoping to spur that change back to the natural order through the introduction of a natural perspective that feels, well, natural in every way.

    I will never change… That sucks. I will always be like this because I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about the alternatives. Those alternatives never make sense. I wish that I could be ignorant, but my mind never stops weighing outcomes. I won’t stop thinking about different iterations of the same idea from alternate perspectives until the day I die. My mind is built to wander and wonder…

    I believe in competition; I believe in evolution; I believe in natural selection; and I believe that all of that isn’t enough of a natural constant to reduce luck to an infinitesimal percentage of our modern world’s outcomes. In the long run, over time, luck will lose. The fight for equality and justice for the individual will never be a fair fight in the short term because some individuals and groups will twist nature into a pretzel in order to alter outcomes, only for those same outcomes to settle into the natural progression of things.

    I accept that outcome because it’s inevitable. We can yell, and we can fight, and we can murder, but that will never do more than create extra friction for that inertial future that we’ll all share. We all want to maximize our individual lives while we’re living, but the outcome for humanity is rarely in focus when anger rises to heights of hate.

    A Blind Ideal

    An atheist and right-libertarian philosophy didn’t pick me, although I’ve never believed in a god, but I went searching for some ideal that felt as close to nature as possible. I’d love to be blind to the peripheries, with tunnel vision as my guide. If I were a blind man, I could be a wealthy man.

    My mother was a John F. Kennedy Democrat from East Boston. My father was a capitalist with contempt for ethics and morals. My extended family is Catholic and Democrat.

    I don’t want to fight the fight because the fight feels fruitless. I feel as though I’m pissing in the wind. I feel as though nobody understands my philosophy, which, by the way, is quietly shared by millions of other people.

    I’m a classic liberal in many ways, but I despise the American government because it’s done almost everything wrong. I despise socialism and communism. I despise crony capitalism, which needs a much more sinister word to be coined because it’s evil; it’s captured the American government.

    I believe that the Civil War never had to be fought because slavery was on its way out in the civilized world.12 I believe that the lives of all those Americans lost in the North and in the South could’ve been saved by letting time heal wounds and wrongs. I believe that Jim Crow laws were a sort of blowback that Ron Paul always sees whenever the government intervenes in private processes.13

    I believe that all levels of government should be reduced to the most basic functions. I believe that local government is the most important government. I believe that the world governments and shadow governments are an evil beyond comprehension.

    I don’t hate people, but I’m wary of people who push processes and personal proclivities to populations of NPCs. I don’t want to be bothered. I don’t want any human being to be bothered. I want to live my life without having to bow to the governments and corporate entities that want nothing more than to count heads and dollar bills. I want peace, and that peace begins at the tip of my nose.

    A Turnstile, Not a Wall

    I should mention that I’m a nationalist because that’s the world we’re living in today. I’m only a nationalist because entitlements in the form of free shit for immigrants are a huge wrinkle in Lady Liberty’s robe. When my ancestors came to this country from Eastern Canada, there were no entitlements; there was only the promise of economic and personal freedoms.

    I believe that our borders should act more like a turnstile and less like a wall. Sure, there should be background checks for immigrants before they’re allowed to enter the United States. They should be required to pay a fee every time one of them turns a turnstile. They should be deported upon the first infraction without any due process being provided. They shouldn’t be allowed any entitlements until they become green card holders. However, they should be allowed en masse. A healthy America grows with strong immigrants.

    I love immigrants of all shades and types. I’ve learned so much from the people who’ve newly entered our country. I speak a little Spanish, so I have an affinity for Hispanics because many of them work hard while being jovial bastards who will give a hand at the drop of a sombrero. I’ve met Nigerian immigrants who comprise a group that has become a true addition to America; the underlying statistics are unassailable.14 I continue to cast a wary eye toward Muslims because September 11th showed the true hatred of some sects.

    I Am God

    I will not hide my biases, but I will not group all Christians, all Jews, or all Muslims into the same bucket because I first believe in the individual.

    This leads me to the idea of the Abrahamic religions. I despise all of the Abrahamic religions — Christianity, Islam, and Judaism — because they’re a net negative on the modern world. With that being said, I will never disallow an individual from practicing any of those religions, although I won’t trumpet their rights to practice those religions, because I do believe in the freedom of the individual.

    The idea that people worship a god is anathema to my ideals. I am god. You are god. We are god. When we abdicate our throne as the center of our world, we abdicate our power as individuals.

    There was a time for Abrahamic religions; they were used, at their worst, as an evil way to control the masses. I truly believe that idea. At best, they’ve given us a cultural framework that began with the Ten Commandments, which are, in many ways, universal truths.

    I believe in law and order within a world of chaos, but that doesn’t mean that I trust police departments or the power of individual police officers who’ve been granted qualified immunity through no legislative process but through processes of the Supreme Court of the United States.15

    I share many tenets with the Libertarian Party, but I don’t share them all, so I’ve decided to stay separate from the group. The Libertarian Party can’t get out of its own way, and the freakazoids who show up at national meetings do nothing but make a mockery of its ideals. For me, libertarianism is a philosophy. I don’t see it ever becoming a mainstream thought, but Javier Milei has given me the hope that the ideals can flourish when individuals learn to understand that self-determination and self-governance are as close to god as any human will ever be during this lifetime. The idea that we abdicate our personal responsibilities to any god or a sitting president is laziness personified.

    I hope that I can make you angry, make you laugh, and make you think. There are universal truths; they’re bigger than me, bigger than you, and bigger than us. I can’t continue to lie by remaining silent.

    Source Notes

    1. Ron Paul, Abortion and Liberty (1983); the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress identifies Paul as a physician and obstetrician-gynecologist. ↩︎
    2. International Forest Products, “Robert K. Kraft”, company profile of Kraft’s work with the Rand-Whitney Group. ↩︎
    3. Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, “Robert Kraft’s Anti-Hate Group Renames Itself the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate” (October 2025), on the organization’s rebrand from the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism. ↩︎
    4. Federal Election Commission, Independent Expenditures Opposing Thomas Massie; Clerk of the U.S. House, Roll Call 275 (September 23rd, 2021); U.S. Congress, H.R. 8809, the “AIPAC Act.” ↩︎
    5. The Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University; FBI Vault, “Jonestown”. ↩︎
    6. A. R. Lucas et al., “50-Year Trends in the Incidence of Anorexia Nervosa”, American Journal of Psychiatry 148, no. 7 (1991); T. J. Soundy et al., “Bulimia Nervosa in Rochester, Minnesota, 1980–1990”, Psychological Medicine 25, no. 5 (1995); S. Allison, M. Warin, and T. Bastiampillai, “Anorexia Nervosa and Social Contagion”, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 48, no. 2 (2014). ↩︎
    7. The History Project, “Boston Pride Collection”, documenting Boston’s first official Pride march on June 26th, 1971; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Pneumocystis Pneumonia — Los Angeles” (June 5th, 1981). ↩︎
    8. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Chapter 516 of the Acts of 1989 (November 15th, 1989); Governor William Weld, Executive Order No. 325 (February 10th, 1992); Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 76, §5. ↩︎
    9. J. W. Wanta et al., “Mental Health Diagnoses Among Transgender Patients in the Clinical Setting”, Transgender Health (2019); Glintborg et al., “Mental and Physical Health Among Danish Transgender Persons”, JAMA Network Open (2025). The studies report elevated diagnosis rates in their clinical and registry samples; they do not establish a single cause. ↩︎
    10. Encyclopedia of Alabama, “Booker T. Washington”; Tuskegee University, “Booker T. Washington”. The records distinguish the original state teacher-salary appropriation from private philanthropy that financed campus buildings and growth. ↩︎
    11. Sikh Coalition FAQ, describing langar as a free community kitchen open to all. ↩︎
    12. Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 (United Kingdom); John C. Calhoun, “Slavery a Positive Good” (February 6th, 1837); Roger L. Ransom, “The Economics of the Civil War”. ↩︎
    13. Ron Paul, “Protectionism Abroad and Socialism at Home” (August 20th, 2018). ↩︎
    14. U.S. Census Bureau, release CB17-108 (2008–2012 American Community Survey); K. Sakamoto, E. Amaral, S. Wang, and I. Nelson, “The Socioeconomic Attainments of Second-Generation Nigerian and Other Black Americans”, Socius (2021). ↩︎
    15. Pierson v. Ray, 386 U.S. 547 (1967); Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800 (1982). ↩︎