“In any war, don’t let your enemies take your weapons away from you”

“That was Stephen Hicks’s warning to students at Galt’s Gulch 2026, our annual student conference held this summer in San Diego. A Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society, Hicks has spent decades studying how political language gets weaponized—most notably in his book Nietzsche and the Nazis. At the conference, he walked students through the actual history behind two of today’s most abused political insults, tracing the term “Nazi” back to the 25-point program the party itself published in 1920, and showing how “fascist” and “socialist” both meant something precise before they became all-purpose slurs. His core lesson: language is a tool your mind uses to grasp reality first, and a social weapon only second—so know the facts, know your own mind, and don’t let sloppy or bad-faith rhetoric disarm you.”
“Check out the recording of this Galt’s Gulch session:”