Super rich financial backer of Trump and J.D. Vance, Paypal founder Peter Thiel, gay and married since 2017, recently wrote that he has found “freedom” and “democracy” to be incompatible, and that he prefers “freedom.” Of course, that is based on Thiel’s notion of what this “freedom” is, and that subject cuts to the heart of the matter in terms of the state of our culture, much less politics, that has us on the brink of an authoritarian coup today.

Far too many of America’s covert social engineers who create and massage our culture by introducing key ideas and social idioms on a regular basis falsely equate “freedom” with “democracy” in their efforts. As a result, they have helped fuel the coup that is confronting us in this fall’s presidential election. Theirs is a fallacy of understanding that goes all the way back to when the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover tasked notorious right winger Ayn Rand with providing a critique of the 1946 Frank Capra movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Hoover saw it as a pro-communist, anti-American product. In that film, the Jimmy Stewart character, George Bailey, gives over his personal dreams to help others in his community, and when things look particularly bleak for him, an angel arrives from heaven to help by showing him what life would have been like if he’d never existed. The vision includes showing him what his antagonist, the heartless banker Mr. Potter, would have caused Bedford Falls to look like if he’d had his way. (In a height of irony, Capra was a Republican who never voted for FDR).

The “freedom” that Thiel desires is the freedom of Mr. Potter, to wreak havoc on humanity if that’s what he desires. The choice to do awful things or not should be his alone. But democracy demands something different. It protects people. What is commonly called “regulations,” for example, may be better understood as “protections,” because they are ultimately designed for that purpose.

Opponents of reasonable gun control are advocating for just this definition of freedom, the freedom to own and, by extension, shoot whomever one pleases as long as he or she is willing to accept the consequences. Our current Supreme Court is having grave difficulties figuring this out.

Protecting people is not communism. It is civility, the kind of civility that animated America’s Founding Fathers to craft a republic and a Constitution dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal, and therefore are deserving of equal protection under the law. It is an anti-bullying concept, one which stands firm against those like the crafters of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that is filled with mandates to order certain types of behavior. Those mandates impose restrictions on the lives, identities and opportunities of virtually every person except qualified white males.

True freedom lies in the ability of all to exercise creativity and choice in life, exactly the opposite of what’s proposed in that document.