The Denial of Distinctions

By Abe Greenwald

Friday, January 16, 2026

 

Yesterday, I wrote about the return of American disorder in the form of mobs that obstruct ICE raids. Part of what makes anti-ICE/open-border activism so strange is that it attacks the most fundamental aspect of what it means to be a country: its physical boundaries.

 

When leftists repeat, “No human being is illegal,” what are they really saying? The phrase itself is as incoherent as Noam Chomsky’s famous sentence showing the difference between syntax and semantics: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” It’s grammatically sound but semantically nonsensical. Similarly, “No human being is illegal” cannot mean what it plainly asserts because no one supposes the illegality of a person in the first place. Actions, not people, are deemed illegal. So, logically, what the slogan actually means is that one cannot cross America’s borders illegally, which in turn means there are no legitimate national borders.

 

Strangely enough, this occurred to me while I was watching the viral clip of Senator Josh Hawley repeatedly asking OB-GYN Nisha Verma whether men can get pregnant. (Don’t worry; I’m about to explain the connection.)

 

In response to Hawley, the woke doctor was afraid to give the standard woke answer, “Yes, men can get pregnant,” because she understands that all reasonable minds recognize that as a nonsense statement. Nor could she bring herself to utter the scientifically incontrovertible answer, “No, men cannot get pregnant.” She could only express her discomfort with the yes-or-no question.

 

And that’s when it struck me. Being woke means denying the underpinnings of logic and reason, rejecting the fundamental discernment that’s necessary to make sense of the world. Radical leftism seeks to undo not only the good working order of the United States and Western civilization. Unchecked, it seeks to unravel reality itself.

 

That’s what the open-borders activists share with the gender radicals: the disavowal of base reality. Borders are lines of separation. There are strict borders between the biological sexes and between countries. What’s more, you could not have either one without those borders. Just as a country’s borders constitute the first fact of its existence, a zygote comes into its very being with its chromosomal sex (and entire nuclear genome) already determined.

 

And here’s an additional thought. While the woke left likes to cast the great religions as traditions of fairy-tale magic inherently at war with science and reason, the very first Abrahamic faith, Judaism, is founded on making the very distinctions that wokeness rejects. In Genesis, God separates light and darkness, day and night, the waters above and the waters below, Heaven and Earth, the sea and dry land, man from animals—and male from female. Without these distinctions, all would be chaos. The left opposes religion because, like science, it draws the lines that keep chaos and incoherence at bay. The divine genius of Genesis is revealed in its understanding that drawing borders is the first step in creating a meaningful world. Separation is necessary to creation.

 

If a civilization is to survive, all its borders—physical, logical, intellectual, social, scientific, and moral—must be fortified and guarded against the perpetual urge to tear them down.