I have a new piece out in the Times of India putting the panic over falling birth rates into perspective. Read it here.

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That trans activism has proved enormously damaging, not only to its own cause, but to all areas of politics perceived to be tangentially related, is old news at this point. The reasons for this backlash have been generally recognized, if grudgingly: trans politics was too radical, its antics too obnoxious, its demands too out of step with society, its ideology too unscientific, and its new norms and policies implemented too quickly and with no legitimate attempt to gain the consent of the governed. Again, old news. But there’s an element largely missing from this final analysis, one that helps fill in the explanatory gaps of why trans rights did not resonate the way social justice activists expected, and also why many formerly progressive critics of the movement were so fixated on the issue, seemingly out of all proportion. In the 2010s and early 2020s, trans issues became class issues in ways few appeared to acknowledge.

Trans rights were presented to the public as a traditional left-wing social cause: fighting for the underdog, helping the underprivileged, and protecting a materially vulnerable minority. Treated as the next great egalitarian project, trans issues were seen by progressives as an extension of typical left-leaning campaigns that ask the majority to extend resources downward — to those less well off. Putting aside the rather glaring fact that no one did much asking when it came to trans politics (policies and norms were simply changed, almost overnight, and then enforced retroactively to the Big Bang), this framing of trans rights as a fight for the downtrodden never quite rang true to the public. Perhaps because, in large part, it isn’t true.

At the height of the trans movement’s influence in 2022, Pew Research found that 1.6 percent of US adults identified as a gender different from their sex, a more than fivefold increase since 2011. Among adults aged 18–29, this figure was an eye-opening 5.1 percent. Most astonishing of all was that the clear majority of these people did not identify as trans men or trans women — 62 percent of trans people, and 60 percent of trans young adults, identified as “non-binary.” Of the 1.6 percent of 30-to-49-year-olds who identified as a gender different from their sex, over 81 percent were non-binary. Similarly, the KFF/The Washington Post Trans Survey, also in 2022, found that 62 percent of trans adults identified as non-binary or something other than a trans man or trans woman.

Why does any of this matter? Because while non-binary is often considered a subset of trans, the two may in some respects be better understood as distinct cohorts. Non-binary individuals are markedly less likely to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria or go on hormone treatments, and vastly less likely undergo gender-affirming surgery (as few as one percent by some measures). As I wrote in the Memory-Hole Archive:

“In many cases, straight people without a glimmer of dysphoria identified as non-binary for explicitly political reasons, without changing anything about themselves aside from their pronouns, such as New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo, sex writer Suzannah Weiss, and activist Peter Coffin.”

This distinction may also extend to class in nuanced ways. From many of the most visible public figures to the personal experiences of most observers, non-binary manifested in a very different way from binary trans (trans women/men) — appearing to be less a psychological condition or deeply ingrained identity, and more a sociopolitical accessory. An accessory, more to the point, worn predominantly by affluent, educated, well-off professionals. Indeed, as adolescents and young adults began coming out as trans and non-binary in unprecedented numbers1, studies often revealed that many were not coming from hardscrabble backgrounds at all. In some cohorts — particularly among non-binary young people — the data shows just the opposite.

Among clinicians and other professionals in youth gender medicine, it has been common knowledge for many years — and is frequently noted at transgender medical conferences — that the young people treated at these practices overwhelmingly come from educated and financially comfortable households. A 2020 study of four major youth gender clinics in the US found the socioeconomic status of their patients to be almost a caricature of affluence: “Demographics of the cohort show [...] majority total household income greater than $100,000 (75 percent), and majority of guardians/parents having completed undergraduate or graduate/professional degrees (68 percent).”

The story is similar across the globe. A 2015 study using older datasets from youth gender clinics in Amsterdam and Toronto found that 49.5 percent of the Amsterdam patients and 51.1 percent of those in Toronto had parents in the highest socioeconomic tier (“major business/professional”) with only 22.9 percent and 21 percent respectively ranking in lower occupational classes. Another study from 2024 looking at a different facility in Toronto found that the youths seen in the clinic “are disproportionally White and socioeconomically advantaged.” A study of children and adolescents at one of France’s largest youth gender clinics over a 10-year period found that over 40 percent were from high socioeconomic status (SES) families compared to just 18.8 percent from low SES families. Likewise, a study involving a German youth gender clinic in 2023 revealed that “Most adolescents [...] came from a family with a medium (57 percent) or high (30 percent) socioeconomic background.” — just 13 percent came from low SES backgrounds. (These clinical studies, for the most part, lumped trans and non-binary together.)

Many clinicians and activists frame these patterns not as evidence of trans affluence but rather of self-selection bias and skewed access to medical care. The fact that youth gender medicine patients tend overwhelmingly to come from educated, upscale households is often woven into narratives about pervasive transphobia, resource scarcity, and even systemic racism. Wealthy, high-status, and usually white families, these advocates argue, are simply far better able to secure treatment for their trans or gender-questioning children than working-class parents. At a glance, it seems a fair critique, certainly in the context of the American healthcare system. Yet we see the same dynamic play out in countries like France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada, all of which have universal healthcare and more redistributive welfare states. Moreover, data from non-clinical population studies also show similar, albeit more nuanced, findings.

A 2024 study using data that tracked over 14,000 young Americans from ages 14–15 to ages 20–24 found that non-binary identity was strongly associated with high family socioeconomic status: “The family SES of nonbinary respondents is statistically significantly higher than all other gender identity groups, yet differences between other identity groups are not statistically significant.” Other research cuts in a different direction in interesting ways. One study from 2021 surveyed trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming young people aged 12–22 about their experiences in Wisconsin public schools and found that 32 percent of non-binary students qualified for free school lunches (a proxy for low family income) compared to 54 percent of binary trans students and 33 percent of all students. Put another way, non-clinical studies that differentiate non-binary from binary trans youths appear to show a genuine socioeconomic gap between them, with non-binary generally registering as middle or upper SES, and binary trans as middle or lower SES.

The universal refrain of nearly all researchers across fields is that “more research is needed,” and that’s especially true of trans-related areas. But we have more than enough data to illuminate the ways in which the class dynamics of trans politics don’t fit neatly into traditional left-wing cause advocacy. In light of what we know — and of what most of us have seen — it is untenable to straightforwardly portray trans politics as a fight for the downtrodden. Youth and young adult gender politics have largely been driven by people who appear to come disproportionately from educated wealthy milieus — especially non-binary identity, which constitutes the majority of trans people under 50. This helps explain why the public did not experience the trans movement’s demands as being akin to civil rights or gay rights, but rather as elite institutions asking them to change language, norms, school practices, workplace rules, and sometimes laws in deference to the identity claims of people often socioeconomically more privileged than themselves.

That mismatch between the political story being told and the actual social composition people encountered very likely contributed to the intensity of the resentment generated by trans politics. Put simply, the maximal accommodation of a predominantly professional-class population was never going to land the way progressives wanted it to, wholly apart from the alienating tenor, speed, and audacity of the demands being made.

On the flip side, the class dynamics of trans politics also make sense of why so many political defectors from within educated left-leaning spaces became so singularly focused on the excesses of the movement, often blowing the issue out of proportion to its real-world scope and scale. As educated, financially comfortable progressives, these critics were deeply ensconced within the same elite institutions, communities, organizations, and social circles in which trans — and especially non-binary — identities had become most prevalent and salient. In their day-to-day personal experience, trans issues seemed to be everywhere they looked in a way that most people had to tumble down online rabbit holes to witness from afar.

None of this is to say that educated or affluent people can’t have problems worth caring about — even problems the public should be asked to address or accommodate. They absolutely can. But differences in education, wealth, and status are politically relevant factors that humans from all walks of life instinctively pick up on, and which influence the way issues are perceived. Pretending that they aren’t relevant, or worse, representing the materially privileged as socially marginalized, only foments antagonism and acrimony. The silver lining of failure is the opportunity to learn and improve. On this score, the rise and fall of trans activism presents a masterclass. Recognizing the class dynamics of trans politics should be part of that lesson.

See also: “Trans Activists Cannot Crush 1.3 Billion People. But They Can Start a Conversation.”

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This article is a guest post by Matt McManus

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Karl Marx’s legacy is a complex one. If Plato was the quintessential philosopher who theorized about the world while being incapable of changing it, Marx occupies the opposite end of the spectrum. Wars have been fought for and against Marx’s alleged legacy. Today, to hear many on the political right tell it, Marxism is simultaneously an embarrassing failure and astoundingly triumphant. Tune into any right-wing podcast and you’ll hear endless diatribes about the spread of race Marxism, postmodern Marxism, cultural Marxism and every other flavor of Marxism in the book. Most of this commentary ecosystem operates at a painfully low level; to say they emit more heat than light is generous. This reflects the intense disdain many on the right have for Marxist ideas, which are not infrequently described as Satanic. But there is also an unusual strain of right-wing thought that has been willing to make selective use of Marx’s arguments for their own purposes.

Of course, Marx and Marxism have been loathed by the right, and especially the far right, for a long time. In Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler railed against the “Jewish doctrine of Marxism” for its rejection of the “aristocratic principle of nature.” He had no patience for the socialist dream of a cosmopolitan world of equals, seeing it as the inversion of his vision of a natural hierarchy of races competing for supremacy. Hitler’s militant anti-Marxism was one of the reasons that, despite their reservations, many conservatives, businessmen, and the German military were willing to conciliate and even cooperate with the Nazi Party’s rise in 1933. As Cambridge historian Richard Evans put it in his The Coming of the Third Reich (2003):

“[The] conservatives who levered Hitler into power shared a good deal of [his] vision. They really did look back with nostalgia to the past, and yearn for the restoration of the Hohenzolleren monarchy and the Bismarkian Reich. But these were to be restored in a form purged of what they saw as unwise concessions that had been made to democracy. In their vision of the future, everyone was to know their place, and the working classes especially were to be kept where they belonged, out of the political-decision making process altogether.”

Many contemporary fascist intellectuals echoed Hitler’s creed. In Benito Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism (1932), largely ghost written by court philosopher Giovanni Gentile, they described fascism as the “resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so called scientific and Marxian socialism, the doctrine of historic materialism which would explain the history of mankind in terms of the class struggle and by changes in the processes and instruments of production, to the exclusion of all else.” They went on to echo the Hitlerian point that Italian fascism rejected the economic materialism of Marxism and socialism, which aspired to universal happiness and flourishing for all. This reduced human beings to “mere animals” organized into an ever-fatter herd. Struggle, above all martial struggle for empire and power on behalf of what Roger Griffin in The Nature of Fascism (1991) called the “ultranation”, were conceived as the true edifying activities that brought individual and social life into focus and gave it meaning. The Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger signed off on these views in more rarefied terms. In Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), he described capitalism and socialism as “metaphysically the same” — the rise of the mediocre and spiritless materialists and hedonists.

After World War II, resolute and conspiratorial anti-Marxism and anti-socialism became a staple and even defining feature of far-right discourse and activism. In Ride the Tiger (1961), self-described “super fascist” Julius Evola described Marxism as the culmination of a long egalitarian decline in the West, which included Christianity, liberalism, and democracy as predecessors. The result of implementing Karl Marx’s dream of a “perfect naturalism and even a true humanism” could only be a “psychic lobotomy intended methodically to neutralize and infantilize any form of higher sensibility and interest, every way of thought that is not in terms of the economy and socio-economic processes.” For Evola, Marxism shared with liberalism a vulgar fixation on economic wellbeing precisely because this materialism was symptomatic of plebeian modes of thinking.

In the United States, many figures advanced theories about creeping “cultural Marxism” subtly undermining the country. In The Death of the West (2001), white nationalist Pat Buchanan described how “cultural Marxists” sought to enact a “cultural revolution” in America. As far as he was concerned, they succeeded, no matter how many people actually read critical theorists like Theodor Adorno:

“That Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse and the Frankfurt School had immense influence on America’s cultural and intellectual history is undeniable. But, unlike the Bolsheviks, they did not storm a Winter Palace, they did not seize power, and they did not impose their ideas by force and terror; they were no giants, like Marx, to whom men paid homage. Few Americans knew who they were. No one, not even Marcuse, was a St. Paul, a Luther, or a Wesley. They were intellectual renegades and moral misfits, yes, but they were also men who thought ‘outside the box’ and put into circulation the ideas of how a successful revolution might be launched in the West, against the West. And their ideas have triumphed. America’s elites, who may not even know today who the Frankfurt thinkers were, have taken to their ideas like catnip.”

Trumpists have embraced many of these themes in their own conspiracy theorizing about the decline of Western culture: placing the blame at the feet of “Race Marxism”, “American Marxism”, “post-modern neo-Marxism”, and of course the classic “cultural Marxism.” Given the volume, one would think the Soviet Union had in fact won the Cold War, and that it wasn’t even especially close.

Despite this history, there have been far-right intellectuals and movements who’ve taken Marxism seriously. To be clear, this is not an invocation of “horseshoe theory” — which remains possibly the worst way to understand the political spectrum, since it focuses exclusively on an ideology’s negations and not on its positive aspirations. There are of course intellectuals that move from the far left to the far right, such as the accelerationist Nick Land. Usually, a persistent theme in their work is a rejection of centrist liberalism. But in these cases, the end goal pivots wildly from a more democratic and equal society to one where liberalism is to be rejected precisely for failing to uphold racial, gender, and class hierarchies enough.

Rather, what I’m referring to are figures on the far right who seek to repurpose some of Marx’s language and arguments. Sometimes this is done for purely strategic reasons. In more interesting instances, there’s a genuine effort to rework Marxist insights for reactionary purposes. Sometimes both are combined. In the cases of strategic repurposing, what we see are efforts to curry favor with anti-capitalist and anti-Western forces by camouflaging reactionary politics in left-wing idioms.

In his seminal work Against Fascist Creep (2017), Alexander Reid Ross describes how far-right intellectuals and activists will occasionally recode their politics to make it more palatable to the radical left, and especially the online left. Far-right thinkers will often borrow critical tools from Marxism to help condemn liberalism and “bourgeois” democracy while rejecting the Marxist aspiration to more fully realize liberal commitments to freedom and equality, regarding that as an example of how Marxism and liberalism in fact share too much in common as twin children of the Enlightenment. In the 1990s, British far-right activist Troy Southgate tried rebranding racist ultranationalist politics as “national anarchism”, using the language of anti-capitalism and ecology. In the 2000s, European neo-Nazis donned the garb of the far left, calling themselves “Autonomous Nationalists” and dressing in black-bloc like anti-fascists. In the early 2010s, white nationalists in the US also infiltrated and attempted to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street movement to advance right-wing populism.

Perhaps one of the clearest examples is the Russian fascist and ultranationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin. Early in his career, Dugin tried to stitch together Red-Brown alliances to roll back Western reforms in Russia, even forming a short-lived National Bolshevik party in 1992. In works like An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism (2014, 2024), Dugin occasionally frames Russia as a force opposed to American and capitalist imperialism. He’ll invoke Soviet-era imagery and propaganda in a nostalgic vein to drum up themes of an oppressed third world aligning under Russian leadership on land against the Atlantic sea powers.

There is little, however, that is ideologically revealing about this; Dugin also happily conducts interviews with Tucker Carlson and chums around with Steve Bannon where it suits his purposes. He’s been subject to fawning profiles in conservative magazines like First Things while militant anti-Marxists like Jordan Peterson have complimented Dugin as a “genuine philosopher” and discussed his work seriously.

In Dugin’s most important ideological work, The Fourth Political Theory (2009), he posits that the three great political theories of modernity have been liberalism, communism, and fascism. Of these, Dugin strongly implies that the road is shortest from the last to his own radical right “fourth” political theory. Given that Dugin self-described as a fascist for a long time, it’s safe to say that road is exactly no distance at all. But he also makes clear that his theory will syncretically borrow from liberalism and communism as well. Dugin asks whether there is “anything that we could take away from liberalism — from liberalism that was hypothetically defeated and has lost its axis? Yes, there is. It is the idea of freedom. And not just the idea of ‘freedom for’ — that same substantive freedom rejected by Mill in his liberal program concentrating on the ‘freedom from.’ We must say ‘yes’ to freedom in all its meanings and in all its perspectives.”

Moving on, he insists that Marxism “is relevant in terms of its description of liberalism, in identifying the contradictions of capitalism, in its criticism of the bourgeois system, and in revealing the truth behind the bourgeois democratic policies of exploitation and enslavement presented as ‘development’ and ‘liberation.’ Marxism’s critical potential is highly useful and applicable. It may well be included into the arsenal of the ‘Fourth Political Theory.’”1

Another example closer to home can be seen in the work of Samuel Francis. Francis was a journalist and intellectual in the Ronald Reagan administration who eventually came to the conclusion that American conservatism was just a slower vehicle for advancing liberalism. In his famous essay “Beautiful Losers: The Failure of American Conservatism”, Francis bemoaned that the goals of many in the Republican Party were not “conceptually distinct from those of progressivism and liberalism athwart which the American Right at one time promised to stand.” He posited that a coalition of “middle American radicals” would eventually rise up to the right of Reagan and take back control of the country. In his essay collection, Essential Writings on Race (2007), Francis clarifies that by “middle American radicals” (MARs) he means white people.

Francis was enormously contemptuous of Marx and Marxism, often conflating it with liberalism. In his opus, Leviathan and Its Enemies (posthumously published in 2016), Francis chimes in on how the New Left “found in Marxism and its revisionist variations a new and more radical vehicle for the environmentalist presuppositions of progressivist and liberal theory, and it also revived and pushed to an extreme the progressivist interpretation of environmentalism as a basis for utopianism and cosmopolitanism.”

Nonetheless, he found certain Marxist tools useful in developing his own critique of the “managerial revolution” wherein liberal and leftist technocrats seized control of the state and proceeded to undermine white civilization. Like other “right wing Gramscians”, Francis approvingly referenced Gramsci’s theory of “cultural hegemony” wherein the values, attitudes, and beliefs of a society are conditioned to support the established order. Except that where Gramsci saw the capitalist, bourgeois elite as being in charge, Francis insisted the conservative bourgeois had actually been replaced by a “managerial elite” that was committed to liberalism, progressivism, Marxism, and other combinations of left-wing values. Part of the goal of the far right had to be breaking the liberal-leftist monopoly on culture to open space for forms of white solidarity and nationalist chauvinism to become politically respectable and then effective.

More recently, we can point to the cult reactionary philosopher Nick Land. While horseshoe theory is largely discredited by analysts of the far right for evaluating its ideologies from a distorted viewpoint, a broken clock is right twice a day, and Land’s career tracks his transition from despising liberals from the left to despising them from the far right. He began as a critical theorist in the vein of Deleuze, Guattari, and Marx. Since then, he has moved firmly to the racist and nativist right. Despite this ideological shift, he remains willing to make selective use of Marx, alongside Austrian economics, paleo-libertarianism, and more.

In a recent conversation with Vincent Le, Land commends Marx for recognizing that social systems produce ideological defenses. While these ideologies are often taken to be true reflections of the world by those governed by them, they are actually upheld because they work in the interests of the ruling classes. However, in Dark Enlightenment (2022), Land makes clear that the ruling classes and ideologies of our time aren’t those that Marx would have recognized. The ruling class “in contradiction to Marxist principles of social analysis […] is not the ‘capitalist bourgeoise.’ Logically it cannot be.” Citing Curtis Yarvin, Land thinks the real ruling class and ideology are liberal elites propagating the views of the “cathedral” — that equality and democracy are universally good, all races are equal, and the most intense forms of capitalism need to be subject to reform or even remade in the name of equity.

What we see in these cases is a good demonstration of the far right’s distinctive combination of ideological fanaticism and syncretic flexibility. This might seem contradictory, but it isn’t. Fundamentally, the far right thinks of the world in terms of those who have power, and those who don’t. An ideal society is one where those best equipped to wield power dominate over natural subordinates — whites over the lesser races, men over women, Americans and the West over the “shithole countries”, and so forth. They are often deeply disturbed that the advance of liberal and/or leftist values has meant that this “natural” or “spiritual” hierarchy has been turned upside down, and the “inferiors” are now treated as equals. On that basis they are willing to mutate and adapt as needed to acquire power, which is both a means and the ends of politics. Given that, making tactical ideological pivots, borrowing insights from leftists where needed, and breaking principled standards quicker than you can lower them is all part of the process.

As a liberal socialist, I think the far right is correct about one thing. Liberalism and socialism are, as Heidegger suggested, far more closely aligned than either are with the far right. Ultimately, liberals and socialists agree that reason and science should be applied to social problems to create a fairer world where everyone’s concerns are given equal weight. This cashes itself out in the liberal respect for human rights, and in the conviction of socialists like George Orwell or Martin Luther King Jr. that everyone ought to have enough resources and opportunities to lead a decent life. The far right rejects this orientation at a foundational level, regarding some as more deserving (often inherently), and so deserving of more. And in their endless radical crusade for extreme hierarchy, they wield principles like transactional instruments to be used or discarded at will in the march to power.

See also: “We All Live on 4Chan Now”

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This post is by contributor Jacob Bielecki.

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In December 2025, Ben Sasse, former Republican Senator from Nebraska (2015–2023), announced that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer at age 53. What should have been a life expectancy of three to four months, however, has turned into something else for Sasse. He’s been taking Daraxonrasib, an experimental drug that has not only slowed the cancer’s growth but has reversed its progression. The groundwork for Daraxonrasib was laid by government-funded research — the very type of research that was cut when the Republican majorities in the House and Senate passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025. 7,800 grants were discontinued or cut as $32 billion overall was slashed from scientific research, with the single largest cut being Northwestern University’s Lurie Cancer Center, one of America’s leading cancer research institutions.

Sasse has given several interviews since his diagnosis, including with conservative New York Times Columnist Ross Douthat, with Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes, and with Sola Media, a Christian media organization. In a widely shared clip of his Sola interview posted on social media, Sasse said his tumors have shrunk by 80 percent and the cancer cells in his blood have declined by 99 percent. Sola has since removed the clip, clarifying that while Sasse was responding well to treatment, his diagnosis was still terminal. Just about all of Sasse’s post-diagnosis interviews have been ideologically friendly puff pieces. To say that Sasse has been served nothing but softball questions would be an extreme understatement. Still, it is to be expected. Ours is a culture that treats death, or impending death, as a kind of moral absolution that elevates all but the most heinous beyond reproach. For this reason, no one wants to raise the only question Ben Sasse should be asked right now: would you have voted to cut the medical research funding that is now prolonging your life?

Ben Sasse rose to prominence during Donald Trump’s first campaign for President in 2015–2016. The press, eager to lionize any Republican who spoke out against Trump, made Sasse a media darling when he announced he would not support Trump if he became the Republican Party’s nominee. Sasse criticized Trump for refusing to denounce his Ku Klux Klan endorsement and said that Trump “thinks he’s running for King” in a Facebook post. Yet, when Trump won the GOP nomination for President, Sasse could not bring himself to endorse Hilary Clinton. When Donald Trump was impeached for the first time — after phone call transcripts were leaked showing that he demanded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy produce dirt on then–candidate Joe Biden, while withholding military aid to Ukraine — Sasse voted not to convict on the grounds that removing the President would be too divisive for the country.

January 6th was the final straw for Sasse. When Trump was impeached a second time, Sasse was one of seven Republican Senators who broke rank and voted to convict. Of those seven senators, only three still hold office. In response to his vote, the Scotts Bluff County Republican Party voted to censure Sasse, and its chair, Kolene Woodward, wrote an open letter addressed to him stating, “You were elected to represent the people of Nebraska who overwhelmingly voted for President Trump. Your actions are a selfish, political ploy.” She also expressed her disappointment that Nebraska does not allow Senators to be recalled. The Nebraska State Republican Party, which voted to censure Sasse in 2016 for criticizing Trump, likewise voted to censure him again after he supported the articles of impeachment. Sasse didn’t even bother serving the remainder of his term. He resigned from the Senate in January 2023 after being hired as president of the University of Florida. Whatever plans Sasse may have had for his future were disrupted by cancer, a disease that also helped shape the politics of the era.

“Ending cancer as we know it” was one of President Joe Biden’s strongest initiatives. The goal the Biden administration set with this “Cancer Moonshot” was to cut cancer deaths in half by 2047 by “Protecting 100 million Americans from exposures to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), known as forever chemicals, and taking action to decrease smoking, the single largest driver of cancer deaths.” The Moonshot expanded early cancer detection programs to millions of Americans, created the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to research better ways to detect and treat cancer, and enacted policies to help make treatment more affordable.

Fighting cancer was a personal matter for Joe Biden, whose son Beau died in 2015 from brain cancer two years after his diagnosis. Biden attributed his son’s cancer to Beau having been stationed near a burn pit while serving in the Iraq War in 2008–2009 and being exposed to toxins. Several months after leaving office, Biden himself was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer that had spread to his bones, which may explain why his gait grew increasingly stiff during his presidency.

It appears, at least for now, that Joe Biden and Ben Sasse are unlikely fellow travelers in their cancer journeys, as their respective treatments have gone better than anyone could have expected. Biden received radiation and hormone therapy and is making regular public appearances, giving speeches, and has written a memoir, while Sasse’s fight with pancreatic cancer has already blown past his doctors’ initial predictions. Sasse’s statements about how his cancer has nearly vanished from his blood call to mind the advancements that have been made in the treatment of HIV. Those living with HIV can be treated with antiretroviral therapy (ART) drugs which decrease their viral load to the point where HIV cannot be detected on a blood test, meaning they cannot spread the disease. The drugs also prevent HIV from progressing into AIDS. Because of ART, the life expectancy for people living with HIV is now comparable to the rest of the population. This was the goal of Biden’s Cancer Moonshot: to transform cancer into a manageable condition that allows people to live normal lives. The Trump administration’s budget cuts have made that dream more distant.

This brings us back to the original question: Would Ben Sasse have voted to cut the cancer funding that’s prolonging his life? Looking through his political career, Sasse’s voting record on medical research funding has been mixed. In his first term in the Senate, Sasse voted for the 21st Century Cures bill, which provided billions of dollars in additional funding for the National Institutes of Health as well as for cancer and other medical research. Additionally during the COVID-19 pandemic, Sasse voted for the CARES Act, an emergency pandemic funding bill that passed the Senate 96-0. But Sasse has also voted against a number of spending bills that cumulatively included hundreds of billions in funding for healthcare and medical research, such as the Consolidated Appropriations Acts of 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2023.

For over a decade, the media has portrayed Sasse as a wise and honorable sage of constitutional conservatism who took a principled stand against Trumpism. Aside from Rand Paul, Thom Tillis, and Susan Collins, every Republican senator voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill and every Democrat voted against it. Republicans who have criticized Trump in the past, such as the recently deceased Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell (who is still alive as of this writing), and Lisa Murkowski all voted to pass the bill. What would Sasse have done? It’s a simple question. This is the same Ben Sasse who said that the Affordable Care Act was “the worst law in our history” during his first Senate campaign. However, Sasse was also the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services during the George W. Bush administration. He must surely know the important role government-funded research plays in developing new treatments for cancer and other diseases. Would Ben Sasse have put his devotion to “small government” conservatism aside to vote against medical research cuts?

Ben Sasse may be dying, but this is not an unfair question to ask. Unlike other prominent pancreatic cancer patients such as Patrick Swayze or Aretha Franklin, Sasse, up until very recently, had the power to change hundreds of millions of people’s lives. If he’s going to make the rounds on the interview circuit and tell the world what it’s like to be living on borrowed time, the public deserves to know whether he is serious about winning the war on cancer.

See also: “We Won’t Prevent Your Cancer, You Have To Start Dying First”

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“Socialism Will Be the Death of the Democrats”

https://americandreaming.substack.com/p/socialism-will-be-the-death-of-the

Jamie Paul is a writer based in Greater Philadelphia, founder of American Dreaming, contributing editor at Bi.org, and former managing editor at Queer Majority. His work has appeared in outlets including Quillette, Persuasion, Areo Magazine, and Gazeta do Povo.

Subscribe now and never miss a new post. You can also support the work on Patreon. Please consider sharing this article on your social networks, and hit the like button so more people can discover it. You can reach me at @AmericnDreaming on Twitter, @jamie-paul.bsky.social on Bluesky, or at AmericanDreaming08@Gmail.com.

Intro music: “Americana” by HoliznaCC0, CC0 1.0. Outro music: “Never-Ending To-Do List” by HappyWorldWithMochi, CC BY 4.0. Both from Free Music Archive.

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Socialism is having a moment in America right now, and the Democrats seem to be here for it. Over the past year, socialists have enjoyed a wave of electoral victories around the country, from Mamdani in New York, to Melat Kiros in Colorado, Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York, Janeese Lewis George in Washington DC, and Gabriel Sanchez in Georgia. Francesca Hong is currently leading in the Wisconsin gubernatorial campaign and Nithya Raman is in a tight race with incumbent Karen Bass for mayor of LA. Not to mention sitting socialist politicians like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib. In 2026, self-identified socialists won 35 Democratic primary elections. Virtually all of them were backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA.

The DSA — the largest socialist political organization in US history — is in the midst of staging a takeover of the Democratic Party. And in case you’re unsure of how socialist “democratic” socialism even is, we need only hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. One DSA co-chair stated, “Our goal is to have the transition from capitalism to socialism.” The DSA’s own website espouses a platform that includes abolishing both the police and prisons as well as obliterating America’s system of checks and balances by “Replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”

DSA-backed politicians have been even more candid. Chevalier, the soon-to-be Congresswoman from New York, has called for the abolition of police, prisons, and borders, has retweeted posts calling for “seiz[ing] all properties from landlords”, and has directly tweeted “seize the means of production.” Hong, who may soon be governor of Wisconsin, said she ideally wants a society “without prisons.” One of Mamdani’s top staffers, Cea Weaver, has uttered such gems as, “Private property, including any kind of especially homeownership, is a weapon of white supremacy,” “If you don’t believe in the government’s sacred right to seize private property, it’s over,” “elect more communists,” and, of course, “impoverish the white middle class.” Mayor Mamdani himself has spoken about “the end goal of seizing the means of production.”

Alarmed at the direction of the party, one moderate Democrat in Congress spearheaded an open letter titled “The Promise to America”, an anodyne list of affirmations including “We are capitalist, not socialist,” “We want safety, not lawlessness,” “We are proud, not ashamed of America,” and “We don’t eat babies” (okay I made that last one up). Of the 212 sitting Democrats in the House of Representatives, only 10 signed the pledge, along with five congressional candidates.

What conservatives have cried wolf about for the past 50 years — that Dems are socialists — is finally becoming true; ironically in no small part because all that wolf-crying took so much of the sting out of charges of socialism, not unlike what the left has done to terms like “white supremacy.” But I digress.

The thing is, this isn’t a hostile takeover. The Democratic electorate appears to be, in more or less equal measure, embracing it or just asleep at the switch. A Washington Post poll from this past July found that 75 percent of Democrats would consider voting for a socialist. Another poll from Fox News found that 59 percent of Democrats had a favorable view of the DSA. Pew Research found in June that Democrats “like” socialist candidates more than they dislike them by a nearly three to one margin. Among white or upper-income Democrats, that ratio increases to four to one. There’s a reason why they call them “luxury beliefs.” In 2025, Gallup found that just 42 percent of Dems had a positive view of capitalism, compared to 66 percent who had a positive view of socialism. This isn’t just good vibes — Dems are beginning to identify as socialists in numbers never seen before.

As I wrote in a piece back in May:

“A 2025 poll conducted by CNN found that 58 percent of Americans believe the Democratic Party has gone too far left, an ‘all-time high’ figure, according to data analyst Harry Enten. Perhaps the public is just mistaken? Another CNN poll found that 33 percent of Democrats — and 42 percent of those under 35 — think of themselves as democratic socialists.”

As it happens, CNN released a new poll just last week that found the same thing: about a third of Democrats or Dem-leaning voters identify as democratic socialists.

I wanted to lay all of this out to establish that this trend is real, and that a substantial portion of Dems are on board with it. If you’re one of those people who continues to regurgitate tired talking points about the Democrats being a center-right party, or there being no real political left in America, I’d like to invite you to join us here in the year 2026. Ultimately, though, I’m not here to talk to leftists. I’m trying to reach people whose heads aren’t already up their asses, because the Democrats need to wake up, and fast. If the moderates, small-L liberals, and non-socialists among you don’t address the mounting socialism problem and right the ship soon, this DSA takeover could be catastrophic for the Democratic Party.

The problem for Democrats is that the numbers just don’t add up. There ain’t enough progressives or “blue no matter who” partisans to carry most elections in this country, certainly not in swing states. Sure, you can elect a socialist in New York City, or Portland, or Seattle, or San Francisco. In the deepest blue cities, Joseph fucking Stalin or Chairman Mao could rise from the grave and run with a D next to their name and win. Outside the bubble, though, the American public is decidedly not down with socialism.

Pew found that US adults dislike political leaders who identify as democratic socialists more than they like them by a 21-point margin. A CNBC survey found that 50 percent of registered voters said they would be less likely to vote for any candidate who described themselves as a democratic socialist, with 42 percent saying they’d be much less likely, compared to just 32 percent who said they’d be more likely to vote for such a candidate. YouGov found that only 29 percent of Americans would even consider voting for a democratic socialist, compared with 45 percent who said they never would. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that 55 percent of Americans would not consider voting for a democratic socialist. That’s kind of the whole ballgame right there. All of these figures are from the past few months.

Now, some polls asked about socialism side by side with MAGA, and found that MAGA was even less popular than socialism. For example, a Reuters-Ipsos poll from last week found that while 51 percent of Americans think socialism has “few or no good ideas”, 57 percent said the same of MAGA. The decision to juxtapose these questions is a rather transparent attempt to present socialism in an electorally favorable light as the lesser evil, but it completely overlooks two enormous facts. First, MAGA is Donald Trump’s personal movement, and Trump is a 600-year-old lame duck. His iron grip on the GOP ends the moment he’s out of office and no longer on ballots. Second, Republicans over the past decade have proven themselves to be nothing if not transactional chameleons. How many times have we seen supposedly principled conservatives eagerly feed their purported values into the wood chipper and perform humiliating about-faces at the drop of a hat just to get ahead? Make no mistake, if MAGA is polling in the toilet come 2028, the GOP field will adapt in a way that the Democratic machine seems too sclerotic and bogged down with ideology to match.

Of course, the Democrats are poised to win the 2026 midterms, not because of socialism, but in spite of it. Midterm voters are disproportionately educated, and over the past 12 years, there’s been an educational realignment of the two parties resulting in the Democratic dominance of educated voters. That’s why, even though Dems looked like they were cruising toward a crushing defeat in the 2022 midterms, the predicted “red wave” never happened. But it did come, two years later, in a presidential election.

If and when the Dems win big this November, I fear they’ll draw all the wrong lessons from it. I fear they’ll mistake youthful enthusiasm for a durable coalition of reliable voters. I fear they’ll mistake online noise for real life. I fear they’ll mistake the social and professional pressures educated progressives face in their own lives for the mood of the country. And I fear that they’ll mistake a midterm layup under the most favorable conditions for socialism being some kind of winning wave of the future.

Socialism is no wave of the future. It’s a 19th-century ideology to address 19th-century problems, championed by know-nothing LARPing rich kids and proudly anti-American ideologues. It’s been tried over and over around the world and has produced nothing but failure, misery, and death on an unimaginable level — to the tune of 80 to 100 million deaths.

If you think that sounds like a better tomorrow, you’re delusional. And if you think a Democratic Party remade in the image of socialism is one a majority of Americans will vote for, well, you’re the political right’s most valuable ally.

See also: “Marxism is Elitism”

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This article is a guest post by Ayman Eckford.

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What does security mean when you are part of a group that is hated by the leader or ruling party of your country? It’s a question persecuted minorities have been asking themselves for generations, and it’s one many trans people in the United States have been asking themselves of late. Amid the executive and legislative crusade against trans people waged by the Republican Party, not to mention the sharp decline in public acceptance and rise in hostility, many trans people have begun to feel that they can no longer depend on the state or social norms to ensure their safety. In fact, a growing number of trans people are taking self-defense into their own hands. But what happens when the state denies you even that right?

A March 2025 study from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law shows that concerns about personal safety are pushing trans people to take proactive measures to protect themselves and their families. The study found that “43 percent of participants were considering pursuing self-defense classes, with almost 9 percent already having done this,” while “Over one-third of participants (37 percent) were considering buying a gun and/or learning how to use a gun, with 13 percent already having done so.” Yet there are some on the political right — including many in positions of real power and influence — who would make an utter mockery of their own values (and the law) by singling out trans people to ban them from owning firearms.

Carrying guns is one of the most culturally American things a person can do. Perhaps this is easier to understand from the outside. As someone born in Eastern Europe, America has always seemed like a country where the laws around carrying weapons were unusually liberal, but just as much a part of the culture as Western movies, Coca-Cola, or Disney. So it’s not surprising that even though many trans people lean left politically and support gun control, when things become dangerous, they, like most Americans, turn to buying guns.

But despite the Second Amendment’s guarantee of “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” in September 2025, senior Justice Department officials in the Trump administration were considering proposals to restrict the right of transgender people to own firearms. The particular angle the DOJ floated, according to two officials familiar with the matter, was “to ensure that mentally ill individuals suffering from gender dysphoria are unable to obtain firearms while they are unstable and unwell.”

This followed a Minneapolis church shooting where the suspected shooter was a transgender woman, even though all indications suggested that anti-religious resentment, not gender identity, motivated the shooting. But the discourse around banning trans gun ownership had been building for some months, fueled online by right-wing narratives highlighting high-profile shootings in which the assailants or alleged assailants were trans and connecting trans people to an “epidemic” of violence. Just a month before his death, conservative activist Charlie Kirk called for banning trans people from owning guns, posting: “If you are crazy enough to hormonally and surgically ‘change your sex,’ you have a mental disorder, and you are too crazy to own a firearm.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s contribution was to wonder aloud if the true culprit was psychiatric medication such as the SSRIs that some trans people were prescribed.

While no opinion polling has been done specifically asking the public whether trans people should be barred from owning firearms, there’s reason to suspect that this view may be shared by a substantial portion of society, especially as Trump’s DOJ has framed it. A 2023 Pew survey found that 88 percent of US adults supported policies that prevent people with mental illnesses from owning guns, and a separate poll from September 2025 found that 42 percent of respondents considered trans to be a form of mental illness. At the same time, the Public Religion Research Institute found in 2025 that 71 percent of Americans agreed with the statement: “transgender people deserve the same rights and protections as other Americans.”

To set the record straight, there is no correlation between being trans and being violent. According to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks gun violence in the US, of the 5,748 mass shootings between 2013 and mid-September 2025, just five shooters have been confirmed as trans. If we wanted to keep guns out of the hands of the people who commit the most mass shootings, we would have to prohibit all white cisgender men from carrying weapons. That is obviously absurd. Of course, when Kirk was killed, right-wing figures speculated that his killer was transgender and argued that trans people should be denied gun rights. When it turned out that the perpetrator was, as usual, a cis man, no one called for disarming cisgender men. It’s clear that this is not about any specific safety threat posed by trans people, but about discrimination and stereotypes.

America has a long history of denying minorities the right to bear arms. In 1857, the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision ruled that black people could not be recognized as citizens, and therefore were denied the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Before the Holocaust, German Jews were disarmed beginning in 1938, first locally, then across the country. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin also stripped the Chechen and Ingush peoples of their weapons — despite their long-standing tradition of carrying them — before committing genocide against these nations, deporting them from their homelands in 1944, and erasing their presence from historical archives and the culture.

We can see a clear pattern: the most severe forms of tyranny and oppression often involve taking away the rights of disfavored groups to protect themselves. In the case of trans people in the United States, they have already been recently denied the right to serve in the military, so the politics of making them helpless is obvious, as well as the politics of their alienation.

The Trump administration has since backed away from its proposal to ban trans gun ownership. But the fact that it was ever on the table, and that it has such vocal support among many on the right, has been eye-opening for trans people. “It’s not about gun control. It’s about removing trans people’s autonomy,” one trans person told the New Yorker. Another said that having a gun is a “simple necessity” considering harassment against trans people on the street.

As a trans autistic person who has lived in Russia, I know this too well. In Russia, you can be attacked just for being different. This is why some LGBT people carry knives in their pockets. It is much harder to buy arms in Russia, but if that hadn’t been the case, many LGBT folks would have carried them. In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed, even more Russians bought weapons illegally simply because the state could not protect them. Of course, the safer the country, the less people feel they need to carry weapons. When I moved to the UK, I felt safe on the streets for the first time. The urge to carry a knife disappeared, as did the hypervigilance I had carried for years.

There is no link between being violent and being trans, bi, or gay. But there is a clear link between being discriminated against and wanting to protect yourself. Taking unconstitutional and anti-American measures to single out and deny firearms to trans people under the guise of “protecting society” isn’t just the hypocrisy of all hypocrisies among so-called conservatives; it serves to place a bigger target on the backs of an already hated and vulnerable group.

See also: “Anti-Trans Activists are Unprincipled and Depraved”

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After a harrowing and discriminatory ordeal at the hands of the Michigan State Police, Dakarai Larriett could have become deeply disenchanted. When troopers pulled him over, exhaustively searched his vehicle, subjected him to a battery of groundless sobriety tests, mocked his sexual orientation, detained him at the police station, and required him to defecate in front of officers, he could have become jaded and cynical. When police body cam footage appeared to show that, upon finding no contraband, the troopers allegedly attempted to plant drugs in his vehicle, he could have decided that the system needed to be burned to the ground.

Instead, he became a liberal reformer, running for Tommy Tuberville’s vacant US Senate seat in his home state of Alabama in the 2026 midterm elections.

Larriett, a Democrat, campaigned on a platform centered around pocket-book issues and accountability, led by his flagship proposal of a “Motorist Bill of Rights”, which would hold state and local law enforcement to the same standards of probable cause to which federal agents must adhere. For nearly a year, the former executive and entrepreneur ran as the frontrunner in the Democratic primary. He put in the work, raised an impressive sum of money, and built a strong grassroots base. Then Everett Wess, a last-minute entrant to the race, flipped the script, taking Larriett to a runoff election in June and defeating him by just 8,000 votes. Under ordinary circumstances, kudos to Wess would be in order — or a postmortem of whatever costly errors the Larriett campaign must surely have committed. Only, these weren’t ordinary circumstances — or rather, they were, just in ways most voters would be shocked to discover. Once again, it would seem, Larriett’s faith in the system is being tested, but he’s still not giving up.

“There was something to do at every single moment”, Larriett told me, looking back on his campaign. “You’re either raising money or raising votes. I started on the phone in February of 2025. I would literally be [raising money] on the phone from nine to six.” As he gained traction, his campaigning increasingly shifted to in-person events, “traveling to different counties, talking to Democratic groups, talking to the police union, talking to the steel workers, every single kind of constituent group you can think of.”

Larriett wasn’t running unopposed during those months. It was an unusually crowded Democratic field in a deep red state. “There were four Democrats running for the nomination, and two write-in candidates,” he said. “It was a very competitive field. Keep in mind, in Alabama, we have to go out and recruit candidates to run for these types of offices. Sometimes no one runs. Sometimes one person runs.”

When no candidate earned at least 50 percent of the vote in May, Larriett, a first-time political candidate, advanced to a runoff and lost with just over 45 percent of the vote. What went wrong?

“There are really two major black endorsement groups,” Larriett explained. Black Alabamians make up about a quarter of the state, but half of the Democratic electorate. “There’s the Alabama New South Coalition, which is actually chaired by my opponent, Everett Wess. He did not recuse himself from the endorsement conference process where we go before the members and pitch our candidacy, our fundraising, and our path to success. I think most people would agree that it was unethical for him to participate in that process and to then nominate himself.

“Then the most important endorsement group is the Alabama Democratic Conference, which is essentially the Black Caucus. It’s been run in a very unethical manner for a couple of generations, and very credible evidence has been shown that they sell endorsements. The chair of the Black Caucus, after nominating you, calls you or sends you a note and says, hey, we need you to put your fair share into the pot for this nomination or we’re going to rescind it. For the office of Senator, it’s $20,000. For Governor, it’s $35,000.”

Wess got that endorsement, as well as a return on his investment. To those who only follow presidential general elections, it might seem as though endorsements are symbolic but largely inconsequential. After all, Donald Trump won the presidency twice while being overwhelmingly out-endorsed by his opponents among newspapers, celebrities, and political groups. But down-ballot races, especially in primary and midterm elections, are far less sensational affairs than presidential politics. Voters often know very few details about the candidates, and beyond party affiliation or snap judgments based on candidates’ names, the endorsements from prominent local political organizations have a disproportionate impact. The picture Larriett paints is stark.

“I outperformed Wess in the conference’s presentation and in fundraising. I raised $150,000, which is very commendable as a Democrat in our state for the primary — the same amount that Senator Doug Jones [Alabama’s most recent Democratic Senator] raised when he won this very same seat [defeating the infamous Roy Moore in 2017]. My opponent raised $12,000 in total for his entire campaign. And at the time of the endorsement conference, he had raised just $2,500.”1

To put this in perspective, a typical Girl Scout sells 293 packages of cookies at around $6 a box — or about $1,750. Sometimes money in politics isn’t about how much you raise, but who the checks are made out to.

“He purchased this endorsement from the Black Caucus. And in the primary, that is a very significant proportion of votes. Even as another black man myself, and with my connection to the community, I couldn’t get quite to 50 percent [...] That’s frankly why I lost.”

According to Larriett, this kind of quid pro quo endorsement scheme is unlawful, but it’s “selectively reviewed and prosecuted. The bottom line is that everyone is doing it — the Republicans and the Democrats.”

He’s not alone in this view. Tabitha Isner, Vice Chair of the Alabama Democratic Party, has been leading the call for reform. While running for Congress in 2018, Isner also faced demands from the Alabama Democratic Conference to make five-figure payments broken up into $5,000 installments to circumvent federal law. State and local law, however, is another matter.

Isner told me that the Alabama Democratic Conference’s modus operandi “is not being done within the law, within campaign finance rules” and is “hurting the ability for the Alabama Democratic Party to grow.” I asked whether this was a legal loophole being exploited, similar to “dark money” in political action groups. She indicated that it wasn’t a loophole, “It’s just not being enforced.”

“There definitely should be a black political organization in Alabama,” Isner continued, “but it should not be operating outside the law. It should not be trapping candidates in an impossible situation [...] I’d like to see them get their paperwork in order and become a functioning legal organization.”

The reason these kinds of shenanigans are tolerated, Larriett suggested, is that many officials see red-state Dem primaries as meaningless. “What we see with our party is there is kind of this sad, defeatist belief that we can never win the general [election] anyway, so it doesn’t matter per se who wins the primary. It’s really, really sad.”

The problem may be considerably larger than Larriett and Isner believe. This isn’t just an issue for Democrats, for primary elections, or for Alabama politics. Pay-to-play endorsement-selling hearkens back to the blatant campaign corruption rife in 19th- and 20th-century city machine politics, but though practices of this sort have declined over the generations, they’re far from stamped out. Thanks in part to the decline of local journalism, they’re simply flying under the radar. The machine never died.

In Texas, the Harris County GOP passed a resolution in 2014 condemning pay-to-play endorsements within the party. As a local precinct chairman and teacher who led the charge said, “I keep seeing people come in [to polling locations] with these pay-to-play mailers and all the slates [...] They simply vote down the ballot. Whatever [these endorsements] say, they vote that way.” In Collin County in 2022, pay-to-play voting guides recommended the “most conservative” Republican primary candidates who just so happened to purchase ads in the mailer. On the other side of the aisle in 2023, two leaders of the Texas Coalition of Black Democrats – Harris County, a Houston-based political action group, were investigated by the Texas Ethics Commission and fined a total of $45,000 for campaign finance violations. As the Commission stated: “it appears from TCBD-HC’s 2020 endorsement slate and its banking records that TCBD-HC may be ‘selling’ its endorsements in exchange for financial contributions.”

In Marion County, Indiana, inquiries were launched in the 2010s to investigate the process by which judicial candidates were endorsed by their parties after paying five-figure “slating fees” ($12,000 for Republicans, $13,500 for Democrats). As the Indianapolis Business Journal noted in 2016, “People who ran against the party’s endorsed candidates in the primary almost never won.” Similarly, Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County Democratic Committee has been criticized as “undemocratic” for charging city-level candidates in Pittsburgh thousands of dollars just to be considered for an endorsement. In Illinois, the Cook County Democratic Party reportedly endorses candidates if they commit to raising $45,000 for the Party. According to the Chicago-based nonprofit Injustice Watch, in 2024, “The party’s picks all won — most of them by substantial margins.” In California, Alice Huffman, a high-profile campaign consultant as well as the leader of the California NAACP, came under fire in 2020 after news broke that the campaigns that hired her always seemed to earn the NAACP’s seal of approval over their competitors. This is merely a sampling.

“It’s not just the money in politics,” Larriett told me. “It’s these gatekeepers who are self-dealing and enriching themselves, like Joe Reed, who is the Alabama Democratic Conference Chair. We’ve really got to clamp down on that. And we do have laws, but they’ve got to be enforced.”

Larriett’s fight isn’t over. He’s been recruited to pursue a position in the Alabama Democrats’ LGBT caucus, which he’ll vie for in August, and is continuing to fight his suit against the Michigan State Police. He’s hoping that a victory in court could help get more traction behind his Motorist Bill of Rights. The machine may be grinding implacably on, but so is Dakarai Larriett.

See also: “Down the Rabbit Hole of Money in Politics”

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This post is by contributor Alexander von Sternberg.

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“Marx called religion the opium of the people. Whether it wants to or not, the Church consolidates the established injustice. It helps men to support and to forget their ills instead of curing them. Obsessed by the hereafter, the believer is indifferent to temporal things. Marxist ideology, as soon as a State has built it up into an orthodoxy, lays itself open to the same criticism: it also teaches the masses obedience and confirms the authority of the rulers. […] The concept of the classless society is emptied of meaning as the regime born of the Revolution becomes stabilized into an old-fashioned bureaucratic despotism.”
— Raymond Aron

In early 2026, a left-wing convoy of 650 delegates from 120 organizations — including political celebrities like the streamer Hasan Piker, former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, and the Irish rap group Kneecap — descended upon Cuba armed with 20 tons of goods. Perhaps more importantly, they also brought ample video and audio equipment to promote themselves and their noble cause. This ostensibly humanitarian excursion was in response to the Trump administration’s blockade of the communist island nation, and the trip quickly made headlines across the English-speaking world, though not necessarily for the reasons the celebrity activists preferred.

It would be unfair to call the convoy a disaster; indeed, 20 tons of goods were supposedly provided to the Cuban people, who are in genuine need. Whether the influencer-activists were aware that those needs were not being met by the country’s dictatorship long before the Trump administration’s blockade is beside the point, as are the activists’ intentions. It became clear, as footage was beamed back to the United States, that these progressive pilgrims were upholding the time-honored tradition known as “champagne socialism.” A better moniker these days may be “couture communism”, especially when gazing upon the haute couture Piker bore, complete with a $695 button-down from Glass Cyprus and a $1,360 pair of Cartier glasses. Meanwhile, Piker and company stayed in 5-star hotels like the Gran Hotel Bristol Habana Vieja. While there’s nothing wrong with living in luxury when you can afford it, this stands in stark contrast to the lives of everyday Cubans, many of whom make less than $200 a year — the very people with whom Piker and his fellow travelers claimed to be in solidarity.

More to the point, the gathering of self-described Marxists and socialists not only sojourned in tone-deaf luxury, but they did so in the midst of Havana’s widespread power outages and blackouts, from which upscale hotels and tourist attractions were largely shielded.1

It is tempting to simply call out the hypocrisy of this entire affair and call it a day; after all, it’s a common critique of Western socialists, given the amount of energy they expend posturing as tribunes of the working class. But to stop at the hypocrisy is to miss something crucial: contrary to its PR branding, the philosophy that undergirds the Western far left — Marxism — has never been particularly interested in helping the poor or even leveling the playing field. The glorified field trip to Cuba may merely seem out of touch, and it certainly is that, but it also perfectly encapsulates an underappreciated aspect of Marxism. The writer Paul Friesen penned a thorough and deeply researched historical accounting of Marxism, both in theory and practice, that brilliantly summarizes the big-picture view:

“Step back from the individual cases and look at the pattern. Russia, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola — different continents, different cultures, different histories, different levels of industrial development, different national traditions, different leaders with different personalities, and different relationships to the theoretical texts. The same outcome: consolidation of power in a vanguard party, elimination of political pluralism, suppression of independent institutions, secret police, show trials, forced labor, famine as a policy instrument, and a death toll that in aggregate runs to somewhere between eighty and one hundred million human beings in the twentieth century alone.”

Friesen’s comprehensive exploration of communism’s monstrous failures is well worth a read, but there may be an even simpler way to characterize Marxist thought that reflects the realities of both its implementation and the mindset of its adherents. As Friesen explains, in practice, the Marxist fundamentally believes that “The actual proletariat […] cannot be trusted to embody their own historical role without guidance.” This way of thinking is a symptom of crude elitism: the idea that one group is inherently superior to most or all others and is therefore better suited to holding power and the privileges that entails. From its foundational texts to its real-world track record, Marxism has shown itself to be just another aristocratic and elitist project that subjugates the lower classes while merely replacing the old upper classes with newer and smaller ones.

The core argument of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels throughout The Communist Manifesto (1848) is that capitalism contains the seeds of its own (and necessary) destruction. In the preface, Engels summarizes their proposition that “in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange” alone explains “the political and intellectual history of that epoch,” and that “the whole history of mankind […] has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and being exploited, ruling and oppressed classes.” Engels and Marx thus claim that the structure of existing societies is an eternal antagonistic struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This deterministic view of society allows room for further generalizations regarding social classes, which quickly become clear.

For all that they lionize the proletariat, Marx and Engels are careful to delineate what they consider to be the better and worse elements of each class. To these ends, they assert that the lowest level of existing class systems consist of “social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society” who are the “bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” At the same time, they also seem to praise the bourgeois “ideologists” who “comprehend the historical movement as a whole.” According to Marx and Engels, the poorest and least educated people are little more than pawns of the bourgeoisie and cannot be trusted, despite their exploitation. This elitist sentiment bears more than a little resemblance to trends in modern progressive politics. We can see its echoes in the general sneering that many working-class Americans have received and perceived from the Democratic establishment for the past decade, ranging from Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” remark to blaming poor white women for their own problems to outright NIMBYism.

This idea of subversive elements from below had deep roots in Marx’s mind. In his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx bemoaned the lack of true revolutionary verve in the 1848 Revolution in France, and saw it simply as a perpetuation of the bourgeoisie that had already been dominating the country. In his text, he claimed that the insufficiency of the Revolution was thanks to the revolutionary republicans who amounted to class enemies for establishing a system which, “like Achilles, [was] vulnerable in one point — not in the heel, but in the head, or rather in the two heads it wound up with: the Legislative Assembly on the one hand, the President on the other.” To Marx, these revolutionaries were insufficient vessels for the necessary societal change in post-Napoleonic France. Yet while he singled out the elite strata of French society, Marx also presaged his and Engels’s later contempt for the “social scum” of Europe’s poor. Expressing an idea of apartness, Marx wrote of the special knowledge possessed only by those few who truly understood the world, who just so happened to be the same class of bourgeois “ideologists” Marx and Engels valorized and to which they belonged. That apartness absolved the ideologist class of any failures, pinning all blame on subversive elements both above and below. Conspiratorial scapegoating of this kind is, of course, among the bedrocks of elitism.

Indeed, the elitism of Marx and Engels habitually tended toward this circular thinking, creating a Manichean foundation that always necessitated violence. For example, when addressing their critics on the question of private property, they write in the Manifesto, “you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.” The forcible confiscation of property against someone’s will is, in essence, an act of violence, and one that likely results in greater violence and oppression. Marx and Engels understood this. They created a logical structure whereby the eternal enemy — the bourgeoisie — was deemed the only true owner of property. Variations of this concept have filtered down to this very day, usually revolving around the term “landlord.”

The self-imposed convenience of the model is laid bare whenever there is an exception to the rule, such as a member of the working class managing to afford their own rental property, in which case they suddenly — magically — become part of the bourgeoisie. This creates a perpetual enemy in need of destruction. More importantly, this type of thinking denies the messy realities of capitalism, in which individuals do not live as classes but as individuals that often share hardships. Through their collectivist and deterministic lens, Marx and Engels have no patience for human agency, reality be damned.

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The elitist is, above all else, at odds with messy realities; they have no tolerance for the exceptions to their rules, which exist simply to justify their own apartness and specialness. Marxism is one of the purest ideological embodiments of this characteristic — and it goes beyond mere theory, which is, ultimately, subjective. If we examine the various implementations of Marxism in practice, particularly in the Soviet Union and its satellites, it’s clear that the elitism was not due only to Marx’s and Engels’s individual worldviews or choice of phrasing. Elitism was baked into Marxism itself, such that it inevitably bled (figuratively and literally) into nearly every large-scale attempt at practical application, as has been observed by critics both without and within the communist systems of the 20th century.

No one outside the Communist Bloc better understood the nature of communism in practice and the type of person it appealed to than the philosopher and liberal anti-communist Raymond Aron. Aron is a figure many today may be unfamiliar with, but as the cultural critic Clive James explained, his contributions to 20th-century thought “did most to offset the more famous Jean-Paul Sartre’s support for communism” in the French intelligentsia, which served as the intellectual bedrock of the pro-communist West. In 1955, he published L’Opium des intellectuels (The Opium of the Intellectuals), an incisive critique that in a single stroke made both him an enemy of the Marxist intelligentsia and also its most effective critic. A keen observer of revolutionary dynamics, Aron made it clear in Opium that “the Marxist type of revolution has never come about because its very conception was mythical”, given that “proletarian revolutions, like all the revolutions of the past, merely entail the violent replacement of one elite by another.”

Aron also questioned the idea of a uniform “proletariat” to begin with, rightly noting that there was no way an entire class of people would share the same values at all times or neatly align with what Marx and Engels would have seen as proper guidance. There was no evidence, Aron explained, of “the characteristics which make [the proletariat] a unity.” Philosophers such as M. Merleau-Ponty or Jean-Paul Sartre could hope all they wanted for a Marxist awakening, but crucially, “they cannot […] represent as a fact the universality of the industrial worker.”

The fact that Marxism was so insistent on the inevitability of its generalizations led Aron to realize what was really going on: the opportunism of a counter-elite. Refuting the idea that Marxism was “the science of working class misfortune,” Aron noted that “communism merely makes use of this pseudo-science in order to attain its own end, the seizure of power” by enticing those in the working class not through promises of equality, but by bringing down the dominance of the bourgeoisie. Taking the point further, Aron wrote, Marxists “have not the honesty to admit that the proletariat, as it becomes gradually and inevitably more bourgeois, loses the virtues which seemed to make it worthy of this high calling,” referring to the ending of all supposed evils of industrial society. Given the contempt Marxists have for the poor and uneducated — the “social scum” — it should hardly be surprising that their proletarian revolutions invariably take the form of replacing one bourgeoisie with another.

These critiques were not confined to Western or capitalist observers of communism. In fact, they included communism’s participants. The first, loudest, and perhaps most significant to notice the bureaucratization of Soviet communism was Leon Trotsky, though his solution was essentially to birth the meme of “real communism has never been tried” via his call for permanent world revolution. As heroic a figure as Trotsky became to so many socialists, he was ultimately an insufficient critic of Marxist thought put into practice. In contrast stood one of the great democratic socialist dissidents of the 20th century, Yugoslavia’s Milovan Djilas, who served as communist dictator Josip Broz Tito’s President of the Federal People’s Assembly of Yugoslavia before being expelled from the party for his advocacy of freethinking and more democratic forms of governance. His most famous work, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (1957), was published abroad after he had been arrested for speaking out against Yugoslavia’s silence on the brutal Soviet occupation of Hungary in 1956. Thanks to the book’s content and, it should be said, wild success, his prison sentence was extended to 10 years.

Through his experiences as a communist, Djilas wrote that unlike what he saw as more humane and democratic forms of socialism, “power is almost exclusively an end in Communism, because it is both the source and the guarantee of all privileges,” with power determining “the material privileges and ownership of the ruling class over national goods” and “the value of ideas.” In essence, Djilas saw the truth firsthand of what Aron had observed from afar: that communism was not an act of liberation or a purveyor of dignity upon the downtrodden, but the creation of a new ruling class: a new elite. As Djilas explains, communist regimes’ “fundamental distinction lies in the fact that a bureaucracy, organized in a special stratum, rules over the people.” Thus, “in practice, the ownership privilege of the new class manifests itself as an exclusive right, as a party monopoly, for the political bureaucracy to distribute the national income, to set wages, direct economic development, and dispose of nationalized and other property.” Socialist catchphrases and rhetoric about workers and the people, Djilas argued, served to mask this elitist reality of communist states.

Djilas’s critique was different from Trotsky’s, who sincerely believed that, due to the Soviet Union’s transformation into a Stalinist nightmare, true communism had never actually been tried. Contrary to that desperately tired talking point, Djilas recognized that the elitist tendency within communist regimes was baked into Marxist theory itself. As he noted, “every ideology, every opinion, tries to represent itself as the only true and complete one,” a fact especially true of Marxism. Marx and Engels were distinguished, Djilas wrote, by “[denying] every scientific and progressive socialist value in the thinking of their contemporaries, usually lumping such ideas into ‘bourgeois science,’ thus banning every serious discussion and study in advance.” Therefore, “if it was independent of the movement, it was not important.” In other words, there was no room for alternative explanations, interpretations, or even questions. This circular logic is a hallmark of elitist thinking because nothing worthwhile exists outside of itself; it necessitates exclusivity.

Compelling as his observations were, Djilas was by no means the most significant critic of this aspect of Marxism. Some of Marx and Engels’s contemporaries saw the writing on the wall from the very beginning, particularly the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Anticipating Trotsky’s and especially Djilas’s critiques by nearly a century, Bakunin repeatedly warned that “scientific socialism” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would, in practice, mean rule by party intellectuals and administrators rather than self-emancipation by workers (to say nothing of those Marx and Engels termed “social scum”). In his words, it would be “the rule of socialist savants,” in which “the upper layer, the aristocracy of labor” would possess all of the privileges promised to the people by the revolution. Bakunin perceived clearly that Marxism’s insistence on a single official program necessitated centralized authority and that its so-called “scientific” leadership would inevitably lead to a small cadre ruling in the name of the people it claimed to have freed. As Bakunin wrote:

“The differences between revolutionary dictatorship and statism are superficial. Fundamentally they both represent the same principle of minority rule over the majority in the name of the alleged ‘stupidity’ of the latter and the alleged ‘intelligence’ of the former. Therefore they are both equally reactionary since both directly and inevitably must preserve and perpetuate the political and economic privileges of the ruling minority and the political and economic subjugation of the masses of the people.”

Bakunin went on to write:

“There is a flagrant contradiction in this theory. If their state would be really of the people, why eliminate it? And if the State is needed to emancipate the workers, then the workers are not yet free, so why call it a People’s State? […] They insist that only dictatorship (of course their own) can create freedom for the people. We reply that all dictatorship has no objective other than self-perpetuation, and that slavery is all it can generate and instill in the people who suffer it.”

Had he lived another 100 years, Bakunin would likely have been aghast at the human destruction Marxism in practice had wrought, but he would not have been surprised at what he saw. He knew such things would come to pass: elite cadres, acting in the name of an ideal they were no closer to implementing than when they began their rule, instead satisfying themselves with Orwell’s maxim of a boot stamping on a human face forever.

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As of the summer of 2026, Marxism seems to be en vogue again. With the election of Zohran Mamdani at the end of 2025, the surprise victories of Marxist and Marxism-aligned candidates in places like New York City, Los Angeles, and Colorado, and a third of Democrats and Dem-leaning voters self-describing as democratic socialists, Marxism is, once again, having a moment.2

In 2025, the sociologist Tibor Rutar wrote in Quillette that Marxism was an idea that refused to die. When we see through Marxism’s liberationist trappings to perceive the elitist project underneath, it’s not difficult to understand why. Marxism is an ideology born from and perpetuated by segments of the intelligentsia. Theory is generally the province of the affluent and privileged, and those who traffic in ideas are almost never “workers” themselves. Liberation on a Marxist scale is an attractive idea to many bourgeois radicals, and the replacement of one ruling class with another led by themselves and justified by this promise seems all the more attractive because, unlike Trotsky’s mythical “true communism”, it is actually attainable. That promise of liberation is the fuel that can bring thousands, if not millions, willingly along for the ride. But like all utopian promises, it is and always has been an illusion. As Rutar explains, “Marx’s theory of history has proved unfounded and unworkable,” with modern Marxists simply “reframing older [ideas] every time they are empirically falsified by new data — a kind of ideological p-hacking.”

Marxism has an enduring power that cannot be denied, but given its track record, it must be refuted, just as fascism has been. Like all utopian ideologies, Marxism possesses the power to convince many of its promises when in fact it simply enriches very few. “The billionaires” among us may be brought low by an applied Marxist project, but as history has shown, that only results in a new elite class, one whose power rests less on money, but on the ability to crush dissent and weaponize a vast bureaucracy against its ever-expanding list of enemies.

As Clive James noted, “no ideology can tolerate a full historical consciousness.” Despite its baffling endurance, Marxism is no different. Like feudalism, theocracy, and other outdated organizing principles, Marxism rests not only upon the notion that the unwashed masses cannot think and decide for themselves, but also that it is dangerous to let them try. While the historical record provides all the worldly, material evidence necessary to demonstrate Marxism’s repeated and destructive failures, those failures were there from the beginning for anyone to see, in Marx’s and Engels’s own words.

See also: “The Myth of European Progressivism”

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Jamie Paul here. This essay is a guest post by Anwesh Satpathy, but I also wanted to share a recent conversation I had with Sandeep Kaushik and David Hyde on the Blue City Blues podcast, where we discussed my Memory-Hole Archive series. You can listen here.

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In December 2025, a video of a 21-year-old woman named Aanchal Mamidwar marrying the corpse of her boyfriend by applying turmeric in the traditional Indian manner went viral in India. Her lover, Saksham Tate, belonged to the Dalit community — the so-called “untouchable” caste historically placed at the bottom of India’s regimented caste system. Saksham was murdered by Aanchal’s family, who disapproved of her relationship with a lower-caste man. Aanchal, speaking to the Times Of India, defiantly declared, “They killed him brutally, but they lost. My lover won, even in death.”

Such tragic events are not rare in India, where honour killings continue to occur periodically. It is difficult to find exact statistics, but the available data suggests that honour killings seem to be higher in regions where the rate of inter-caste marriage is greater.1 As is too often the case in India, girls and young women are seen as the repository of the family’s “honour.” In rural areas where life is virtually impossible without interactions with fellow villagers, inter-caste marriage can lead to a boycott of the lower-caste family by neighbours, especially when a lower-caste man marries a higher-caste woman. It is for this reason that families often hold public ritual mock-funerals to disown their daughters who married outside the caste against their parents’ wishes.

The brutality but also complexity of the Indian caste system has no true analog in the West, although racial segregation comes closest. It may be for this reason that the caste system is seldom discussed — and almost never accurately — in the Western world. It is simply not possible to grasp caste and its impact on Indian society without first exploring its origins, manifestations, and intricacies.

There is perhaps no social issue whose solutions are as intimately tied to an understanding of its origins as caste. The Indian caste system is a hierarchical system of graded inequality. The Brahmins, or the priestly caste, occupy the top position. They are followed by the Kshatriyas, or royalty and warrior class. The Vaishyas are merchants and at the bottom are the Shudras, or workers, whose prescribed task is to serve the other three castes. Outside of this fourfold system are the Dalits, or the “untouchable” caste, condemned by birth to the menial tasks of sweeping, butchery, manual scavenging, and so forth. They have been referred to as the “untouchables” because a higher-caste person is thought to be defiled simply by touching them. To this day in many parts of India, the upper castes still take a bath for ritual purification after accidentally coming into contact with Dalits. In more extreme cases, Dalits are thrashed for using the same public facilities to bathe as the upper castes.

This raises the question: how do Indians even know other people’s caste? The most reliable way of identifying one’s caste in contemporary contexts is through surnames. However, surnames vary between states. An individual living in the eastern state of Odisha is unlikely to know what surname qualifies as a Brahmin or a Shudra in the western state of Gujarat. Moreover, surnames associated with Brahmins in one region may be associated with Dalits in another. This is the reason why one witnesses the most extreme caste atrocities in tightly-knit rural communities, where one’s caste is unmistakable. Urban areas like Mumbai, on the other hand, partly if not entirely obscure such instant recognition, owing to migrants from all states.

What gives legitimacy to such an inhumane system? The simplest explanation was given by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the economist and lawyer whose name has become synonymous with the Indian Constitution on account of his role as chairman of the drafting committee. Ambedkar, who belonged to the Dalit community, considered Hinduism to be a “veritable chamber of horrors.” The doctrine of karma posits that the suffering one undergoes in their present life is a consequence of the actions of one’s previous life. In other words, one is born a Dalit for the sins of their previous life, while being born into an upper-caste family is seen as a reward for the good deeds of one’s previous life. The caste system can be understood partly as a division of labour, though not one that is born out of choice but forced by circumstances of birth.

Caste, in this sense, Ambedkar contends, is a form of slavery that poses a threat to liberty. A society in which the conduct, livelihood, and moral status of some groups is determined by the dictates of another cannot be said to be a truly free society. Citing the ancient Hindu legal text Manusmriti, Ambedkar argues that the caste system derives its validity from religious scriptures and that the annihilation of caste is not possible without also destroying the sanctity of such religious texts and thus destroying Hinduism itself.

It is important to note that Ambedkar’s call to destroy Hinduism is not a call to eradicate religion. He was not interested in Hindu theology as such except for strictly historical and sociological analysis. The heavy influence of his professor at Columbia University, the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, is palpable in Ambedkar’s discourse. Hinduism, in the Ambedkarite analysis, came to be defined primarily by rules and codes instead of principles, making Hindu society susceptible to practice religion as a matter of obedience and submission rather than through sustained reflection. In Deweyan terms, Hinduism had lost its social efficiency. Ambedkar grants that strands of Hindu theology are not only compatible with liberty but have “greater potentialities for producing social democracy than the idea of fraternity.” Nevertheless, Hinduism as it exists experientially often does not respect the lofty ideals found in the Upanishads but rather the caste structure reminiscent of the Manusmriti.

But the justifications for the caste system do not explain how it has endured well into the 21st century. The persistence of caste is due less to theology and more to societal structure. Caste is a reality not just in Hindu society but in South Asia as a whole. In Pakistan, caste retains its feudal structure and has noticeable overlap with class. The caste pride that many groups flaunt is less reminiscent of any scriptural sanctions as much as it’s shrouded in the language of pride in having “warrior blood”, as is the case with Rajputs across India and Pakistan, or Muslim Sayyids who claim descent from the family of the Prophet. The Scheduled Castes (the constitutional term for Dalits) in Pakistan do not own land for either cultivation or shelter. They are engaged in a vicious and never-ending cycle of debt slavery. Much like their Indian counterparts, castes like the Mochi (traditionally cobblers) and Bhangis (sweepers) are residentially segregated from their upper-caste fellow-Muslim counterparts. The Dalit Hindus of Pakistan, who face both caste-based discrimination by the upper-castes and religious discrimination by the Muslim majority, are often denied access to places like barbershops and restaurants.

Two defining features of the caste system can be gleaned from its manifestation in contemporary South Asia: the prevalence of endogamy (marrying within one’s tribe, or in this case, caste) and the attendant doctrine of purity and pollution. Segregation is rarely defended in any explicit way as a means of preserving scriptural sanctity in modern India; it is instead disguised in the language of cleanliness. In Anand Patwardhan’s masterful 2011 documentary on caste, Jai Bhim Comrade, the upper-caste interviewees are seen justifying segregation on account of the Dalits being so “filthy”, “stinking”, and “dirty” that they are recognisable through smell. As research in social psychology has found, disgust sensitivity forms the basis of much of our cultural and social taboos. Given that these taboos are invoked more through instant intuitions and less through elaborate reasoning, it is not surprising that studies confirm that higher disgust sensitivity makes it easier to dehumanise. The Nazis exploited this trait extensively in their propaganda, depicting Jews as parasites, locusts and worms. It is this instinctual sentiment of disgust that facilitates the upper-caste’s dehumanisation of the Dalits. This is further complicated by the fact that many Dalits are forced into negative stereotypes and condemned to jobs like sweeping simply based on the accident of their birth.

While the practice of untouchability was formally abolished and is heavily penalised by the Indian Constitution, the culture has proven harder to legislate. The most widespread manifestation of caste that transcends the divide between rural and urban areas is endogamy. The breakdown of the strict division of labour in industrialised areas has also helped make caste partially invisible. Still, some progress has been made. Increased mobility between states often means that people don’t know the caste of the individual they interact with. Likewise, affirmative action, known as “reservation” in India, has ensured that Dalits and the Backward Classes are represented in proportion to their population across institutions, including in Parliament, the public sector, and educational institutions.

And yet, endogamy is where the reality of caste becomes salient in even urban areas. Only around 10 percent of marriages in India are inter-caste. The majority of marriages — 90 percent according to some surveys — are “arranged marriages.” It is the family that takes a major role in finding the bride. And a cursory glance at the matrimonial section of major newspapers will show caste as a non-negotiable criterion for most people. “Love marriages” — marriages via the general dating route — are looked down upon. While the Constitution protects individual choice for marriage, the western state of Gujarat (Prime Minister Modi’s home state) has been seriously considering introducing a clause that makes it mandatory for couples seeking marriage to get permission from their parents. This comes on the heels of another state making it mandatory for live-in couples to register their relationship with the authorities, failing which they shall be subject to fine or three months imprisonment.

Taboos on inter-caste relationships are so entrenched that they’re a feature even in same-sex relationships. The gay/bi dating app Grindr, for instance, has profiles explicitly flaunting dominant caste identities like Gujjars and Jats while others mention “no SC/ST and only Brahmins.” Even in non-heterosexual relationships, casteism is shrouded in the language of cleanliness, with stereotypes of Dalits being smelly and dirty.

Despite the preponderance of endogamy, there is considerable debate on its importance in the caste system and whether it is a relatively late addition. Ambedkar explicitly discarded the then-fashionable eugenics theories to instead focus on its social structure. He saw endogamy as a symptom but not the cause. The alternative ideas proposed do not ignore endogamy as much as note it as a recent development. The most prominent voice among these is the historian Nicholas Dirks, who traces caste in its contemporary manifestation to British administrative exercises to categorise social groups, arguing that the British Empire’s seemingly neutral ethnographic census of India calcified previously fluid categories. This was not due to any impulse toward reform. The British were in fact hesitant to take legal measures as a remedy for the social inequalities produced by caste, and often incorporated caste into law to appease high-caste Hindus. This was a way of, in the words of Sir Thomas Munro, “strengthening […] the attachment of the natives to our [British] government by maintaining their ancient institutions and usages.” As the journalist Manoj Mitta points out in his brilliant survey of caste through law, the British reinterpreted medieval laws intended to punish British lower classes to suit the Indian context of lower castes instead. Thus, people were put in stocks as punishment for trivial offences and the severity of their punishment depended not on the nature of their offence but on their caste identity. It was laws like these, some argue, that have restricted mobility between castes while creating frozen categories.

The Marxist historian Irfan Habib, while not disagreeing with Dirks’ thesis, presents caste as a social division of labour that undergoes multiple transformations over time. In Habib’s telling, caste became hardened not merely through Brahminical (i.e. Hindu) norms but also through the development of Buddhism and the advent of Islam. The doctrine of karma acquired a renewed lease through its centrality to the Buddhist faith while Buddhist texts, through their aversion to communities engaged in hunting and butchering animals, denigrated the peasant class. Habib, much like Dirks, does not discard endogamy but also does not emphasise it as a causal factor.

The question of endogamy can be easily settled if one looks at the genetic data. The geneticist David Reich has found that the degree of differentiation between various jatis (subcastes) is three times greater than that of their European counterparts. Reich concludes that Indians faced population bottlenecks around three-to-two thousand years ago, similar to those experienced by Ashkenazi Jews. A population bottleneck happens when a small number of individuals have many offspring and remain isolated from surrounding peoples owing to geographical, environmental, or social factors. This results in the “founder effect”: loss of genetic variation and increased inbreeding. The severity of this can be glimpsed from the fact that population bottlenecks among Baniyas in Uttar Pradesh and Gujjars in Jammu and Kashmir are 10 times higher than that of Ashkenazi Jews. It is difficult to dispute that endogamy has played an enormous role in caste, given the fact that its prevalence has become a major cause of recessive diseases in India.

It’s clear from the available genetic evidence that endogamy in caste is not a recent creation, as Dirks argues. The existence and defining features of caste can be traced back at least two thousand years. Yet, it is indeed the case that the expanding list of Scheduled Castes in India may include castes whose status as Dalits is relatively recent (a few centuries old as opposed to over a thousand years). Nevertheless, endogamy is what sustains caste, which means the annihilation of caste is not possible without a social revolution from below. Only when exogamy becomes the norm will caste distinctions, at long last, begin dissipating to the point of triviality. There has been great progress made in the years since Indian independence, but the dreams of Ambedkar to uproot the caste system as a whole still seem distant.

See also: “The Depopulation Bomb Isn’t Ticking, It’s Overblown”

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This is the eleventh essay of a multi-part series. Read part one here, or see all of the currently published articles here.

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The American left’s shift from liberalism to social justice progressivism over the course of the 2010s manifested in nearly every institutional and cultural overstep of the era. Liberal tolerance became a stifling environment of censoriousness. Liberal pluralism became intersectional racial hierarchies. Liberal arts education gave way to increasingly radical pedagogies. Due process became trial by mob. Liberal gender norms that embraced gender-nonconformity became regressive and rigid gender stereotypes under which the nonconforming were encouraged to change genders altogether. The pursuit of self-expression in the face of authority became a cult of safety enforced by authority. Perhaps more than anything, the period from 2014 to 2023 saw the systematic flattening of the individual into mere identity characteristics and group affiliations, which were elevated above all else. It was this primacy and worship of identity that charted, justified, and gave permission to everything that was carried out in its name.

Central to the attitudes of the era was the paradigm of “lived experience.” The concept, which originated in 19th-century German philosophy and took shape in 20th-century French feminist scholarship, migrated during the early 2010s from academic literature into cultural thought, political discourse, and even policymaking. In its new political orientation, lived experience functioned as a challenge to expert consensus, the scientific method, and inconvenient data, positioning the personal experiences of people — and specifically people from marginalized groups — as holding equal or even more weight than traditionally authoritative sources of information. With populism surging across the political spectrum, the public desire to tear down experts, or elevate everyday people as the true experts, provided a potent wellspring from which cultural leftists drew time and again in service of their identitarian crusades.

Lived experience became the trump card leftists pulled whenever their demands were too unreasonable, the objections too effective, or the data too uncooperative. In the spaces, organizations, and institutions dominated by progressives, claims of lived experience were an unassailable way of knowing. Feelings could override facts, and a ubiquitous refrain from the era was some variation of you don’t get to tell me how I feel. It was a pretty neat deal, used by activists to push for everything from defunding the police to abolishing prisons to paying reparations.

In universities, students cited their lived experience in order to bulldoze speakers, conversations, coursework, or ideas they found discomforting. In a 2018 article in Inside Higher Ed, a pair of Cornell psychologists observed that “Meaningful debate on uncomfortable important topics is replaced by proclamations based on ‘lived experiences’ and ‘emotional knowledge.’ But it is impossible to refute a person’s claim of a lived experience that caused her suffering. If this rubric is how we define permissible speech, very soon nothing worthwhile qualifies. The heckler’s veto reigns supreme.”

Indeed, in the wake of the 2017 riot at Middlebury College that shut down a talk by conservative political scientist Charles Murray and injured a faculty member, 150 students signed an open letter rejecting the notion of open debate and the free exchange of ideas, insisting:

“To state that these protests are the product of mere ‘opinion’ is to dismiss the real, felt experiences of the students who chose to dissent in various forms. We contend that experiences and emotions are valid ways to see the world, and that the hegemony of rational thought-based perspective often found in a university setting limit our collective creativity, health, and potential.”

This ethos made the project of education itself needlessly fraught. As a University of Denver professor noted in 2021, “By citing ‘lived experience’, some students make claims of expertise about their own lives that are not subject to dispute. [...] ‘Lived experience’ can be a claim that what the person is aware of is all there is, with no allowance for the way the narrative may be self-serving or just plain wrong.”

Within academic journals, the fixation with lived experience and identity led to the rise of “positionality statements”, sometimes also called “reflexivity statements” (not to be confused with “diversity statements”), in which authors listed their identity characteristics, privileges, and intersectional credentials — or their “position” with relation to social power dynamics, as defined by the cultural left. As a 2023 article in Perspectives on Psychological Science described, these statements “are meant to address genuine concerns about the limits of knowledge production” and are predicated on the assumption that “reducing bias” in research “hinge[s] on the biographical details of individual scholars.” In the late 2010s and early 2020s, statements of positionality started appearing across the academic landscape, in fields including anthropology, biology, chemistry, engineering, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, public health, social work, and even animal agriculture.

At first glance, such statements might not seem that out of place. After all, conflict of interest disclosures have long been the norm in academic publishing. In practice, however, they became bizarre social justice catechisms that contributed little of relevance or value to the scholarship at hand. Take, for example, this excerpt from the positionality statement of a 2020 article in Physical Review Physics Education Research:

“I identify as a White, cisgender, heterosexual, continuing-generation (CG) man with a color vision deficiency. I was raised in a pair of lower-income households but I now earn an upper-middle class income. I am an assistant professor and director of the LA program at the Hispanic serving institution where the study was performed. My experiences working with marginalized students, particularly those whom I have had the honor to mentor as LAs and as researchers, have motivated my attempts to use my position and privilege to dismantle oppressive power structures.”

It’s worth sampling a few more. From a 2019 article in American Sociological Review:

“Both authors are middle-to upper-middle-class white women — one is a mother, the other is not. A commitment to antiracist, intersectional, and feminist principles guides our research efforts, and we conducted this work with an awareness of the politics, dangers, and limitations of affluent white academics writing about the lives of low-income Black Americans.”

From a 2022 article in the Journal of Social Issues:

“I (first author) was raised as a Muslim immigrant-origin girl in a small Iowa town and constantly aware that my family was ‘different.’ Having been an educator in PK-12 contexts, my goal in studying developmental psychology was to make the process easier for other youth who, like myself, were intersectionally minoritized and privileged because of religious, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and/or other identities or experiences. I was unprepared for the microaggressions embedded in developmental scholarship rooted in non-inclusive modes of knowledge production.”

From a 2022 article in BioScience:

“[Author name] is a disabled (ADHD) cis white queer woman who grew up in a supportive and economically stable household with two university-educated parents.”

From a 2023 article in Paleobiology:

“[Author name] (she/her) is a White, cisgender, heteroromantic woman and professor in the Department of Geoscience at Hobart & William Smith Colleges (HWS). She was a first-generation college student with a learning disability that significantly slows her parsing and processing written language. [...] [Author’s name]’s advocacy for greater inclusion of historically marginalized people in STEMM arises both from her experience as a woman in geology and paleontology and as the mother of two cisgender women who are just beginning to confront the inequities of the world.”

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In some journals, statements of this kind were optional but encouraged. In others, they became a requirement, such as the Adultspan Journal, BMJ Global Health, the Journal of Adolescent Research, the Journal of Advanced Academics, the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, the Journal of STEM Leadership and Broadening Participation, the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, Libraries: Culture, History, and Society, Music Therapy Perspectives, Personality and Social Psychology Review, and Tobacco Control.

Yet for all of the theatrical efforts to sniff out and uproot all forms of bias, conspicuously scarce was any concern over the fact that broad swaths of academia were in effect politically far-left monocultures — a fact that surely contributed more to bias than one’s skin color, gender, or sexuality ever could. Any academics who openly criticized these echo chamber effects could expect to be stonewalled at every turn.

In 2023, a paper titled “In Defense of Merit in Science”, penned by 29 academics including two Nobel laureates, offered a substantive critique on the ways in which academia had become too politicized, identitarian, and hostile to the concept of merit. It was an argument expressing the small-l liberal values and ideals shared by most Americans. Yet within the academy, such views were (and are) considered heterodox, contrarian, outlandish, racist, and reactionary. As such, the paper was rejected by every prestigious journal it was submitted to. As a piece in the New York Times explained, “The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took issue with the word ‘merit’ in the title, writing that ‘the problem is that this concept of merit, as the authors surely know, has been widely and legitimately attacked as hollow.’” An editor from another journal wrote that the manuscript was “downright hurtful.” The paper had to be published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, a legitimate journal that nevertheless serves as a kind of scholarly leper colony where authors can explore ideas, sometimes anonymously, that mainstream academia won’t touch — apparently including a defense of merit.

Like most phenomena that originated in the ivory tower, lived experience soon graduated into the real world. But unlike the abstract and often imaginary “harms” that so animated progressives during these years, the populist anti-intellectualism inherent to the concept of lived experience produced actual, tangible, material harms. This occurred most notably in the considerable inroads it made into public policy and the federal government.

In the early 2020s, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) made significant efforts to integrate lived experience into their work. In particular, from 2021 to 2024, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) actively sought the input, guidance, and participation of people with lived experience related to drug use — a cohort once known as drug addicts or drug users, now identity-rebranded to “people who use drugs” (PWUD). Under the progressive drug policy approach known as “harm reduction”, which essentially concedes rampant drug use as unavoidable and seeks instead to make illicit drug use as safe as possible, SAMHSA welcomed the “expertise” of people with both lived and “living” experience with substance use — a cohort once known as current drug addicts or drug users.

Did these policies help? According to the CDC, between 2021 and 2024, the number of drug overdose deaths declined from 106,699 in 2021 to 79,384 in 2024. Good news, though researchers attribute this trend less to harm reduction policies and more to the declining potency of the fentanyl supply and greater access to medications for opioid use disorder that had already been increasing since the late 2010s. Meanwhile, SAMHSA’s own data showed that illicit drug use rose from 22.2 percent of Americans in 2021 to 25.5 percent in 2024, and drug use disorder rose from 8.7 percent in 2021 to 9.8 percent in 2024. When the expertise of your new drug policy “experts” is in doing drugs, a rise in drug use seems, if not predictable, at least not terribly surprising. Thankfully, the Biden administration resisted the urge to appoint Keith Richards as Drug Czar.

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In all seriousness, lived experience was not wholly without benefit in policymaking. For example, soliciting input from young people with firsthand experience in the child welfare system about how the system could be improved, as HHS’s Child & Family Services Reviews began doing in the early 2020s, has a high plausible upside. Oftentimes, however, people with lived experience were not merely looked to for useful perspectives — they were regarded as subject matter experts on par with actual experts who have devoted their careers to studying and working in their field. Indeed, lived experience was literally transformed into “lived expertise” throughout various sectors of government.

In 2022, New York City Mayor Eric Adams hosted a national convening on the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. The conference assembled a broad range of experts including “people with lived experience” to “discuss strategies for ending hunger, improving nutrition, [and] reducing the prevalence of diet-related diseases.” Evidently, having experienced hunger made one an expert on nutrition. Similarly, the Social Security Administration, in its 2023 Equity Action Plan, commemorated the “milestone” of conducting research in which people with disabilities, referred to as “lived experience experts”, were paid for their participation.

In many cases, government bodies were not using “expert” and “expertise” in a euphemistic way to describe glorified survey respondents or focus groups; these people were being put into positions of consequential authority and responsibility. A 2023 grant application for the Administration on Children, Youth, and Families’ Children’s Bureau required applicants to craft an “equity impact statement” that was “data-driven.” The first example given was “including qualitative input from experts, such as those with lived experience.” The program, the application went on to detail, would be “co-designed and co-led by youth and families with lived expertise.” That same year, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance put out a call for grant application peer reviewers who had “expertise and/or lived experience across a wide range of justice-related and community safety areas [emphasis added].”

Homelessness, too, became a type of expertise. Carrying out President Biden’s February 2023 Executive Order 14091 to further advance racial equity, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) crafted homeless policies “In partnership with Black and Brown people as well as people with lived expertise of homelessness.” As a HUD Notice of Funding Opportunity from that same year declared, without evidence:

“The people who know best what solutions will effectively end homelessness are those who are experiencing homelessness. HUD expects CoCs to include people with lived homeless expertise and experience in their local planning and decision-making process. People with lived experience should determine how local policies may need to be revised and updated [...] including participating in planning and oversight activities, and developing local competition processes.”

This framing appeared over and over in homeless policy documents, including at the state, county, and city levels during these years. Alas, the best efforts of those with lived expertise in homelessness proved unable to reverse the tide of the US homeless crisis, which soared from over 582,000 people in 2022 to more than 771,000 people in 2024. Who could have foreseen this?

Perhaps the most visible facet of the progressive left’s worship of identity and lived experience was its impact on the culture. In the press, the old-school ideals of objectivity and generalism, which entailed that journalists not cover stories they had a personal connection to in order to minimize bias, underwent an evolution during this era. Increasingly, topics related to specific minority communities were covered by journalists from those groups. Part of this shift occurred in direct response to the paroxysms of 2020. Part had already been underway for years, the product of activists, special interests, and other journalists proactively pushing for it. As New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger noted in a somewhat self-serving 2023 piece in the Columbia Journalism Review:

“Journalistic decisions are continually being criticized in public by leaders, activists, journalists, celebrities, and influencers speaking for themselves or, just as often, for a broader community. These communities are often tied to personal identity, whether it’s derived from race, religion, gender, ethnicity, nationality, or partisan affiliation. [...] Sometimes they will assert that their community can only be fairly covered by a member of it.”

By the early 2020s, it had become the de facto norm to see stories about minority communities covered by journalists from those groups. In fact, by mid-decade, resource guides for news managers admonished editors to make sure minority staffers weren’t being completely pigeonholed into covering their own identities:

“Audit assignment patterns for minority staff: Review the last three months of story assignments. Are minority journalists consistently assigned only to community-specific stories [...]? If so, diversify their briefs and create a plan for broader career development.”

I’ve also seen this trend firsthand (dare I say, lived experience?). As a magazine editor, I have been in scores of production meetings and group chats in which my colleagues and I made concerted efforts to find identity-matched writers for articles about specific communities. I have had writers turn down paid commissions to write, citing discomfort about not belonging to the communities they were being asked to cover. Having worked in LGBT media since 2021 as a straight cis man, this has also hit me closer to home. Audiences had so taken these new norms in stride that they seemed to have forgotten that things had ever been different. As a result, most people who have encountered me or my work assume that I am either bisexual, gay, trans, or otherwise queer-identified simply because of the publications I’ve worked for and the subjects I’ve covered. At a certain point, I grew tired of having to correct the record (lest I be accused of a kind of identity-based stolen valor) and penned a rather surreal Queer Majority essay in 2023 essentially coming out as straight.

From the outside, journalism’s shift toward identity-credentialism might initially seem a useful and labor-saving move. For one thing, having journalists cover their own communities can save time and legwork that outsiders would have to spend getting up to speed on a lot of the basics. Having intimate and personal experience of something can also add a layer of depth lacking from a more generalist perspective, and in some cases can catch nuances that might otherwise be lost. These benefits are real, but they came at a steep cost.

The implementation of lived experience into the press’s inner workings correlated perfectly with the rise of activist journalism and the concomitant collapse of public trust in the media — in no small part over widespread concerns of bias. Gallup and the Knight Foundation found in 2020 that fully 83 percent of Americans thought there was “at least a fair amount of bias in news coverage.” In 2022, they found that just 25 percent could agree with the statement “In general, most national news organizations do not intend to mislead, misinform, or persuade the public.” This wasn’t merely a problem of perception. One study analyzing 1.8 million articles from major US press outlets from 2014 to 2022 found that media bias in headlines had grown. Other research found biases in the selection of which stories media organizations chose to cover, and that the press’s use of social justice rhetoric and the various isms and phobias rose sharply during the 2010s and especially after 2015.

This trend was by no means confined to the media. During the second half of the 2010s, left-identitarianism mowed through popular culture and mulched everything in its path, beginning in the young adult fiction (YA) and children’s book publishing industry. In 2015, the YA author Corinne Duyvis coined the hashtag “#OwnVoices” in a tweet designed to help people share recommendations for children’s books about “diverse characters written by authors from that same diverse group.” The hashtag took off and rapidly mutated into a years-long industry-wide witch hunt to police who was allowed to write characters or stories related to particular identity groups. Within the span of a year, #OwnVoices had claimed its first victim: a Mexican-American author. As the novelist and culture writer Kat Rosenfield, who underwent her own YA cancellation ordeal, covered in 2017:

“In August 2016, E.E. Charlton-Trujillo’s When We Was Fierce was yanked from shelves on the eve of its release amid accusations that it stereotyped its black characters; several months later, Harlequin Teen delayed YA fantasy The Continent after author Justina Ireland lambasted the book for employing white-savior tropes.”

In 2017, Kirkus Reviews, which occupies a similar place in the publishing world as the Michelin Guide does for restaurants, gave a glowing review to the YA novel American Heart, including a coveted star rating for exceptional merit. Then the book, along with Kirkus itself, was slammed for its “white savior” narratives (the novel, written by a white author, has a white protagonist who rescues a Middle Eastern Muslim character). Within days, Kirkus revised the review to parrot the online criticism, stripped the book of its star, and affixed a note from the Kirkus editor in chief apologizing to the mob. In other cases, authors caved to public pressure and self-cancelled, such as when Amélie Wen Zhao yanked her 2019 YA book Blood Heir from publication after an outrage campaign over the novel’s problematic depictions of slavery and black characters. Part of the problem, of course, was that Zhao wasn’t black herself.

Like every other “woke” movement of the era, #OwnVoices gleefully cannibalized its own. In 2018, YA author, sensitivity reader, and vocal online enforcer Kosoko Jackson tweeted, “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during horrific and life changing times, like the AIDS EPIDEMIC, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?” A year later, his debut novel, A Place For Wolves, came under fire for being set in war-torn 1990s Kosovo, a setting unrelated to Jackson’s identity as a black American. Hoisted by his own petard, Jackson took it like a man: he pulled the book from publication, vowing to “do better” and prompting his publisher to shred the 55,000 copies already printed.

“When a gay Black man writes about his own experience falling in love, he better choose the right backdrop for it or else — only there is no right backdrop,” one author told Kat Rosenfield in 2019, “They tantalize us with the possibility that if we just do enough research, if we hire enough sensitivity readers, if we go to enough diversity classes, it’ll be enough. But it’ll never be enough.” The game was rigged, and playing it became increasingly invasive and suffocating. As Rosenfield wrote:

“It’s also become the source of awkward and inappropriate conversations between young writers and their editors and agents. ‘I had an agent actually ask whether I had a history of mental illness,’ says another YA author, who recently sold her debut novel to one of the big-five traditional publishers. With #ownvoices extending to everything from medical conditions to sexual orientations, authors describe feeling compelled to either reveal private information in order to assert their right to tell a given story, or abandon the material entirely.

[...]

“Additionally, gatekeepers who consider themselves anti-racist allies can have troubling preconceptions of what marginalized people’s stories should look like, and will pressure writers with different backgrounds to stick with ‘issue books’ centered on oppression or injustice. ‘Issues are important for sure, but damn! Can a bitch be entertained? Can I be Black and be entertained?’ says Francina Simone, a YA author [...]. “Sometimes my Blackness is a struggle, but that doesn’t mean my whole life is. Imprints want those kinds of books, but it’s feeding the crowd who wants…I don’t want to call it trauma porn, but it kind of is.”

Over a period of about seven years, #OwnVoices chewed up the youth literature industry and spit out an unrecognizable self-parody of social justice grotesquery in which manuscripts were well-nigh unpublishable unless they conformed to the movement’s dogmas. By 2022, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center found that 80.5 percent of all newly published YA or children’s books were by and/or about BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color).

This wasn’t only happening in the YA world. In 2020, American Dirt, a New York Times best seller and Oprah’s Book Club selection about a Mexican migrant who flees to the United States, was embroiled in a nationally covered controversy. The novel’s white author, Jeanine Cummins, was pilloried by “Latinx critics” over her lack of lived experience to write such a story. The fury turned vicious and ultimately violent, causing the publisher to cancel the book tour, citing “specific threats to booksellers and the author.” In 2022, the book Bad and Boujee, about black feminism, was pulled from circulation by its publisher after a social media outcry over its author being white.

Hollywood had its own version of #OwnVoices in which the act of performers playing characters different from themselves — a craft once known as acting — was dramatically narrowed in scope to help ensure that actors kept to portraying characters of their own identity group.

In 2015, actress Scarlett Johansson was cast as the lead in the live-action adaptation of the manga/anime series Ghost in the Shell (2017), sparking heavy criticism for “whitewashing” a non-white character.1 A similar furor erupted over the casting of white actor Ed Skrein as a character that was originally Asian in the 2019 Hellboy reboot, causing Skrein to quit the production and perform the requisite obeisance to leftist identity politics. In 2018, Johansson caused an even greater controversy after she was cast to play the trans protagonist in the film Rub and Tug. The backlash grew so vociferous that she withdrew from the project. Johansson had not yet internalized the new definition of acting. When she told an interviewer the following year, “You know, as an actor I should be allowed to play any person, or any tree, or any animal because that is my job and the requirements of my job,” she became a running joke and an object of ridicule among cultural leftists, who saw her as an entitled bigot for believing that actors should be able to play characters who are not facsimiles of themselves.

In several cases, #OwnVoices-inspired hysteria forced LGBT artists out of the closet in ways they didn’t feel comfortable with. The acclaimed YA author Becky Albertalli was subjected to an extended online smear campaign in which she was accused of profiting off of the LGBT community. Albertalli had penned a number of popular novels featuring LGBT characters, including Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015), which was adapted into the film Love, Simon (2018) and the Hulu spinoff series Love, Victor (2020–2022). She had done this all as a presumed straight woman, a well-established no-no among the social justice Red Guard. Only, she wasn’t straight, and came out as bisexual in a 2020 Medium post in which she wrote:

“Let me be perfectly clear: this isn’t how I wanted to come out. This doesn’t feel good or empowering, or even particularly safe. Honestly, I’m doing this because I’ve been scrutinized, subtweeted, mocked, lectured, and invalidated just about every single day for years, and I’m exhausted. And if you think I’m the only closeted or semi-closeted queer author feeling this pressure, you haven’t been paying attention.”

Two years later, actor Kit Connor, whose breakout role playing the bisexual main character in the series Heartstopper (2022–2024) made him an overnight sensation, infuriated his legions of progressive superfans when he avoided discussing his sexuality on a podcast appearance when asked. Then he was filmed holding hands with his female co-star in August 2022, and things went off the rails. Connor found himself in the eye of an outrage hurricane in which countless former fans called him out for “queerbaiting”, trying to dupe people into thinking he was LGBT, and playing an LGBT character while straight. In September, he deleted his Twitter account, only to briefly reactivate it a month later to post, “Back for a minute. I’m bi. Congrats for forcing an 18 year old to out himself. I think some of you missed the point of the show. Bye.” The whole affair became one of the vanishingly rare instances during the years covered in these archives in which the woke mob appeared genuinely contrite and ashamed of their behavior.

The “racial reckoning” of 2020 functioned as a massive accelerant for these trends, sending a shockwave through the voice acting industry in particular. White actor Mike Henry stepped down as the voice of the black Family Guy character Cleveland Brown, stating that “persons of color should play characters of color”, and was recast by a black actor. White actress Kristen Bell apologized for voicing the mixed-race character Molly on the show Central Park, saying “I am so very sorry” and vacating the role so the show could recast a person of color, which it did. Similar stories played out with the animated series Bob’s Burgers, Big Mouth, and the 2023 revival of Futurama.

Most notably, The Simpsons announced in 2020 that they would no longer have white actors voice characters of other racial or ethnic groups, after years of social justice hectoring. This put an end to the 30-year run of white actor Hank Azaria’s roles as Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Carl Carlson, Lou, and the Bumblebee Man, as well as white actor Harry Shearer’s role as Dr. Hibbert. The characters were recast by POC actors, with the exception of Apu, who was instead demoted to a background extra with no speaking parts. Azaria voluntarily stepped down, apologizing for “passing along structural racism.” Shearer, for his part, relinquished his role under protest, saying, “The job of the actor is to play someone who they’re not. That’s the gig. That’s the job description. I’m not a rich nuclear plant owner. I’m not a Bible-believing Christian that lives next to Homer (Simpson) [referring to other characters he voiced]. I’m not any of those people.” As Simpsons creator Matt Groening said in 2018, “People love to pretend they’re offended.”2

Groening was more right than he knew. A 2020 New Yorker piece touched on why black voice actors like Cree Summer or Phil LaMarr voicing non-black characters was not also a problem, arguing, “It would be folly [...] to ask that the categories of creator and creation — cartoonists and actors, writers and characters — align neatly,” as though that sentence did anything to explain the asymmetry.

In their frenzied attempts to signal virtue, destroy rivals, and stay on the right side of history (and the mob), cultural leftists appeared to have spared little thought for the broader implications of their identitarian crusades. The columnist Pamela Paul put it well in a 2022 New York Times op-ed when she wrote:

“Taken to its logical conclusion, the belief that ‘lived experience’ trumps all other considerations would lead to a world in which we would create stories only about people like ourselves, in stories to be illustrated by people who looked like ourselves, to be reviewed and read only by people who resembled ourselves. If we all wrote only from our personal experience, our films, performances and literature would be reduced to memoir and transcription.

“What an impoverished culture that would be.”

Of course, lived experience, like every other tenet of cultural leftism, was an entirely selective affair. One’s lived experience mattered little if they belonged to the wrong group, held the wrong views, or identified as something that was verboten. In a 2012 paper, White Fragility (2018) author Robin DiAngelo almost got it when examining the “problematic” nature of white people’s “personal experience”:

“In our own work examining the dynamics of cross-racial discussions, we have shown how the guideline of ‘personal experience’ can in fact be co-opted by White students. [...] This co-option functions to protect and inoculate White students’ claims from further exploration. Our research illustrates that the ‘speak from personal experience’ guideline rests on two problematic assumptions: first, that only the individual herself has access to her own mind; and second, because she is presumed to have sole access, her experiences cannot be challenged. In this way, claims of experience are closed off from interrogation, for how can one question the ‘personal’ experience of others? Thus, the discourse of personal experience [...] functions to make experience itself a kind of ‘sacred text.’ While the guideline to speak for oneself may be intended to prevent White participants from negating the perspectives of students of Color, in effect, it often protects White perspectives from critical analysis.”

But rather than acknowledging this flaw in the framework of lived experience as fundamental, DiAngelo chose the unprincipled path of cognitive dissonance: embracing lived experience for marginalized groups, and problematizing it for “privileged” groups. Over the course of the decade, left-leaning cultural norms followed suit. Over and over, the message sent loud and clear was that members of privileged groups had had their time in the spotlight and now their duty was to step aside, sit down, and shut up. More than that, privileged groups were told they lacked the moral standing to speak about issues related to race, sexuality, and gender.3

This trend hit LGBT activist circles earlier than most. In his 2022 Queer Majority essay, “My ‘Lived Experience’ With the Cult of ‘Social Justice’”, the author, editor, and longtime bisexual activist and organizer Rio Veradonir recalled the atmosphere at some of the biggest activist events:

“In 2016, I attended an LGBT event in Washington, DC, hosted by the Obama administration as an invited bi activist. I didn’t know what to expect. I was hoping for something productive. What I witnessed was anything but. There was virtually no discussion of policy ideas that might make a real material difference in the lives of bi people. It was nothing but grandstanding. Panelists were competing in the oppression Olympics, obnoxiously vying to portray themselves as both the most virtuous and beleaguered. Every speech began with a recitation of the speaker’s intersecting oppressed identities. The more intersectionality points, the more street cred. Poor chaps who had the misfortune of being born white, male, and/or heterosexual (and who weren’t trans) were admonished to ‘check their privilege’, which meant that their opinions were worthless. The quality of one’s ideas didn’t matter, not that anything concrete was being discussed anyway. Instead, the political strategy amounted to nothing but endless shouting about how American society was irredeemably awful and needed to be torn down.

[...]

“Over the following years, we attended many more progressive conferences, including Netroots Nation (attended every year by Democratic lawmakers). They all had the same toxic culture — and it got worse by the year. Eventually, almost every discussion group, presentation, or speech seemed narrowly focused on this emerging, illiberal ideology. With it came more obnoxious behavior. Attendees who spoke up in defense of traditional liberal values were protested, shouted down, and disinvited. I witnessed outright racism against white people, sexism against men, and cisheterophobia — all coming from the movement that was supposed to be standing for equality and human rights.”4

As social justice activism spread throughout educated progressive circles more broadly, male perspectives became suspect. The mere act of men speaking freely was seen as though every word came at women’s expense and therefore had to be stigmatized and derisively recast as “mansplaining”, “manologues,” “manterrupting”, and “hepeating.” This attitude became especially strident in the discourse surrounding anything related to abortion or sexual misconduct. In 2018, the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh became a referendum over sexual assault allegations dating back to his teenage years, which he and his accuser recalled very differently. Commenting on the controversy, which had become a topic of discussion across society, Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono said, “I just want to say to the men in this country: Just shut up and step up!” Similarly, when guest hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2022, the actress and comedian Chelsea Handler distilled the company line on reproductive rights when she told men to “shut up, do the work for once and don’t open your mouth unless you’re chanting, ‘Her body, her choice,’” to the roar of approving clapter.

White folks were sent the same message. Everyday Feminism’s 2015 “7 Essential Steps to Being a Good Ally” led off with “Check your privilege” and “Listen, AKA, shut up,” while their racial guide for white feminists, published that same year, advised “Shut up, sit down, and listen.” Covering Netflix’s 10-part progressive race polemic Dear White People in 2017, the entertainment outlet The Wrap suggested the ideal mindset for white viewers going in: “All you have to do is shut up and listen.” 2020 headlines in major newspapers read “Stop talking and start listening, white people” and “The best white statement to make right now may be to shut up and listen.” Still, some messaging was more tactful, such as a piece in the lifestyle magazine The Good Trade urging white people to “decenter” themselves in conversations.

A senior at Dickinson College summed up the sentiment of the era, as students often do in their unguarded, blunt way, in a 2019 Dickinsonian op-ed titled “Should White Boys Still Be Allowed to Talk?”

At the same time, white people not speaking was also seen as problematic. In another 2012 paper, Robin DiAngelo argued that white silence often “functions to maintain white power and privilege.” However, she noted, “too much white participation simply reinscribes” “white dominance.” By 2020, white people were being publicly shamed for not speaking up and told that their silence was violence while also being scolded to “pass the mic”, “get in the backseat”, and “shut the fuck up.”

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Whereas the attitudes of white people were often treated as wrong, oppressive, or at least suspect simply because of their whiteness, cultural leftists afforded the opinions of black people the presumption of virtue. But that privilege was subject to revocation. According to the gospel of social justice — which redefined racism to mean “prejudice plus power”, as they defined each — black people may have been categorically precluded from charges of racism, but they could certainly be stripped of their intersectional deference: they simply needed to be conservative.

As the writer and academic Tyler Austin Harper observed in 2023, “Though White liberals generally trip over themselves to defer to the ‘lived experience’ of Black Americans, it often seems that this same courtesy is rarely extended to Black people who understand their own racial experience in ways that don’t accord with progressive pieties.”

This dynamic played out time and time again. The black conservative commentator and 2021 Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder was decried as the “black face of white supremacy” in the pages of the Los Angeles Times. The black neurosurgeon and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson was called “coon of the year” by a tenured University of Pennsylvania professor. Similar racist attacks were hurled at black commentators who ran afoul of cultural leftism including Van Jones, Kmele Foster, and Coleman Hughes. On one level, this was nothing new. Black conservatives such as the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the economist Thomas Sowell, the economist Glenn Loury, or moderates like the linguist John McWhorter had been on the receiving end of slurs and racial calumnies from the left-wing black intelligentsia for decades. By the 2010s, however, these were no longer intra-community squabbles, but widespread and highly visible attacks coming from every direction.

The black Republican Senator Tim Scott, for example, was subjected to years of left-wing derision and racial abuse beginning almost as soon as he entered national politics in 2013. Scott was likened to a right-wing ventriloquist’s dummy by an NAACP leader, called an “Oreo” (black on the outside, white on the inside) by a white Texas Democratic Party county chair, and had his Wikipedia page vandalized to describe him as an “uncle tom [[house negro]] coon.” In 2020, one enraged progressive left Scott a voicemail referring to him as “Uncle Tim” and dubbing him the “lowest piece of shit this country ever produced.” Another threatened to gut him “like a fish”, vowing, “Tim Scott, my crosshairs on my rifle are going to be pointed right at your forehead and blow your black (inaudible) dumbass away.” In 2021, Scott’s GOP rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union, in which he noted, “I get called Uncle Tom, and the N-word by progressives”, prompted “Uncle Tim” to trend across Twitter for hours until the platform stepped in to block it.

White progressives in particular were given a pass to lecture black conservatives on matters of race in ways that would be reputational (and often career) suicide in any other context. When Scott, born and raised in South Carolina, emphasized the social progress in the United States and expressed a message of racial positivity in 2023, The View’s Joy Behar, a white woman with 30 times Scott’s net worth, felt perfectly comfortable proclaiming that Scott “doesn’t get it [racism].”

This incongruity between the left’s stated love of diversity and its demonstrated hatred of the diversity within these “diverse” communities caused some to lament the state of the diversity project as a whole. For what was the point of diversity if not to make the country more left-wing? As the Washington Post columnist and deputy editorial page editor Colbert I. King wrote in 2021, “[Black and female Republicans] are living proof that neither racial nor gender diversity is a guarantor of progressive, inclusive, and broad-minded thinking. Diversity, much in vogue, has its limits.” Or, as the decorated New York Times journalist and racial justice activist Nikole Hannah-Jones put it in a since-deleted 2020 tweet, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black [...] we all know this and should stop pretending that we don’t.” This notion that there was a “correct” way to be black in the world — progressive in politics, Democratic in voting, pessimistic on race relations, exasperated in disposition — permeated every area of left-of-center thought. In one of his most memorable 2020 campaign gaffes, Joe Biden encapsulated this attitude when he told black Americans, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

Indeed, cultural leftists could not reconcile how a growing cohort of non-white voters were being alienated by the normalization and implementation of radical social justice ideas such as dismantling merit-based academic criteria and gifted programs, defunding the police, and an open-door border policy. People of color were supposed to think, act, and vote in a certain way — except many weren’t. They wanted their neighborhoods policed, their children evaluated on grades and test scores rather than skin color, and their country’s border enforced. Were leftists so out of touch? No, it was these minorities who were wrong! Thus, a new explanation emerged: the rise of “multiracial whiteness” and non-white… white supremacy. Evidently, if a person of color wasn’t acting right, they were acting white. Their lived experience wasn’t just disregarded; they were essentially accused of being race traitors and Clayton Bigsbys.

If holding the wrong opinions invalidated one’s lived experience, it was nothing next to claiming a forbidden identity. In June 2015, Rachel Dolezal, the president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, who presented and was widely accepted as a light-skinned black woman, was outed by an Idaho newspaper as being white. The story went stratospheric, sweeping the country and beyond. Dolezal was accused of racism and perpetrating a kind of racial fraud, though she remained adamant that, while she was born white, she “identified as black.” As it happens, she hadn’t merely been posing as a black woman in the workplace; she’d been living as though she were black, publicly and privately, for eight or nine years prior to the scandal. By all appearances, Rachel Dolezal either sincerely believed, or came to believe, that she was, in fact, black. But her adopted racial identity and lived experience protected her no more than a cocktail umbrella before the devastating rockslide of progressive condemnation and ridicule. Within days, Dolezal became an internationally infamous pariah, losing her job, her friends, and her reputation, even changing her name the following year.

Dolezal became the first prominent example of “transracialism” — the notion that someone can have a racial identity different from the one they were born into — but by no means the last. In 2017, a transracial and transgender woman in Florida (sometimes also reported as being a man) calling herself Ja Du made headlines for identifying as Filipino despite being born white, stating that she felt Filipino in her heart: “Whenever I’m around the music, around the food, I feel like I’m in my own skin.” Nevertheless, Du was slammed for enacting “cartoon stereotypes”, accused of “cultural appropriation”, and lambasted by Filipino-Americans.

In 2021, Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan, a human rights lawyer billed as the National Lawyers Guild’s first Latina president in 2015, was revealed to be white. Under heavy criticism, she acknowledged that she is “racially white”, but stood firm that she felt “culturally” Latina: “my cultural identity was formed as a result of my family, both chosen and chosen for me, and that has always been Latinx.” She, too, lost her job. Similarly in 2023, the truth about Raquel Evita Saraswati, the Chief Equity, Inclusion, and Culture Officer at a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, was exposed. Saraswati, who identified as multiethnic despite being, in her mother’s words, “white as the driven snow”, remained resolute about her racial identity, even as she resigned in disgrace.

In some cases, such as Jessica Krug, Satchuel Cole, and CV Vitolo-Haddad (all in 2020), when the truth came out (in Krug’s case, she outed herself before someone else could), these white women confessed to knowingly misrepresenting themselves as people of color. Others were disputed, such as the writer and Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King, who always presented as a biracial black man but was dogged since 2015 by allegations that he is fully white and mocked across the political spectrum as “Talcum X.” Perhaps the most unhinged transracial story involved the internet personality Oli London, who, despite being a white British male, came out as both nonbinary and Korean in June 2021, claiming that he was “born in the wrong body.” London then proceeded to undergo 32 surgeries to look more Korean. So committed to the identity was he that London even discussed plans to have penis reduction surgery in order to, in his mind, be “100 percent Korean.” Needless to say, Koreans were none too pleased, the outrage and backlash flowed freely, and accusations of racism abounded.5

Transracialism became so radioactive on the left that even offering a philosophical defense of it made one a monster. The vehement hostility toward transracialism was born, in no small part, from the contradictions it exposed in social justice ideology. Race, the left had long maintained, is made up — a human-created fiction. And yet the cultural left’s identitarian and often essentialist focus on race portrayed it as perhaps the most important and immutable aspect of a person. The idea that one could change races dragged these two incompatible beliefs inconveniently into the light. Likewise, the fact that transracial people were credibly accused of using POC identities to get ahead and further their careers clashed with the progressive dogma that people of color were an oppressed underclass.

More troubling still, the concept of transracialism raised a deeply uncomfortable comparison with trans issues. If gender and race are both social constructs, identity is deeply personal, and lived experience is supposedly sacrosanct, on what grounds can changing one’s gender be celebrated while changing one’s race be rejected as a fraudulent act of bigotry? There are compelling and well-reasoned arguments for why these concepts are substantively different, but rather than “doing the work”, progressives opted, by and large, to shut down debate and smear anyone who seriously engaged transracialism.6

When the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published “In Defense of Transracialism” in the prestigious feminist journal Hypatia in the spring of 2017, arguing that transgender and transracial people should both be accepted, the uproar was so ferocious that it made national news headlines. Tuvel was hit with a wave of online abuse, condemnations from fellow philosophers, and an open letter with more than 800 signatories that was sent to the Hypatia editor calling for a retraction and alleging grave but unspecified “harms” perpetrated by the paper. Meanwhile, another letter was posted on the journal’s Facebook page, signed by Hypatia’s Board of Associate Editors, denouncing Tuvel’s paper, apologizing for having published it, and suggesting a possible retraction. Commenting on the moral panic surrounding the affair, the philosopher and legal scholar Brian Leiter wrote:

“I confess I’ve never seen anything like this in academic philosophy [...] A tenure-track assistant professor submits her article to a journal, it passes peer review, it is published, others take offense, and the Associate Editors of the journal declare that ‘Clearly, the article should not have been published’ and that the abuse to which the author is being subjected is ‘both predictable and justifiable.’”

Ultimately, Tuvel’s paper — and career — survived, but the ordeal chilled the academic discourse on transracialism ever after.

Lived experience, as a framework for viewing the world and justifying one’s beliefs and actions within it, flourished for self-serving and ideological reasons. But its effects were corrosive not because of who was employing it — lived experience was corrosive to higher education, knowledge production, public policy, political attitudes, and the broader culture because it is a fundamentally unfalsifiable, provincial, impoverished, and, in practice, unprincipled way to view the world. A 2023 article in Our World in Data beautifully articulates the limits of personal experience:

“It’s tempting to believe that we can simply rely on personal experience to develop our understanding of the world. But that’s a mistake. The world is large, and we can experience only very little of it personally. [...] Let’s assume [...] you know 800 people. In a world of 8 billion, this means that you know 0.00001% of the population. A 100,000th of a percent. [...]

“Perhaps you think restricting the people you learn from to the number of people you know by name is too narrow. After all, you also learn from strangers you meet, even if you don’t get to know their names. Let’s assume you are exceptionally good at this, and you have a conversation with three new people every single day of your life. If you can keep this up for 73 years, you will get to know 80,000 people. [...] After a lifetime of speaking with people, you will have spoken to 0.001% of the world’s population. For every person you’ve had a conversation with, there are still 100,000 people you’ve never spoken to.”

The fever pitch of identity worship — its theatrical performativity, vicious outrage campaigns, and embarrassing anti-intellectualism — became less shrill after the era of cultural progressivism waned, but significant portions of the trends and patterns documented above have quietly calcified into a new normal. And normalizing abject identitarianism on the left has also given the political right permission to indulge in the ugliest forms of their own identity politics. Moreover, as we’ll see, the logic of identity worship could not be contained even within the left.

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I was recently on the Agree to Disagree About Gender podcast to discuss what has gone wrong with trans activism and how to push for trans rights and acceptance without abandoning liberal values. You can watch here or listen here or here.

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In his 2008 stand-up special Why Do I Do This?, Bill Burr’s hilarious routine about population management laments the spawning of so many useless people clogging up the highways, getting in the way, and polluting the planet. Looking at old folks’ large family photos, he quips, “Yeah, and none of you did shit. I don’t recognize anyone in that photo. You just made 30 people who are all taking a shit every day that ends up in a river. That’s not a photo — it’s an environmental disaster, and you framed it!” His tongue-in-cheek solution? Make having babies illegal to get the population down to his ideal size: 30,000 people (that way everyone can attend the Super Bowl in person). “Out of all the bullshit I’m talkin’ up here, I think I’m onto something with this, you know? It’s like, I’m eliminating people but no one has to die.”

Burr’s colorful ramblings were intended as comedy, but the subject matter is no joke. What he stumbled onto was a philosophical school of thought known as anti-natalism — the position that procreation is unethical. Just two years prior, the philosopher David Benatar published the influential and extremely provocative anti-natalist treatise, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (2006), which remains the seminal text on the matter two decades later.

Benatar’s thesis stakes out the most hard-line version of anti-natalism, arguing not only that procreation is immoral, but that existence itself is a harm and that it would therefore be better if no humans (or any sentient life) existed at all. Most people will find this idea absurd or even monstrous on its face and simply dismiss it out of hand. To be sure, the notion that existence is a harm and that the only way to save the world is to end it does sound an awful lot like the sort of thing you’d hear from a deranged supervillain or an apocalyptic artificial intelligence. But a line of reasoning cannot be discarded just because we find its conclusions uncomfortable. Benatar’s arguments deserve a fair hearing, and have been taken seriously in many quarters. So, is coming into existence a harm? And if it is, are we wrong to bring new lives into the world?

Of course, there are scenarios in which most reasonable people would agree that bringing a new life into the world is unethical. For instance, if that life is the product of incest, or has been determined to have a severe medical condition that would cause immense suffering and death shortly after birth. All but the most uncompromising religious zealots will concede that in certain circumstances, bringing to term or even conceiving a new life can be immoral. If both parents know they are carriers for a recessive disease that has a high likelihood of passing to their offspring and leading to agonizing pain and early death, choosing to conceive — or neglecting to use birth control — seems reckless at best and grotesque at worst. This is an important baseline to establish: most people agree that coming into existence can be a harm, at least sometimes. Benatar’s argument — that coming into existence is always a harm — may seem different in kind, but it is in fact different in degree: perhaps the most glaring difference in degree in all of moral philosophy.

Benatar’s thesis follows from his premise, which he calls “the asymmetry of pain and pleasure”, and has since come to be known as “Benatar’s asymmetry argument.” It goes as follows:

1. The presence of pain is bad.

2. The presence of pleasure is good.

However,

3. The absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone,

4. Whereas the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation.1

This premise, Benatar notes, leverages widely shared human intuitions implicitly evident in attitudes toward procreation, happiness, suffering, regret, and obligation. For example, suppose someone has two dogs, a male and a female, but cannot afford to care for any more animals. If they have their dogs spayed/neutered to prevent the suffering of puppies likely to be neglected, we recognize that this outcome (the absence of suffering) is good even if those puppies never come into existence to experience it. On the flip side, we recognize that never playing with your dog is bad only if you actually have a dog — not playing with a nonexistent dog you don’t have cannot be bad.

Benatar extrapolates from this asymmetry argument that the absence of suffering is so much more morally salient than the absence of pleasure, joy, and flourishing that no amount of positive experiences could ever outweigh the smallest of harms. After all, if a given individual never comes into existence, all of the joys they never experienced would be irrelevant, but the pain they would avoid would be a moral good. As Benatar puts it:

“One of the implications of my argument is that a life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad — a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pin-prick — is worse than no life at all.”

In other words, unless one can be assured with certainty that a given life will be absolutely free from any trace of suffering — a virtual impossibility — coming into existence is a harm in itself. Thus, it would be better not only if no one procreated, but if no one had ever been born in the first place. This is the crux of Benatar’s anti-natalist argument.2 Better Never to Have Been goes on from there to explore the feasibility and desirability of banning procreation, enacting “pro-death” abortion policies, and the prospect of a deliberate “phased extinction” of humanity, though he is under no illusions that such ideas will ever be broadly popular.3

Benatar’s conclusion logically follows from his premise, and yet the primary objection (beyond a simple moral disgust response) makes itself. Since the dawn of modern humans, an estimated 117 billion people have been born. All available evidence indicates that the overwhelming majority of these people have regarded their lives as worth living and as worth having been brought into existence. Surely this is a counterpoint worth seriously considering? Apparently not. Benatar ascribes these attitudes to mere optimism bias, artifacts of evolution, and “mass self-deception.” “Armed with a strong argument for the harmfulness of slavery,” he writes, “we would not take slaves’ endorsement of their enslavement as a justification for their enslavement, particularly if we could point to some rationally questionable psychological phenomenon that explained the slaves’ contentment.”

On more than one occasion, Benatar reiterates that just because an argument has a seemingly ugly or mind-boggling conclusion does not make the argument wrong. He rightly points out that many ideas now taken as self-evident truths were once widely seen as counterintuitive or even offensive and that his thesis cannot be dismissed on those grounds alone and should be evaluated on its merits. In this, as in much else, Benatar is technically correct. At the same time, it’s not every day that a serious person, or at least a person with a pretty good case to be considered one, lays out a formal argument in book length for why it would be morally better if the universe were devoid of all complex life. When it comes to the sorts of ideas people will be least able to give a fair hearing to, the notion that they themselves and indeed their children should never have been born is hard to top. Asking even a philosophically minded “high-decoupling” reader, much less the general public, to sincerely consider whether it would be better had they and everyone they’ve ever cared about never existed, really is asking quite a lot. Benatar’s maximally anti-natalist thesis occupies such an outer limit of moral reasoning that no one could or should be begrudged for finding it too preposterous or unthinkable to engage with.

Benatar is not unaware of this. He preempts the charge that his argument is a reductio ad absurdum of asymmetry, noting that the logic is valid and generally accepted in most other cases (you know, when people’s extinction isn’t being argued for). He also notes that few would be prepared to accept the logical conclusion of his asymmetry argument being false — that if existence is not a harm but an inherent good, we should therefore singularly dedicate all human effort to maximum procreation. But the unspoken premise that Benatar treats as self-evident — and that very much remains to be demonstrated — is that the fate of everyone in the universe should hinge on a simple syllogism. He also appears to accept as self-evident the notion that logical arguments must or should be taken to the absolute limits of their applicability and then be accepted as binding. This is a stiflingly rigid and autistic approach to logic, which exists as a tool to help make sense of the world but can and often does go off the rails at a certain level of hypothetical application. Exploring those extremes through thought experiments is a useful exercise. But accepting all of their implications as fully prescriptive rather than accepting the limitations of logic to weave together a grand unified moral theory of everything is the kind of mistake that ill-fated thinking machines make in science fiction doomsday stories.

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More fatally, Benatar’s thesis endeavors to bloodlessly sidestep human emotion, intuition, and irrationality, yet the asymmetry principle he grounds his argument in is itself based on flawed human intuitions which he treats as an almost mathematical truth that can be cleanly extrapolated outward. On the one hand, we are told that human extinction can be justified as a positive moral good because it follows logically from the fact that humans intuitively regard the absence of pain, regardless of existence, as more morally salient than the absence of pleasure — and yet on the other hand, the human intuition that our lives and the lives of our children are worth bringing into existence is hand-waved away as emotional bias. Benatar makes no move to dissect or pick apart the reasons why the intuitions behind his asymmetry argument could be artifacts of evolved risk aversion, conventions of linguistic habit, or context-dependent quirks of our primate psychology. One intuition is meaningless, the other is gospel. This is not a reasonable basis on which to call for the end of humanity.

Better Never to Have Been also discounts the role that the mind plays in suffering: how oftentimes suffering results not from circumstances that are objectively harmful, but ones which become interpreted as such because of the stories we tell ourselves. In this, Benatar’s thesis reveals itself, as is common in Western philosophical thought, to be ignorant of Eastern philosophy — which is acutely concerned with the suffering of existence — and the wisdom it has to offer. Likewise, from the inception of the cosmos, nonexistence has been the default state (or non-state). None of us existed for the long eons prior to our conception. The opportunity to come into existence, for a time, brings with it the certainty of some amount of suffering, but that suffering can be inextricably bound to one’s sense of worth, accomplishment, satisfaction, and meaning. Our joys can seem all the sweeter because of the struggle it took to achieve them. That hypothetical single pinprick of pain that Benatar argues renders a life not worth bringing into existence might be the culmination of an intensely meaningful rite of passage, without which an individual may indeed find their life bereft of meaning, perhaps even to the point of wanting to end it.

Though his core argument is flawed, Benatar raises a number of strong ancillary points. It is uncontroversial and entirely defensible to contend, for instance, that bringing new lives into existence is not an automatic and unqualified good, and that we should not devote ourselves to pumping out the most possible lives like an assembly line, as the people from Bill Burr’s population bit. We can see a prime example of this with animal agriculture and factory farming. Whatever else can be said of bringing billions of lives into existence only to be confined in appalling conditions, subjected to all manner of torture and abuse, and then ultimately killed, often very painfully, for our own use — there is no morally defensible argument that this industrial-scale slaughter is good for the animals involved or makes their lives worth living. They would, in fact, be better off never existing.

Similarly, Benatar’s argument that procreation is a fundamentally selfish act and that “there can never be a moral reason to have a child — or, at least, no all-things-considered moral reason” is compelling. Being a good or even halfway decent parent requires tremendous sacrifice and selflessness, a fact that tends to be retroactively applied to the decision to conceive itself, though this is irrational post-hoc justification (and often gets inverted, as when childless people are thought to be selfish). People decide to have children, when indeed they actually decide, because they want children. The motivation behind those wants could be multifactorial, involving biological instincts, love of one’s partner, social or cultural pressures, the desire to continue one’s lineage, pass on one’s legacy, experience parenthood, and so on. I part ways with Benatar in seeing something wrong with that, but it is perfectly valid to note that such decisions cannot possibly be motivated purely or even primarily by an altruistic or loving concern for a person one does not yet know and who does not even exist.

Better Never to Have Been can, at times, veer into rather dry philosophical minutiae of little interest to non-philosophers (which Benatar suggests some readers may want to skip over), but the majority of its pages will provoke some combination of reflection, fascination, and disconcertion, depending on one’s own psychological makeup. There is a reason why this short book from a previously little-known academic has made waves in philosophical circles for two decades. There is genuine value in having thinkers willing to explore the extremities of human thought, to stress test ideas and take them to — or past — their breaking point, and to step outside the Overton window and force confrontations with premises and conclusions that would otherwise go unquestioned.

It is a good thing to have cogent reasons for why we believe what we do. But sometimes those beliefs are so ingrained, foundational, and axiomatic that we are bewildered when we see them challenged. In so doing, however, we come out the other side tempered with a stronger understanding of ourselves. The true worth of Better Never to Have Been doesn’t hinge on whether the book’s central argument is correct, but in the ways in which it makes us grapple with our most bedrock assumptions about life. For that reason, we should all be thankful that David Benatar came into existence.

See also: “The Depopulation Bomb Isn’t Ticking, It’s Overblown”

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Jamie Paul is a writer based in Greater Philadelphia, founder of American Dreaming, contributing editor at Bi.org, and former managing editor at Queer Majority. His work has appeared in outlets including Quillette, Persuasion, Areo Magazine, and Gazeta do Povo.

Subscribe now and never miss a new post. You can also support the work on Patreon. Please consider sharing this article on your social networks, and hit the like button so more people can discover it. You can reach me at @AmericnDreaming on Twitter, @jamie-paul.bsky.social on Bluesky, or at AmericanDreaming08@Gmail.com.

Intro music: “Americana” by HoliznaCC0, CC0 1.0. Outro music: “Never-Ending To-Do List” by HappyWorldWithMochi, CC BY 4.0. Both from Free Music Archive.

The Vegas Golden Knights are the most successful ice hockey team in NHL history, relative to their short existence. In the nine seasons since the Golden Knights were founded as an expansion team in 2017, the club has qualified for the playoffs eight times, reached the conference finals four times, the Stanley Cup Finals three times, and won the Stanley Cup in 2023, just six seasons after entering the league. Now the upstart “misfits” of the Nevada desert are headed to the Finals once again after completing a stunning sweep of the heavily favored and top-ranked Colorado Avalanche. The National Hockey League couldn’t ask for a more picture-perfect expansion success story. But outside of Greater Las Vegas, few seem to be celebrating. In fact, much of the hockey world seems downright pissed off.

In May, the fantasy sports company RotoWire conducted a study of hockey fanbases across the US and found that the Golden Knights were the most hated hockey team in America. Some of this comes down to simple envy, but that’s not the only reason. There’s also the club’s infamously rule-bending and cutthroat pursuit of winning at all costs, even if it means engaging in unscrupulous business practices or treading over the norm of Canadian courtesy that suffuses the sport’s culture. Yet these have been features of the Golden Knights’ modus operandi since their inception, and the team has only now become the foremost villains of the hockey world. The difference lies in who the VGK have playing between the pipes. Goaltender Carter Hart’s outstanding playoff run has carried the Golden Knights to their third Stanley Cup Final, but his role in one of Canada’s most high-profile sexual assault trials has made him, in the eyes of many hockey fans, a monster. The fact that he was acquitted, and that the evidence uncovered during the trial supports that verdict, hasn’t stemmed the tide of vitriol. If anything, it’s only gotten worse.

Across every hockey-related section of social media, the Hart discourse is overwhelmingly scathing, defamatory, and toxic. It is an ecosystem awash in an ocean of posts calling Carter Hart a “sexual predator”, a “sex pest”, a “rapist”, and a “literal rapist” who “should be in jail”, among other epithets. Others have extended their hatred outward, posting that anyone willing to defend Hart is an “incel chud”, who “hates women”, is “cool with rape”, and deserves to be gang raped. The independent journalist Rachel Gilmore went further to include all Golden Knights fans, writing, “If you’re cheering for a team that signed Carter Hart, you’re a fucking loser anyway.” This is just a small sampling of what 10 minutes spent on a single social media platform turns up.

To understand the Carter Hart saga, we need to begin in 2018.

It happened after the 2018 World Junior Ice Hockey Championships, the highest level of competition among elite 16-to-20-year-old prospects. In Canada, this tournament receives enormous attention, the equivalent of Division I NCAA football in the US. Carter Hart, then a 19-year-old second-round draft pick of the Philadelphia Flyers, backstopped Team Canada to a gold medal victory. Following a gala hosted by Hockey Canada in London, Ontario that June and attended by the Canadian junior team, one of the players, Michael McLeod, had drinks at a nearby bar with a young woman identified only as “E.M.” due to Canadian privacy laws. The two returned to his hotel room and had consensual sex. That much is agreed upon by all parties. Then a number of other Team Canada players were invited in for group sex, with eight or more men being in the room at various points, one of whom was Hart. E.M. claimed this was all non-consensual. The men claimed it was consensual.

Five players were ultimately brought up on charges of sexual assault in early 2024: Michael McLeod, Dillon Dubé, Alex Formenton, Cal Foote, and Carter Hart. All five were playing professional hockey, four in the NHL (including Hart, who was the starting goaltender for the Philadelphia Flyers), when they were indefinitely suspended from playing and required to take leaves of absence.

The trial, which took place from April to July of 2025, became a media circus — and also a procedural one. With five defendants, each with their own legal defense teams, the proceedings were always going to take a while. The case was further delayed by two separate juries being discharged. Just two days into the trial, the jury was dismissed after an interaction between one of the defense attorneys and a juror during a lunch break. Three weeks later, the replacement jury was discharged after the judge was sent a note from a female juror complaining that two lawyers representing Formenton appeared to be whispering to one another and laughing each day as the jury entered the courtroom, “as if they are discussing our [jurors’] appearance”, which the note described as “unprofessional and unacceptable.” Justice Maria Carroccia determined that the jury could not be impartial and decided that she would preside over the remainder of the trial without a jury and deliver the ruling herself. If that weren’t enough, the courtroom experienced frequent technical difficulties.

Despite its hitches, however, a great deal of clarity and light has been shed on what happened that night through various investigations, pretrial disclosure (akin to discovery in US courts), and trial cross-examination.

E.M. claimed that the amount of alcohol she had consumed at the bar prior to leaving with McLeod had made her too drunk to consent to group sex, though she agreed that she was somehow able to and did consent to sex with McLeod. But in a statement to London police in 2018, E.M. said she’d only purchased a couple drinks for herself, and security footage from the bar did not corroborate her claim that players were buying her drinks throughout the evening. A London police detective who reviewed the security footage also said she did not appear to be very inebriated. During cross-examination, the defense brought in glasses from the same bar and demonstrated that E.M.’s account of how much she drank was not physically possible, causing her to revise her recollection to reflect only having drunk half as much as she initially claimed.

E.M. also claimed that the other players who were brought in for group sex were not invited by her or with her consent, and that the group sex that followed was non-consensual. This was disputed by multiple lines of evidence. First, eyewitnesses who were in the room for a time but did not engage in sexual activity testified that it was E.M. who wanted the group sex, and that she aggressively instigated the activities, masturbating in front of the men, demanding they have sex with her, and amid their hesitation, calling them “pussies.”

Then there were the consent videos — plural. These were, after all, college-aged Canadians in 2018. As the CBC reported:

“In the first video, a voice off-camera asks whether E.M. is ‘OK with this.’ She smiles and says: ‘I’m OK with this.’

The second video was taken an hour after the first.

‘Are you recording me? OK, good, it was all consensual,’ E.M. says, holding a hotel towel in front of her naked body. ‘You are so paranoid, holy. I enjoyed it. It was fine. It was all consensual. I am so sober, that’s why I can’t do this right now.’”

At one point, she was being spanked and asked the men to stop, which they did. That was the only time E.M. had asked for anything to stop. Carter Hart’s role in the night’s events was asking E.M. for oral sex and receiving it.

E.M.’s story changed both over the years and also during the course of the trial. In 2018, she did not want to press charges. It was her mother who filed the first complaint with the London police, triggering an investigation that concluded in 2019 with no charges. Direct message screenshots from that time showed E.M. apologizing to McLeod for her mother making a big deal and saying that it was all a “misunderstanding.” Later, E.M.’s. view of that night changed, and the investigation was reopened in 2022, leading to formal charges and the trial.

The verdict that came in — acquitting all defendants of all charges — was the only legally justifiable judgment based on the facts of the case. As I posted on July 24, 2025, shortly after the news broke: “No one who actually read the testimony and evidence should find this surprising.”

In her 91-page verdict, Justice Maria Carroccia expounded on her ruling, stating that “In this case, I have found actual consent not vitiated by fear. I do not find the evidence of E.M. to be either credible or reliable.” She continued, “On several occasions the complainant referred to her evidence as ‘her truth’ rather than ‘the truth’, which seemingly blurs the line between what she believes to be true and what is objectively true.”

Carroccia went on to write:

“The complainant also gave a vague answer when it was suggested to her in cross-examination that it was easier for her to deny the deliberate choices she made on June 18 and 19, 2018, than to acknowledge the shame, guilt, and embarrassment about those choices. She did not deny the suggestion, she said: ‘I don’t know. I’m kind of struggling to understand that’ and went on to explain that she blames herself and that other people should be held accountable, but it was ‘a combination of things.’”

Carroccia also pushed back on the illiberal political climate surrounding the case:

“Although the slogan, ‘Believe the victim,’ has become popularized as of late, it has no place in a criminal trial. To approach a trial with the assumption that the complainant is telling the truth is the equivalent of imposing a presumption of guilt on the person accused of sexual assault and then placing the burden on him to prove his innocence. That is antithetical to the fundamental principles of justice enshrined in our constitution and the values underlying our free and democratic society.”

So what actually happened that night? Literary scholar Marilyn Simon provided perhaps the most incisive summary in her perceptive July 2025 essay exploring the psychological aspects of the case:

“I find the defendants’ account of E.M.’s behavior that night eminently believable. The hockey players and E.M. herself both described the ‘porn-star personality’ she adopted throughout the night, and she behaved exactly as someone enacting her own porn-star fantasy would behave. But her retrospective confusion and humiliation also strike me as authentic. It may be that she encouraged and wanted wild sex on one level but felt ashamed of her desires on another; that she wanted and didn’t want dangerous sex; that she wanted and didn’t want an exciting night; that she wanted and didn’t want to push her limits. I am sympathetic to this confusion, even though I reject entirely her attempt to make five young men pay for her own poor judgement.”

After investigations by the police (twice), Hockey Canada, the NHL, and a criminal trial (which the Crown has elected not to appeal), the accused men were exonerated and allowed to play again. This shifted the focus from the defendants as a group to Carter Hart in particular, as far and away the best player of the bunch, and thus the most likely to make a return to the National Hockey League. He was also the only defendant to testify during the trial. Hart’s contract in Philadelphia, having expired during his leave of absence, left him a free agent who signed with the Vegas Golden Knights in the fall of 2025. After shaking off a lot of rust and battling through an injury, Hart, now 27, is playing like the franchise goaltender he showed promise of becoming in his first few years.

But while he’s allowed to play, and seems by all accounts to be embraced by his teammates and coaches in Vegas, the hockey world and members of the press, who appear not to share Justice Maria Carroccia’s liberal ideals and respect for evidence, have made their displeasure abundantly known.

One frequently encountered sentiment, often heard from men in hockey spaces who are not full-blown male feminists but still endeavor to be seen as “one of the good ones”, is an attempt to split the baby by saying that Hart and his teammates in that hotel room were creeps but not actual rapists — immoral, but not criminal. This, too, deserves pushback. There is nothing wrong with having a consensual one-night stand. There is nothing wrong with having consensual group sex. There is nothing wrong with asking a woman for oral sex and then receiving it. Maybe that’s not your cup of tea, and that’s fine. But one’s distaste for a sex act — again, between consenting adults — does not render it criminal, professionally excommunicable, or even immoral. Based on the facts as laid out in the trial, not only isn’t Carter Hart a rapist or sexual assailant — he did nothing wrong. One can say that he committed an error in judgement. As a soon-to-be professional hockey player at the highest level, it doesn’t take a genius to know that orgies are the sorts of things that can easily become a PR nightmare if details get out. But nothing about this case suggests a lapse in moral judgement.

It has become a cultural victim-blaming trope emblematic of neanderthal misogynists to dismiss incidents of sexual assault by claiming that the woman “was asking for it”, and for good reason. But what happens when events actually unfold in this manner? What happens when the woman in question literally asks for and even demands sex, going so far as to roar emasculating invective at her male partners for showing hesitation? What happens when she gives convincing consent in not one but two videos? Does the woman’s post-coital or morning-after regret retroactively transform the night’s festivities from a “wild” but consensual evening into a horrifying gang rape that all males involved must be imprisoned for? As Simon wrote, “If consent can, as the prosecution contended, be ‘withdrawn at any time,’ does that ‘anytime’ include seven years after the fact?” Modern mainstream feminism — which has become less a cogent political philosophy these days and more a sociocultural labor union that unconditionally advocates for the female side of every gendered issue — unsurprisingly says yes, but its representatives in the Hart discourse can offer no compelling reasons why. What’s more, it appears that many, if not most, are unfamiliar with the facts uncovered in the trial.

The closest thing to an argument one finds for why Carter Hart is indeed a rapist is the mantra that “being found ‘not guilty’ doesn’t equal ‘innocent.’” This is one of those inane and endlessly repeated statements on par with declarations that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. But “not guilty ≠ innocent” isn’t just a stupid person’s idea of a smart thing to say; it betrays a deeply illiberal attitude toward civil liberties and due process that anyone who values a free society should find troubling. The line of reasoning that this refrain and its underlying belief are expressing is that for a certain type of person to be accused of a certain type of crime, the allegation itself is proof of guilt, and no evidence, counter-evidence, defense, or legal adjudication can override that. The sense one gets from observing these attitudes in the wild is that such people apparently see little use for courts or liberal justice systems at all. Rather, they would seem to prefer a society in which any man accused of sexual assault was thereupon swiftly taken out back behind City Hall to receive an unceremonious penectomy administered with a shotgun.

These are, not coincidentally, often the same people eager to lecture us on the virtues of rehabilitation and leniency when it comes to murderers — especially those from marginalized communities. But alas, Carter Hart, whose name and face seem lifted straight out of central casting for “a spoiled, college-movie antagonist who says ‘My father will hear about this!’”, has no melanin forcefield to protect him. All he has are the facts. Those are usually enough, with the aid of competent defense attorneys, to win the day in a court of law. But the court of public opinion has no use for facts, especially when they’re politically inconvenient. Carter Hart may never be able to silence his critics, but he can keep winning.

See also: “Memory-Hole Archive: MeToo and Feminist Culture Wars”

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Subscribe now and never miss a new post. You can also support the work on Patreon. Please consider sharing this article on your social networks, and hit the like button so more people can discover it. You can reach me at @AmericnDreaming on Twitter, @jamie-paul.bsky.social on Bluesky, or at AmericanDreaming08@Gmail.com. Cover imaged edited by ChatGPT and American Dreaming.

This post is by contributor Jacob Bielecki.

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The recent Supreme Court decision Louisiana v. Callais ruled that a Louisiana congressional map updated to include two majority-black voting districts was unconstitutional after a legal challenge from self-described “non-African-American” voters. The lawsuit claimed that the map was an example of racial gerrymandering despite the fact that black people comprise 30 percent of Louisiana’s population and the previous congressional map contained only one majority-black district out of the state’s six — a nearly twofold underrepresentation. While the Court’s Republican majority did not gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent said the Court’s majority opinion rendered it “all but a dead letter.” The Louisiana legislature is now redrawing a map that will once again leave the state’s black voters with just one majority district and give Republicans another seat in the House of Representatives.

This is merely the latest salvo in Republicans’ systematic attack on civil rights, and one that sets a troubling precedent other states may follow. The South’s GOP strongholds are continuing an old legacy, one that has wavered on occasion but never truly died. It’s the legacy of “The Great White Chief” James K. Vardaman, the early-20th-century Governor and later Senator from Mississippi. In the post-Reconstruction era, Vardaman and white southerners implemented a white supremacist regime of disenfranchisement and terror. Now, sixty years later, this regime is making its return.

The story of America’s most odious Senator begins in Edna, Texas on July 26, 1861, where James Kimble Vardaman was born under the stars and bars of the Confederacy to Mollie Fox and William Sylvester Vardaman.1 William had moved his family to Texas in 1858 and bought a plantation; however the amount of money he had to borrow left him too heavily in debt to purchase the necessary number of slaves to work the land. When Texas seceded from the Union in 1861, William Sylvester Vardaman joined the Confederate Army and served under General Lawrence Sullivan Ross, a former Texas ranger who would serve as the 19th Governor of Texas from 1887-1891 and as the fourth President of Texas A&M University from 1891-1898. The elder Vardaman was wounded in action and disabled for the rest of his life. Upon the Civil War’s conclusion, William returned to a dilapidated plantation whose liberated slaves had left. He also still hadn’t paid off his loans. With his dream of becoming a wealthy plantation master and slave owner dashed, William packed his family and a few of their possessions into a wagon and travelled to Yalobusha County, Mississippi in 1868.

Because of William Sylvester Vardaman’s disability, James and his two brothers had to work on the family cotton farm as well as picking cotton on neighboring farms just to make ends meet. Neighbors said the Vardaman brothers were the best cotton pickers in Mississippi. But to the young Vardaman, picking cotton was ignominious work. Slave’s work. And the fact that he had to do it was a humiliation that fueled his white supremacist views for the rest of his life. James K. Vardaman, like his father, resented that the Union’s victory in the Civil War deprived him of his dream of owning a great plantation where slaves toiled the land. He wasn’t the only white Southerner who thought this way.

Vardaman aspired to be a lawyer and politician from an early age. So strong was his desire that when he had his tonsils removed, his parents told him that if he put up a fuss during the surgery he would lose his voice and never become a lawyer. As a young man, after saving up 200 dollars from making and selling cross ties to the local train station, Vardaman moved in with an uncle, was formally educated by his cousin, and passed the bar exam, which was an oral examination in those days.

Though a practicing lawyer in Winona, Mississippi, journalism came to occupy a growing portion of Vardaman’s time as he edited the Winona Advance and later moved to Greenwood, Mississippi where he founded the Greenwood Enterprise. Much like Benito Mussolini, Vardaman’s journalism career was pivotal to gaining a following he could transfer to politics. His populist editorials criticizing Mississippi’s elite quickly made him a hero among the state’s poor whites.

In 1890, Vardaman made the jump to elected office, winning a seat in Mississippi’s House of Representatives. With his finger on the pulse of the electorate and the shame of his youth still burning in his belly, James K. Vardaman knew exactly what his base wanted. He gave them unabashed racism, and they loved him for it. But not everyone welcomed this rising political star. Vardaman’s vow to break up large plantations and redistribute the land to poor white farmers put him in direct opposition to Mississippi’s planter elite, who also feared that his white supremacist policies would cause black sharecroppers, the backbone of the state’s economy, to flee North. Mississippi’s upper crust sneered at Vardaman’s supporters and called them “rednecks”, but their disdain only strengthened Vardaman’s support among poor whites, who proudly embraced the moniker and even wore red handkerchiefs to Vardaman’s rallies.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter what Mississippi’s elite wanted. The state’s poor whites demanded a white supremacist government, and they voted en masse for men like James K. Vardaman to give it to them.

Decades later, another infamous demagogue would learn the hard way what Southern whites really wanted from their elected leaders. George Wallace was the symbol of white Southerners’ resistance to the Civil Rights movement, but he wasn’t always a segregationist. Before his entry into politics, Wallace was a judge for Alabama’s Third Judicial Circuit noted for his fairness regardless of race. While other judges called black attorneys by their first names, Wallace paid them the respect of addressing them as “mister.” When Wallace ran for Alabama governor in 1958, he steered clear of race, speaking against the Ku Klux Klan and being endorsed by the NAACP. He was soundly defeated in the Democratic Primary by John Malcolm Patterson, who promised to close any schools the federal government attempted to integrate and flaunted his Ku Klux Klan endorsement. Lamenting his loss, Wallace said, “You know why I lost that governor’s race? […] I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again.”

Moving forward, Wallace took a hard-line stance against integration, justifying this change in direction with perhaps the most damning remark ever made about Southern voters: “You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor.”

James K. Vardaman’s policy positions were eye-opening, not because of what they said about him but because of what they said about white Southern voters. Vardaman favored strictly regulating corporations, the prohibition of alcohol, and nationalizing coal mines, railroads, and telephone lines. He also supported raising taxes on the wealthy and government-funded pensions for the elderly, a forerunner to what would become Social Security. Anyone running on a similar platform today would be called a socialist, yet Vardaman’s voters wholeheartedly supported his policies. White voters were all for a little economic planning so long as those plans excluded black people — a sentiment that lingers to this day.

Vardaman’s 1890 victory coincided with white Southerners seizing control of legislatures throughout the former Confederate states in the late 19th Century. Contrary to popular belief, what we know today as Jim Crow laws were not immediately implemented after Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877. These discriminatory laws were the culmination of rampant voter fraud on the part of white Southerners and racial terror campaigns against African-Americans to prevent them from voting. During Mississippi’s convention to replace its 1868 Reconstruction-era constitution, 133 of the 134 delegates were white Democrats. The only black or Republican delegate was Isaiah T. Montgomery, despite black people making up 58 percent of Mississippi’s population. Montgomery, a prominent leader in Mississippi’s black community who founded the all-black town Mound Bayou, was chosen as a delegate because of his accommodationist views on race. “Marsh” Cook, a white Republican, had also campaigned to be a convention delegate and attempted to organize black Mississippians to oppose the Constitution, but he was shot 27 times by six assailants. No one was arrested for Cook’s murder.

The new constitution enshrined a literacy test and poll tax, both required for any voter to cast a ballot. In practice, these provisions were primarily enforced to restrict the voting access of African-Americans. Similarly, black people were barred from owning firearms, part of a consistent pattern throughout US history in which the right to bear arms has been unequivocally championed for white Americans while remaining conditional for black Americans. The state Constitution also included a grandfather clause that prevented Mississippians from voting if their grandfather had never voted. As it had only been 25 years since the end of the Civil War, virtually every African-American’s grandfather, having been enslaved for most of their lives, would have never cast a ballot.

In some former Confederate states, these grandfather clauses acted as loopholes to allow those poor whites who could not pass a literacy test or pay a poll tax to continue to vote. However, this was not the case in Mississippi, as thousands of poor white and illiterate men were barred from voting. In 1890, Mississippi had 110,000 registered white male voters. By 1892, there were only­­ 68,000. Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution was the blueprint every former Confederate state legislature followed when enacting their post-Reconstruction-era constitutions from 1890-1908.

While the Constitution’s language was vague, the delegates were anything but. Sol S. Calhoun, the Constitutional Convention’s President and a justice on the Mississippi Supreme Court, proclaimed, “Negro suffrage is an evil […] The negro race seems unable to maintain even its own imitative acquirements. It seems unfit to rule. Its rule seems to mean, as it has always meant, stagnation, the enslavement of woman, the brutalization of man, animal savagery, universal ruin.”

Isaiah T. Montgomery, the lone black delegate, found himself in an impossible position. If he voted in favor of the Constitution, it would be a betrayal of his own community. If he voted against it, he and his family may very well have been lynched. In the hopes that black Mississippians would be spared from further racial terror if they kept their heads down, Montgomery voted to ratify the Constitution. Former Confederate General William T. Martin, who was one of only three delegates to vote against enacting the Constitution (over a dispute about state debt), said to the assembled men during deliberations, “What are you here for, if not to maintain white supremacy?”

The new Constitution worked exactly as intended. In 1890, there were 130,000 black voters registered in the state of Mississippi. By 1900, there were less than 1,300. And in 1898, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Mississippi’s constitution was legal as it did not explicitly state that it discriminated against black people.

No delegate was more proud of Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution than James K. Vardaman, who had no qualms admitting what its purpose was, stating: “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. [...] Mississippi’s Constitutional Convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics. Not the ‘ignorant and vicious’, as some of the apologists would have you believe, but the nigger. [...] Let the world know it just as it is. [...] In Mississippi, we have in our constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro. [...] When that device fails, we will resort to something else.”

Vardaman was made Mississippi’s Speaker of the House in 1894, a powerful role that positioned him to make a run for Governor. After his bid for the governorship failed in 1895, however, Vardaman volunteered to serve in the Spanish-American War where he was commissioned as a Captain in the United States Army. While serving in Cuba, he was promoted to Major. As the war continued into 1899, Vardaman requested to be discharged so he could run for governor again but ultimately chose to stay in the Army.2 When he was finally discharged, there were only a few weeks left to campaign for the Democratic Party’s nomination.

With the mass disenfranchisement of African-Americans, Mississippi was effectively a one-party state where winning the Democratic nomination for any office was tantamount to winning the general election. At the time, Mississippi counties could choose whether to hold the nomination process through popular vote or by electing a delegate who would then cast a vote on the county’s behalf at the Mississippi Democratic Party Convention. Just like in 1895, Vardaman won all the counties where the nominee was selected through a popular vote and lost the counties where a delegate was selected. This allowed Andrew H. Longino to win the nomination and the governorship. However, Vardaman’s many supporters applied immense pressure to the state legislature to change the primary system, which they did, passing a law decreeing that nominees for all statewide offices would be decided by popular vote.

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On October 16, 1901, African-American civil rights leader and Tuskegee Institute President Booker T. Washington had dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. The dinner should have been a routine event that went largely unremarked upon. Instead, an explosion of racist denunciations rang out across the American South.

The Memphis Scimitar said the “dinner was the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.” Infamous South Carolina Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman told reporters, “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again.” Vardaman somehow managed to one-up this disgusting statement by saying that the White House was “so saturated with the odor of nigger that the rats had taken refuge in the stable.” The Birmingham, Alabama newspaper The Enterprise ran an editorial reading, “The Incident of counseling with a negro and dining with his establishes a precedent humiliating to the South.” Georgia Governor Allen D. Candler said, “No self-respecting man can ally himself with the President, after what has occurred […] and no Southerner can respect any white man who would eat with a negro.” One week after Washington and Roosevelt’s dinner, the Missouri newspaper The Sedalia Sentinel published the anonymously written poem “Niggers in the White House”, which was republished in newspapers throughout the South.

The vitriol spewed at Theodore Roosevelt was laced with suggestions from the Southern elite that he was willing to let his daughters have sex with black men. As South Carolina Governor Miles McSweeney said of the dinner, “No white man who has eaten with a negro can be respected; it is simply a question of whether those who are invited to dine are fit to marry the sisters and daughters of their hosts.” The fear of miscegenation lay at the heart of Southern white supremacist views. In the minds of Southerners, there could be no greater crime than a black man raping a white woman, and most lynchings were sparked by rumors, often unsubstantiated, that the victim had sexually abused a white woman. The true fear had little to do with the trauma and effects of rape on women. Rather, it was about the violation of a white woman’s purity and the insult to white men’s masculinity. “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman gave voice to this anxiety when he said, “I have three daughters, but so help me God, I had rather find either one of them killed by a tiger or a bear […] conscious that she had died in the purity of her maidenhood, than to have her crawl to me and tell me the horrid story that she had been robbed of the jewel of her maidenhood by a black fiend.”

Of course, the histrionic fear of miscegenation was all projection, for no group in America committed the act of miscegenation more than Southern white men.

When slavery was legal, it was common for enslavers, their family members, and other white men who worked on the plantation to rape female slaves, many of whom were just girls. These repeated rapes resulted in an untold number of enslaved women being forced to give birth to their rapist’s child (and property). In 1834, abolitionist George Bourne noted in his book Picture of Slavery in the United States of America that many of the lighter-skinned slaves bore a striking resemblance to their enslaver on the plantations he observed. He also wrote that several plantation owners’ wives privately complained that they were only wives in the legal sense while in reality merely serving as overseers to their husbands’ harems of slaves. It is impossible to determine how many slaves were conceived through rape, but the fact that the average African-American’s genome today is 20–25 percent European paints a rather grim picture.

Even after slavery was outlawed, white men still continued to force themselves on black women. One of the most famous examples is that of Strom Thurmond, who served as a US senator from South Carolina from 1956-2003. An ardent segregationist, Thurmond’s 24-hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Bill of 1957 held the record for longest filibuster for almost 70 years. Yet six months after his death at the age of 100 in 2003, Essie Mae Washington-Williams revealed that Thurmond was her father, having impregnated her mother, Carrie Butler, one of the Thurmond family’s African-American housekeepers, when he was 22 and she was 15 or 16.

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With the primary system overhauled, James K. Vardaman was able to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for governor with ease in 1904. And as stated, to win the nomination was to win the general election, which he effortlessly did. During his campaign speeches, he openly announced that “a vote for Vardaman is a vote for white supremacy, a vote for the quelling of the arrogant spirit that has been aroused in the blacks by Roosevelt and his henchmen [...] a vote for the safety of the home and the protection of our women and children.”

Vardaman may have been one of the South’s most controversial politicians, but he was also one of the most charismatic. Standing over six feet tall in an era in which the average man was five foot seven inches, and with shoulder-length hair slicked back at a time when such hairstyles were rare, he cut a striking image. Vardaman wore black suits in the winter and all-white suits in the summer, like a plantation owner. His white supremacist rhetoric and his distinctive appearance led him to be dubbed “The White Chief” or “The Great White Chief.”

During Vardaman’s tenure as governor, he oversaw the opening of the State Insane Asylum in Jackson and the Deaf and Dumb Institute. He also successfully pushed for education funding increases for white communities, which rose by 25 percent, along with a 50 percent raise for teachers and the construction of three hundred new schools. On the other hand, Vardaman used every lever of power at his disposal to destroy the already meager educational opportunities available to black Mississippians. He closed black public schools and vetoed funding for the Mississippi Normal Institute, a college for black teachers. “The only effect of negro education is to spoil a good field hand and make an insolent cook,” Vardaman once said.

One month into his governorship in February 1904, Vardaman penned a nationally distributed op-ed titled “A Governor Bitterly Opposes Negro Education”, outlining his positions on public education and voting rights for black Americans and highlighting the paternalistic attitudes the white Southern elite had toward black Southerners:

“The nigger cannot live in the same country with the white man on terms of social or political equality. It is one of the impossible things […] I am opposed to the nigger’s voting, it matters not what his advertised moral and mental qualifications may be. I am just as much opposed to Booker Washington as I am to voting by the cocoanut-headed, chocolate colored typical little coon, Andy Dotson, who blacks my shoes every morning. Neither one is fit to perform the supreme functions of citizenship […] I want to do what is best for both races. I am the nigger’s best friend. But I am friendly to him as a nigger whom I expect to live, act, and die as a nigger.”

Mississippi and the rest of the white South enforced Jim Crow in ways that went beyond their states’ constitutions to maintain white supremacy. As the former United States Attorney General Eric Holder wrote in his book Our Unfinished March (2022), “Jim Crow was never policed just by laws written out on paper. It was enforced with broken bones and crushed skulls, with rope wrapped around trees and knots tied around necks, with bodies displayed in town squares or made to disappear at the bottom of rivers.” And from 1882-1968, no state had more lynchings than Mississippi, many of which occurred during James K. Vardaman’s governorship.

One such case was the lynching of Luther Holbert. On February 3, 1904, James Eastland, a white plantation owner, confronted Holbert to evict him from his property for reasons that are not known. Some historians have theorized that Eastland may have been upset that Holbert was encouraging other black workers, who were forced to work on the plantation because they were indebted to Eastland, to leave. A gunfight followed that left Eastland himself, along with two black workers, John Carr and John Winters, dead. It was alleged that Holbert killed Eastland during the fight, though this was never proven.

When news of Eastland’s death reached Doddsville, Mississippi, the white citizens formed a posse led by Eastland’s brothers, Woods Caperton Eastland and C.C. Eastland, and went to the Eastland plantation where they killed one of the black workers. But by this time, Luther Holbert and an unknown black woman were already on the run. The following day, two more black men were killed by the mob. On February 7, the posse caught Holbert and the black woman, took them to a black church in Doddsville, and tied them to a tree where a mob of 1,000 people gathered. Like many lynchings, it was a picnic-like atmosphere where deviled eggs, lemonade, and whiskey were served while Holbert and the black woman’s fingers and ears were cut off and given to the spectators. Holbert’s head was bludgeoned so severely that his eye hung from its socket, then the mob took corkscrews and tore the flesh from his thighs and chest. Holbert and the woman were then thrown into a fire pit while they were still alive.

C.C. Eastland was arrested for the murders, but a judge dismissed the charges, much to the delight of the crowd gathered at the courthouse in September 1904. That November, Woods Caperton Eastland welcomed a son whom he named James in honor of his late brother. James Eastland would be elected to the United States Senate in 1943 where he would serve until 1978. Eastland was one of the Southern Senate delegation’s most vociferous segregationists and stifled Civil Rights legislation throughout the 1950s and 1960s. President Lyndon Johnson said, “Eastland could be standing right in the middle of the worst Mississippi flood ever known, and he’d say the niggers caused it, helped out by the Communists.”

After his term as Governor was over, James K. Vardaman was elected to the United States Senate in 1912 on the platform of repealing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which were passed to give former slaves and all those born in the United States citizenship and the right to vote, as well as decreeing that the right to vote could not be infringed upon due to race. The Amendments had to be ratified by the former Confederate states as a condition for them to be readmitted into the United States during Reconstruction. But Vardaman was no longer in Mississippi, and his white supremacist radicalism rendered him largely irrelevant in the US Senate. These Amendments were never going to be repealed due to opposition from Northern politicians. One of the few pieces of legislation Vardaman played a significant part in was the passing of laws barring child labor.

When the US Senate voted to declare war on Germany and enter World War I, Vardaman was one of only six Senators to vote against the resolution. His opposition to the war was largely due to his white supremacist views, as he believed that black Americans were inferior and lacked the temperament to serve in the military. Vardaman was also concerned about the prospect of teaching black soldiers how to use guns and training them to fight. He feared that life in the military would lead black soldiers to conclude that a more equal world was possible, and that the skills and tactics they learned could be employed when they returned to the South to make this a reality.

Vardaman’s refusal to vote for the United States’ entry into World War I effectively ended his political career — and his former popularity could not save him. Congressman Pat Harrison, who had previously been one of Vardaman’s biggest allies, ran against him and relentlessly criticized his opposition to the war on the campaign trail. During his four terms in the House, Harrison had also built a following that rivaled Vardaman’s. President Woodrow Wilson, whose policies Harrison championed, endorsed his Senate candidacy and helped him edge Vardaman in the 1918 primary. Pat Harrison would later become one of the most powerful men in Washington when he was elected to chair the Senate Finance Committee and proved pivotal to passing and implementing President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs such as the National Industrial Recovery Act and the 1935 Social Security Act. Harrison also helped the United States’ allies defend themselves against fascism before the country entered World War II with his support of the Lend-Lease Act.

Vardaman went back to working in the newspaper industry after losing his Senate seat and waited for an opportunity to mount a comeback. When Senator John Sharp Williams announced his retirement in 1922, Vardaman threw his hat into the Democratic Primary race. However, he had aged considerably during his time away from politics. Vardaman, once one of the South’s most charismatic orators, had lost most of his teeth and could barely speak. Everyone around him also acknowledged that he was no longer there mentally. Despite this, Vardaman’s popularity had recovered since the end of World War I. He narrowly won the first primary against Congressman Hubert D. Stephens, but triggered a run-off in which Vardaman’s opponents rallied around Stephens and defeated Vardaman by 9,000 votes.

James K. Vardaman retired from politics for good after his primary loss, and despite being the most powerful man in Mississippi, he managed his finances as terribly as his father had and found himself virtually penniless. Vardaman and his wife moved in with their daughter and son-in-law in Alabama. According to his obituary, which was published in Alabama newspapers and later reprinted in The New York Times, Vardaman suffered a nervous breakdown shortly after moving to Alabama and his health never recovered. He died on June 25, 1930, at the age of 68. That same obituary said that “Negroes who knew him admired him.” Of course, the African-Americans who knew him could never fully and safely express how they may have truly felt about The Great White Chief, and Vardaman worked his entire life to make sure of that.

James K. Vardaman’s legacy still lives on in Mississippi. The lynchings of Emmett Till and Civil Rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were all the result of the policies and social norms implemented by Vardaman and white Southerners in the years after Reconstruction. And the Republican states that have redrawn districts to eliminate black congressmen are taking a page right from Vardaman’s playbook — only they have acted more swiftly to marginalize black voters than the post-Reconstruction generation of white Southern politicians ever did. The New South is, in some respects, not so different from the Old South. Black Southerners always knew this. The Republican Party started Reconstruction and white Southern Democrats resisted until they were able to finally kill it. In the 1960s, Northern and Western Democrats, led by a Southern Democratic President and a black Baptist minister, revived Reconstruction, causing a political realignment that led to white Republicans in every state working diligently to kill it. That is the arc of American politics since the end of the Civil War.

There will be more legal challenges to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts from Republican states in the coming years. The Supreme Court will not repeal these laws all at once. Instead, provisions will be whittled away until the laws are rendered all but meaningless. It took half a century to beat Jim Crow. It took 50 years for a quasi-Jim Crow to make a comeback. It will take another half century or more to beat Jim Crow again. Hopefully, this time, it will be for good.

See also: “The Hebrew Hammer: The Hank Greenberg Story”

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A version of this essay was originally published in Queer Majority in November 2025, titled “Can 80% of Society Really Be Irredeemable Transphobes?”

Last November, Queer Majority published an essay of mine titled “How to Fix What Ails Trans Activism.” It looked at where activists went wrong, charted the erosion of public support, and offered a philosophically liberal framework for how to reorient trans activism away from a zero-sum power struggle and toward a universalist vision centered around discussion, mutual respect, and winning hearts and minds. The piece blew up on social media, circulated widely among a variety of big-name accounts, and was also republished in Persuasion. Of course, not everyone was pleased. The most voluminous criticism has come from folks in the anti-trans camp, annoyed that the essay stopped well short of espousing a hardline gender-critical worldview. On the other end of the spectrum, many people in radical trans activist circles were infuriated. The article was denounced as transphobic hate, and I was accused of being everything from a far-right bigot to a “salty detransitioner.” I was even doxxed, which I’d humbly suggest may not be the most effective way to rebut the observation that trans activism has too often been hijacked by “extremist bullies” and authoritarians.

Two sentiments in particular predominated among the trans activists I heard from. The first was that trans activism has essentially made zero mistakes, and that virtually 100 percent of the backlash has been conjured by right-wing media. To espouse this talking point is to advertise one’s disconnection from reality and blind allegiance to the tribe. It is to completely overlook the fact that while the political right has, of course, eagerly capitalized on the backlash to radical trans activists, the extremism of these activists has supplied their opponents with an arsenal of needless ammunition. The second was the implicit belief that anyone holding the moderate, pro-trans position shared by a supermajority of society is, in fact, a bigot. It’s this latter thread that’s worth following, because building a more effective version of trans activism — or any activism — requires, above everything, a sense of perspective and being grounded in the material facts of the world around you. Neglecting to do so ends only in disaster.

Much of the impetus and justification for the level of ferocious intensity, urgency, and uncompromising maximalism of today’s trans activism is predicated upon a distorted view of modern society. Activists paint a dire but largely illusory picture of a culture drenched in hate, in which trans people are crushed from all sides by pervasive oppression, victimized by an “epidemic” of murder, and even threatened with “trans genocide.” Thankfully, this isn’t true, but these attitudes persist because in many radical circles, the bounds of acceptable thought are drawn so narrowly as to render anyone who isn’t a far-left trans activist a reactionary and even violent transphobe.

According to the foot soldiers purporting to speak on behalf of trans people, the overwhelming majority of society are transphobes in need, not of being persuaded, appealed to, or compromised with, but of being somehow defeated and subdued. These are the 79 percent of Americans who oppose trans women in female sports (including 67 percent of Democrats or Dem-leaning voters). These are the 71 percent of Americans who believe no one under 18 should have access to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones (including 54 percent of Dems). In Ipsos’s 2025 LGBT+ Pride Report, they surveyed 26 countries, almost entirely Western, and found that only 22 percent supported trans athletes competing outside their biological sex category. That other 78 percent represents roughly 1.35 billion people. That’s an awful lot of genocidal bigots to quell and crush. Perhaps this is just generational? No. Even among Gen Z, the 26-country-average support for trans athletes competing in their chosen category was a mere 27.5 percent.

And yet this same report also found that 71 percent supported protections for transgender people against “discrimination in employment, housing, and access to businesses such as restaurants and stores.” In the US, support for “nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people” stands at a resounding 75 percent. The vast majority of people across the Western world are not frothing haters hell-bent on oppressing, much less eradicating, trans people. The vast majority of people across the Western world are moderates steeped in liberal values who want trans people afforded the same legal protections as everyone else, but who also have real concerns with the more controversial — and as yet, unresolved — edge cases in trans politics.

Many of these moderates have been alienated or pushed away by the excesses and overreaches of the trans movement, but they are still persuadable. They still have liberal principles that can be appealed to. If activists write them all off as irredeemable transphobes, we cede actual transphobes a monopoly on proactively influencing public opinion. That path leads to dark places no human rights supporter should wish to tread. And, as we have seen, the backlash will only continue to spread, affecting not only trans people, but gay, lesbian, and bi folks, as well as sexual freedom more broadly. The grim irony is that society is far from the anti-trans hellscape activists portray it as, but if we follow the road they’ve started down, eventually it will be.

See also: “How Trans Activism Became So Radical”

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It’s never been easier to despise the political right. It turns out that a Republican president dooming millions to death by feeding life-saving aid programs into a “wood chipper” while enriching his family through cryptocurrency bribery schemes and mafia-like self-dealing payoff shakedowns isn’t great for public relations. Voters also don’t much appreciate having their neighbors and their kids snatched into vans by masked goons, or deported without due process.1 They don’t like seeing their cities occupied by fascistic paramilitaries who gun down citizens in the streets. Add to that an unpopular foreign war launched out of the blue that has led to soaring fuel prices, and it’s no surprise why so many are fed up with the right. Yet even while Trump’s approval numbers sink deeper into the toilet and his party coasts toward pulverizing midterm losses this November, there is one thing the American public still loathes more than Republicans: Democrats.

As the Real Clear Politics polling average has consistently shown, even while voters plan to cast their ballots for the Democrats in the 2026 midterms, they still rate the Democratic Party as less favorable and more unfavorable than the GOP. A 2025 poll conducted by CNN found that 58 percent of Americans believe the Democratic Party has gone too far left, an “all-time high” figure, according to data analyst Harry Enten. Perhaps the public is just mistaken? Another CNN poll found that 33 percent of Democrats — and 42 percent of those under 35 — think of themselves as democratic socialists. What’s more, a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll from February found that while 62 percent of US adults believed Trump was “out of touch” with the concerns of everyday people, that figure was 65 percent for Democrats in Congress. Folks know that Trump has been a singular disaster, and they’re willing to vote against his party to provide a check on his abuses and blunders, but why hasn’t that also translated into better numbers for the Dems? Why is the left still more disliked than the right? A lot of it comes down to the way Americans experience leftists as people. And an incontrovertible truth at the heart of modern politics is that leftists are uniquely annoying. Insufferably, infuriatingly, blood-boilingly annoying.

This is something I have often felt myself. I consider myself an environmentalist. I support universal healthcare, criminal justice reform, LGBT rights, a woman’s right to choose, and much higher levels of social spending, including universal basic income. I have voted Democratic almost down-the-line for 18 years. I am fully aware of just how dangerous the populist right is, and have published extensively on the topic. I know that the right’s attacks on American cities, the democratic system, immigrants, higher education, science, economic stability, international relations, and political norms far outstrip the excesses of the left in sheer material damage. Not to mention their egregious prosecution of culture-war hobby horses backed by the full might of the federal government. And yet I too find leftists interpersonally nauseating in a way right wingers can never even approach.

Spend any amount of time actively engaged in political discourse as a non-leftist — or even as a heterodox leftist — and you will encounter droves of progressives who, almost to an individual, behave in a manner that can only produce hatred in their interlocutors. They often interact in bad faith, rush to make outlandish accusations, employ a host of derailing tactics, knowingly misrepresent others’ points, and pepper them with unhinged attacks that frequently veer into the same bigotries they claim to oppose, all drenched in their characteristic catty smugness and snark. In the worst cases, which, in years past, were all too common, online leftists would go much further, whipping up massive pile-ons designed to publicly shame and destroy the livelihoods of those they disagreed with. Then there are the many violent and sexualized threats one can expect — a common feature of lefty-dominated spaces such as Bluesky, or Twitter from around 2018 to 2022.

To move among online leftists is to be immersed in a sea of what appears to be viciously sadistic and deeply disordered neurotics. These tortured souls habitually call for, glorify, and celebrate violence and suffering — so long as this venomous ire is directed at the right kind of people. You know, conservatives, centrists, liberals, moderates, apolitical people, capitalists, healthcare CEOs, Zionists, the wealthy (presumably excluding their parents), white people, straight people, Western societies in general, and of course other leftists whose opinions slightly diverge from their own, or whose professional success or talent make them jealous. No one is spared, including would-be allies and fellow comrades. The most common experience many Americans have had with leftists — whether online or in the many institutional and professional spaces in which they’ve held sway — is one of being relentlessly attacked, bullied, and slandered, or witnessing this happen to others. The impression most are left with is that these arch progressives despise nearly everyone in the country, often including themselves. Is it any wonder that society returns the favor?

Part of the dynamic at play here is driven by the partisan double standard I have written about in which the political left is generally held to higher moral standards than the right, and consequently penalized more for their shortcomings. The reason this double standard is so impactful is that it is almost entirely self-created. Leftists posture as our moral superiors, whereas right-wing populists proudly own being cynical scoundrels and egocentric edgelords. The right does not pretend to be inclusive while discriminating against disfavored groups. They don’t pretend to be anti-racist while promoting racial essentialism. They don’t pretend to value diversity while rejecting viewpoint diversity. They don’t pretend to care about the downtrodden while championing luxury-belief policies that make their communities objectively more dangerous. They don’t pretend to care about “the science” while politicizing medicine and torching public trust. They don’t pretend to want a fairer society while nakedly pursuing their own advancement.2 They don’t wax poetical about ethics, integrity, or intellectual honesty only to side with dictators, theocrats, terrorists, and jihadists.

The hard right doesn’t aspire to any high-minded ideals beyond a notional simulacrum of Christianity watered down to homeopathic dilution and sold at full price. Right-wing populists don’t merely set their moral bar low, they openly disdain the very idea of a moral bar as lame, gay, retarded, and cucked. Morality is for suckers and losers. As Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s advisor and deputy chief of staff for policy, said in January, “We live in a world [...] that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” The right wears its cartoonish villainy like a badge of honor. There can be no lofty moral or intellectual expectations for ride-or-die Trump supporters, because there is every reason to expect that any proud member of the American right in the 2020s — and certainly post-January 6, 2021 — is, at the very least, utterly unencumbered by commitments to philosophical principles or even a coherent concept of truth. Leftists are no different, except they pretend to be saints, which makes abhorring them almost irresistible.

It’s also rather difficult to ignore all of the madness that has flowed out of the left and deranged society over the past decade and a half. To name just a few: cancel culture and the attacks on free expression, far-left radicalism in universities and K-12 education, the countless instances of workplace meltdowns and leftist institutional capture, the incredible oversteps of trans activism, and the racial hysteria and violent chaos of 2020. Perhaps most consequential for the public perception of leftists was the injection of far-left politics into every other facet of American life to create a totalizing sense of inescapability.

The economist and writer Noah Smith encapsulated the general attitude in a pair of recent tweets:

You can think whatever you want about Smith, or people like him. You can demand substantiation for his claims and then, as is nearly always the case with leftists, dismiss all evidence provided out of hand. The fact remains that the past 15 years happened, and the percentage of society that witnessed what they believe were outrageous, illiberal, and systematic overreaches carried out and enabled by cultural progressives has steadily grown. Whether that portion of society has reached a critical mass is difficult to say. But it has become, at the very least, a majority.

Americans overwhelmingly don’t use social justice language, say that left-wing cancel culture is a serious problem (84 percent), and reject left-wing identity politics. A November 2024 YouGov poll found that 57 percent of US adults considered “political correctness or being ‘woke’” important to the outcome of the 2024 election. A 2025 Pew survey found that 87 percent of Americans think left-wing extremism is a problem, including 53 percent who said it was a “major problem”, compared to 85 and 52 percent who said the same of right-wing extremism, respectively. Democratic Party insiders are well aware of these issues. Internal party polling found in 2025 that fully 69 percent of voters believe Dems are “too focused on being politically correct.” A 21-state research project from a nonprofit aligned with a major Dem super PAC found that “working-class voters perceive Democrats to be woke, weak, and out-of-touch, too focused on social issues.”

Society’s message to leftists has been unambiguous: they don’t like you. I don’t like you, either. I have the death sentence on 12 systems!

Jokes aside, the fact that I fundamentally agree with, if not all the particulars, at least the general thrust of many left-wing causes doesn’t soften my frustration, but adds another layer onto it. The ways in which leftists have needlessly hamstrung every cause they purport to fight for by inspiring backlashes that fuel the right has been sickening to watch. And the fact that real material problems affecting millions of people have become the LARPing toys and fashion accessories of the rudderless children of privilege to be blithely gambled and sacrificed like pawns in a game is apoplectically infuriating. Even while I outline more effective and liberal ways to advocate for many of these causes, I have long, long ago given up hope that leftists themselves will change course or become part of the solution. The simple truth is, as a wise man once said, “There’s no cure for being a cunt.”

See also: “The Far Left Is the Far Right”

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Subscribe now and never miss a new post. You can also support the work on Patreon. Please consider sharing this article on your social networks, and hit the like button so more people can discover it. You can reach me at @AmericnDreaming on Twitter, @jamie-paul.bsky.social on Bluesky, or at AmericanDreaming08@Gmail.com.

Alex is a writer, historian, and host of the popular History Impossible podcast and Substack of the same name. His work has appeared or been mentioned in outlets including Quillette, Areo Magazine, Merion West, Uncommon Ground, Queer Majority, and the New York Times. He’s also a contributor to American Dreaming and a friend.

Alex’s essays: “Enduring the Misfortunes of Others” and “The Psychological War on Minneapolis”

Klein’s NYT piece: “This Is Why There’s No Liberal Joe Rogan”

Other articles referenced: “The ‘Roaring 2020s’ and Other False Rhymes of History” and “Memory-Hole Archive: Political Violence”

Research referenced: Pew Research (2023), Pew Research (2026), and Blue Square Alliance (2026) (and the Axios coverage of it)

Jamie Paul is a writer based in Greater Philadelphia, founder of American Dreaming, managing editor at Queer Majority, and contributing editor at Bi.org. His work has appeared in outlets including Quillette, Persuasion, Areo Magazine, and Gazeta do Povo.

Subscribe now and never miss a new post. You can also support the work on Patreon. Please consider sharing this article on your social networks, and hit the like button so more people can discover it. You can reach me at @AmericnDreaming on Twitter, @jamie-paul.bsky.social on Bluesky, or at AmericanDreaming08@Gmail.com.

Intro music: “Americana” by HoliznaCC0, CC0 1.0. Outro music: “Never-Ending To-Do List” by HappyWorldWithMochi, CC BY 4.0. Both from Free Music Archive.

This is the tenth essay of a multi-part series. Read part one here, or see all of the currently published articles here.

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The progressive left’s nearly decade-long reign over American culture was nothing if not explosive. Between the firestorms over free expression and race, the ideological burn through institutions and the education system, the heated culture wars around sex and gender, and the conflagrations — literal and figurative — of political violence, the “woke” years from 2014 to 2023 had more than their fair share of fireworks. Quietly suffusing the atmosphere of the era was a culture of grievance, identity, victimhood, and fragility that provided the flames of radicalism all the oxygen they would ever need. To understand this period of American cultural history, we must examine not only its most incendiary flashpoints, but the very air it breathed.

Ever since the rise of this culture of grievance and identity in the 2010s, commentators and critics have traced its roots to various schools of thought within the leftmost reaches of 20th-century academia, including postmodernism, critical theory, postcolonial theory, and others. In the years since, this origin story has calcified into conventional wisdom. But while it’s true that some older academic frameworks such as intersectionality and queer theory helped inform and shape the currents of the woke era, their role has been largely exaggerated. Upon closer examination, this grievance culture, which merged with and became what we now think of as social justice politics, was born of a confluence of factors far broader than anything found in the bowels of academic theory.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, Americans, seen the world over as bombastic and egocentric, were told that they suffered from a lack of self-esteem. The self-esteem movement took off in California, most notably through the Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem created in 1986. Education systems around the country reoriented themselves around the goal of building up students’ view of themselves. Before long, this ethos had gone mainstream, influencing behavior in the wider culture with a massive surge in motivational speaking and self-help books. Alongside this was the rise of 12-step recovery programs, support groups, and the normalization of therapy. Above all, these shifting attitudes were driven by television programming, which turned processing one’s emotions from something shameful and private into a form of public entertainment. In the final analysis, French poststructuralism was no match for American daytime talk shows. When it came to influence, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida could not hold a candle to Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil.

The resulting culture was one in which mental health issues were less stigmatized and certain kinds of bullying and bias were less acceptable. It was also a culture in which everyone was more medicated, normal human attributes were more pathologized, and every conceivable danger — real or imagined — was assiduously childproofed. Children and adolescents by the millions were barred from free and unsupervised play, diagnosed with mental disorders and prescribed meds, and handed inflated grades and participation trophies. Kids were treated like cracked porcelain dolls while also being told that they could do or be whatever they wanted. This mixture of emotional fragility and egotism proved particularly combustible, especially when the “sky’s the limit” promises Millennials were raised on turned out to be well-meaning lies.

It’s no coincidence that these cultural shifts took shape in the wake of the Great Recession, just as the Millennial generation was entering adult life. Decades of trends and forces converged in the early 2010s. Stymied by economic forces and the lengthening lifespans of their still-working elders, many young people could not actualize themselves through what they achieved in the world. Instead, they sought actualization through their identities and sense of victimhood. They connected with one another through the Internet and stumbled down ideological rabbit holes on platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. And as journalism’s business model collapsed, the press became ever more plugged in and reliant on social media, absorbing and spreading the ideas shared across these ecosystems. Many of the threads covered in this series — such as the ideological capture of institutions including universities, K-12 schools, tech platforms, major corporations, nonprofits, and the press — all wove together around these trends, each reinforcing the other and producing a cult of fragility.

The first outgrowth to emerge from this bubbling cauldron has come to be known as “safetyism”: the idea that safety — expanded far beyond physical danger to include being offended, made uncomfortable, or confronted by opinions with which one disagrees — trumps virtually all other considerations. Within culturally left-wing circles, anything or anyone one didn’t wish to see or hear made people feel “unsafe.”

Between 2014 and 2023, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) Campus Deplatforming Database tracked 368 instances at American universities in which guest speakers or events were cancelled, disinvited, withdrawn, or disrupted by actors on the political left. These speakers ran the political gamut, including George Will, Peter Thiel, Christina Hoff Sommers, Nimesh Patel, Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, CIA Director John Brennan, Senator Ben Sasse, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Congresswoman Liz Cheney, former Senator Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. FIRE also catalogued an additional 268 attempted university cancellations and disinvitations from the left during this span. The rationale for virtually every case was the same: tolerating people or ideas that did not align with far-left cultural orthodoxies wasn’t just harmful, it posed a kind of emotional danger that students said made them feel physically threatened and unsafe.

In 2016, Trinity College disinvited rapper Action Bronson after more than 1,300 students signed a petition claiming that Bronson’s violent lyrics “would create a psychologically harmful and drastically unsafe space for women, LGBTQIA+ students, and survivors of sexual assault.” Similarly in 2020, a professor at USC was suspended after his use of a Chinese word that sounds slightly similar to a racial slur “harm[ed] the psychological safety of our students”, as his dean put it.

The atmosphere on campus became so uptight and allergic to offense that a number of high-profile comedians, including Jerry Seinfeld, Larry the Cable Guy, and Chris Rock, stopped playing colleges. As Rock said in a 2015 interview, “I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative. Not in their political views [...] but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of ‘We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.’ [...] You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”

Students were especially averse to having their opinions challenged — or as they would put it, having their safety threatened. A professor at Northwestern University penned an op-ed in 2015 criticizing campus feminism and what she described as a culture of “sexual paranoia” and “sexual panic” sweeping academe. Two students filed a Title IX complaint against her, alleging that her essay and a tweet she’d posted about it were an attack on them, causing a years-long investigation. Meanwhile at UC Berkeley, a professor citing black-on-black crime statistics during a Black Lives Matter event was enough to earn a formal harassment claim on the grounds that he “made the classroom environment feel unsafe.” It also prompted a groveling apology to the “distressed” students from the dean. In the case of one USC professor in 2023 who told students at a pro-Palestine demonstration that Hamas were murderers and he hoped its members were killed, he was banned from campus for being a threat to student safety.

There was a built-in asymmetry at work. Whereas the “threat” posed by unobsequious professors was largely a figment of students’ infantilism, the threat students’ fickle complaints posed to their professors’ careers was quite real. As one professor detailed in a 2015 Vox piece titled “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me”, under these incentives, higher education was devolving into a purely transactional business exchange:

“This shift in student-teacher dynamic placed many of the traditional goals of higher education — such as having students challenge their beliefs — off limits. While I used to pride myself on getting students to question themselves and engage with difficult concepts and texts, I now hesitate. What if this hurts my evaluations and I don’t get tenure? How many complaints will it take before chairs and administrators begin to worry that I’m not giving our customers — er, students, pardon me — the positive experience they’re paying for? Ten? Half a dozen? Two or three?”

The safetyism running amok on campus also made the jump into the real world in ways that only undermined actual safety. In 2019, Starbucks issued a public apology after an employee at an Arizona location ejected six police officers whose presence they said made a customer feel unsafe. Others took their delusions of unsafety into their own hands. That same year, also in Arizona, a man stabbed a teenager in the back and cut his throat, claiming the teen’s rap music made him “feel unsafe.”

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It wasn’t just problematic opinions that imperiled students, but course material itself. At Harvard, law students in 2014 asked their professors not to teach rape law, or in some cases even use the word “violate” in class, because such things could “trigger” distressing memories. That year, the New York Times reported that “Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as ‘trigger warnings’, explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them.” Students were triggered by classic literature like The Great Gatsby, Shakespeare, Huckleberry Finn, Greek mythology, and the Bible, as well as images depicting the crucifixion. In one case at Wellesley College, they were even triggered by a sculpture of a man in underwear. These cases were not outliers. A 2016 NPR survey of more than 800 professors found that over half reported having used trigger warnings in classes. As a 2015 report from the National Coalition Against Censorship found:

“There are reported complaints about spiders, ‘images of childbirth’, suicide in a ballet, indigenous artifacts, images of dead bodies, ‘fatphobia’, bloody scenes in a horror film class, and more. One respondent observed, ‘I’m not sure you can teach American literature without issuing a blanket trigger warning for the entire semester.’ [...] Many [university administrators] observe that warnings are being requested for material that students find merely discomfiting, challenging, or offensive to their beliefs. In the words of one, ‘students who have NOT had significant traumatic experiences are using trigger warning requests to avoid engaging with uncomfortable course materials.’”

Trigger warnings spread beyond campus as well. As a 2014 piece in the New Republic catalogued, social media and the blogosphere were filled with earnest trigger warnings about everything from pregnancy, to alcohol, to Chris Brown, small holes, and animals in wigs. The theater world, too, leaned into content warnings. In 2018, a Denver theater company made headlines when it issued trigger warnings before a production including “Adult language”, “Sudden loud noises”, and “Theatrical fog/haze.”

While the idea of trigger warnings became a laughingstock in the broader culture, college students supported requiring professors to issue trigger warnings for material “that might ‘trigger’ difficult emotional responses” by a 65 percent to 27 percent margin even in 2023. Still, some campuses did sour on trigger warnings. In 2021, Brandeis University’s “oppressive language list” included the term “trigger warning” itself because some students, in a chef’s kiss of self-parody, found it triggering.

From a 1997 episode of The Simpsons

Where the precious snowflakes of America could not find a threat to their safety, they instead found grievance, spawning a new class of offenses known as “microaggressions” — casual interactions or attitudes perceived to be discriminatory slights against members of marginalized groups. Of course, since offense-taking is personal and subjective, what counted as a microaggression was constrained only by the limits of the progressive imagination. For example, a pair of Columbia University students started a crowdsourced blog in the early 2010s called the Microaggressions Project. Within four years, it had received more than 15,000 submissions.

It wasn’t just keyboard warriors. Forbes stepped up in 2020 to let everyone know that it was a workplace microaggression to ask a person of color exhibiting anger “Why are you getting so angry?”, or asking a black colleague “Would you mind coordinating lunch?”, or accidentally mixing up a POC colleague’s name. One document used as training material for the Philadelphia court system listed “Environmental microaggressions” including television shows with too many white characters, universities whose buildings are named after too many rich white men, and an “Overabundance of liquor stores in communities of color.” According to university language guides, even expressing sentiments such as “America is the land of opportunity”, “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race,” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job”, “America is a melting pot”, and “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough” were deemed microaggressions. But figuring out how to criticize these transgressions was trickier than it seemed. In 2015, a campus group at Brandeis had to apologize and take down an exhibit raising awareness about microaggressions because, yes, some students found it triggering. Microaggressions were evidently so harmful that they could not even be uttered in order to criticize them.

Beset by such treacherous emotional dangers from all sides, students demanded “safe spaces” — havens from which they could be protected from scary ideas. A 2017 poll from the Knight Foundation and Ipsos found that 87 percent of students favored providing safe spaces, defined as “areas of campus designed to be free from threatening actions, ideas, or conversations.” As ripe for ridicule as safe spaces were — and they did become a punchline — the thinking behind them has proven durable. By the end of the woke era, this culture of fragility had indelibly set in. Indeed, data from 2025 shows that 82 percent of left-leaning university students said that “speech can be as damaging as physical violence.”

As safetyism spread and took root in the culture, it became an imperative to make every facet of society “safe” for the sensibilities of educated leftists and their emotionally fragile matrix of overlapping, developmentally arrested neuroticisms. Insecurity demands conformity and continuous affirmation. In practice, this meant the politicization of everything.

Hobbies, fandoms, subcultures, and online communities that were hitherto mostly non-political suddenly found themselves embroiled in social justice activism and controversies. The post-George Floyd racial reckoning hit television particularly hard. From the summer of 2020 through the end of 2022, it seemed there was hardly a television show on air that did not have a “very special episode” — or what we might call a “very special arc” or even whole season — that veered from its established plot, tone, and style, sometimes wildly, to lecture viewers about how racist America was and how oppressed black people were within it. The shift was felt on both sides of the screen. As journalists Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik wrote in 2022:

“The result [of the racial reckoning on Hollywood] has not just been a demographic change. It has been an ideological and cultural transformation. We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers — all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. This was the case not just among the high command at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, but at every level of production.

How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. ‘Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke everyone, including the woke,’ one writer said.”

Another showrunner told them, “This is all going to end in a giant class-action lawsuit.”

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Of course, television was only one domain, and nobody was forced to watch it. There were so many other pastimes to enjoy without being inundated with left-wing activism. One could always read — that is, unless it was something new in the genres of young adult, romance, or fan fiction. Archive of Our Own, known online as AO3, is the largest repository of fan fiction in the world, hosting millions of works and generating annual pageviews in the billions. In 2020, the platform’s progressive users launched a years-long campaign to #EndOTWRacism (referring to the site’s parent company), alleging an epidemic of white supremacy on the platform and demanding that AO3 abandon its famously pro-free expression policies to overhaul its moderation approach and make the site safe for fans of color. Except, these activists could not seem to find many examples.

During those years, simply disagreeing with 2020-style “anti-racism”, or producing content that ran afoul of its strictures was enough to earn the label “white supremacist.” In a lengthy Teen Vogue article in support of the campaign — which likened the problems on AO3 to a bar owner with Nazi patrons and directly scolded readers who disagreed as racists — the clearest instance of “violently racist” content presented was a comment reading: “Diversity consultants are not only wastes of money they are people you pay to create race problems where there weren’t any. Anyone even suggesting they be hired should be driven out of the public square and publicly tarred and feathered.” Still, AO3 capitulated, apologized, and has undergone multiple rounds of site changes to address the concerns of the campaign. Naturally, activists were not satisfied.

Forget reading, what about a good old-fashioned tabletop role-playing game? During the late 2010s and early 2020s, the popular game Dungeons & Dragons, along with its parent company Wizards of the Coast, was mired in their own “racial reckoning” as activists accused the game of propagating racism and bigotry. This led to a cascade of changes culminating in a new revision of the game in 2024 that was widely panned by players.1 It wasn’t just D&D. As a headline in IndigiNews put it: “World of board games faces reckoning for colonial themes.”

Why not just curl up with a nice crossword puzzle then? Because, Americans were told, crosswords were rife with hidden bigotries and the Eurocentric biases of the older white men who wrote and edited them. In response to such critiques, the Times created the New York Times Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship in 2022. Surely quilting was a hobby free from politics? You mean that wretched hive of racism and villainy? What about yoga? Culturally appropriative, racist, and in need of decolonization and reorientation to dismantle systems of oppression. CrossFit, then? The workout community and company of the same name underwent its own activist meltdown after its founder criticized the way the George Floyd protests were flouting pandemic quarantine protocols. Denounced as a racist, he apologized but was still forced out of the company he started. Of course, you could always just stay home and work out with a Peloton bike, if creepy sexist dystopias are your sort of thing.2

The list went on and on. Radical politics infiltrated everything from classical music, slammed as white supremacist and “inherently racist”, to genealogy, which, given everything else covered in these archives, was to be expected.

To escape politics, perhaps one just had to go outside. But no, the left-wing activism followed them there, whether they were watching birds, or rock climbing, or even fly fishing — yes, fly fishing. Sports in general, which had long featured a kind of low-grade background conservative politics — complete with troop salutes, jingoistic pomp and pageantry, and jet flyovers — also became more overtly political during this era of cultural progressivism. In 2016, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat down during the national anthem in protest of police violence. In later games, he switched to kneeling, inspiring thousands of other athletes to do the same in what came to be known as “taking the knee.” In 2017, over 200 players in the NFL alone took the knee in a single day. By the early 2020s, far-left activism had filtered down to youth athletics, and not just when it came to trans issues. One example, as I covered in 2023, was a proposed expansion to Canada’s Greater Toronto Hockey League, an elite youth league that feeds prospects into the NHL pipeline, that would include guaranteed roster spots to racial minority groups.

Even the land itself became politicized. In an uncommon case of the United States importing culture war issues from other countries (in this case, primarily Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), land acknowledgements — statements naming the indigenous tribe(s) that once lived wherever the acknowledgement is being made — caught fire among American progressives and the many domains in which they held influence. Their stated purpose was to recognize the historical harm done to these communities and to serve as a first step to doing better by these peoples’ descendents. In practice, they were almost always empty gestures done for the benefit of the professional-class acknowledgers to signal status and virtue to one another. After all, as happy as progressives were to acknowledge stolen land, they had no intention of giving it back. Graeme Wood’s commentary in a 2021 Atlantic essay is required reading on the subject:

“In David Mamet’s film State and Main, a Hollywood big shot tries to shortchange a set hand by offering him an ‘associate producer’ credit on a movie. A screenwriter overhears the exchange and asks, ‘What’s an ‘associate producer credit’?’ The big shot answers: ‘It’s what you give your secretary instead of a raise.’

The practice of ‘land acknowledgment’ — preceding a fancy event by naming the Indigenous groups whose slaughter and dispossession cleared the land on which the audience’s canapés are about to be served — is one of the greatest associate-producer credits of all time. A land acknowledgment is what you give when you have no intention of giving land. It is like a receipt provided by a highway robber, noting all the jewels and gold coins he has stolen. Maybe it will be useful for an insurance claim? Anyway, you are not getting your jewels back, but now you have documentation.

[...] If you have seen enough of these — I have now watched dozens, sometimes more than one at the same event — you learn to spot them before the speaker even begins acknowledging. In many cases the tone turns solemn and moralizing, and the speaker’s posture stiff, as if preparing to read a confession at gunpoint. One might declare before, say, a corporate sales retreat: We would like to respectfully acknowledge that the land on which we gather to discuss the new line of sprinkler systems is in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. The acknowledgment is almost always a prepared statement, read verbatim, because like all spells it must be spoken precisely for its magic to work. The magic in this case is self-absolution.”

During the late 2010s and early 2020s, land acknowledgements were drafted, adopted, or employed at virtually every level of society. Land acknowledgements were used by localities including Tempe, Phoenix, and Flagstaff, Arizona; Los Angeles County, Sacramento, and San Francisco, California; Denver, Colorado; Chicago, Illinois; Eden Prairie, Minneapolis, and Northfield, Minnesota; New York City, New York; Portland, Oregon; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They were used by state bodies or agencies in Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington State; by government agencies including NASA, branches of the National Park Service, the US Department of Arts and Culture, and the Library of Congress; and by organizations or events such as the Academy Awards, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association, and the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

On college campuses, land acknowledgements became nearly ubiquitous, including at schools such as Arizona State, Colorado State, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Emory, Harvard, Michigan State, Montclair State, MIT, Northwestern, Oregon State, Penn State, Rutgers, Stanford, UAlbany, UC Davis, UC Merced, Umass Amherst, the University of Connecticut, the University of Delaware, the University of Illinois system, the University of Rhode Island, the University of San Diego, the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Utah, West Virginia University, Yale, and far too many more to list.

Sports, too, were sucked in, with land acknowledgements adopted by professional sports teams including the Chicago Blackhawks, the Buffalo Bills, the Indianapolis Indians, the Montreal Canadiens, the Seattle Kraken, and the Toronto Blue Jays, as well as at events such as the Boston Marathon. In 2023, the NFL even read a land acknowledgement prior to Super Bowl LVII.

From a virtual event held by Microsoft in 2021 that went viral over its land acknowledgement.

Piecemeal attempts to catalogue land acknowledgements have documented scores of additional examples, such as a 2022 study published in the American Education Research Journal that examined 47 university land acknowledgements, and the activist-run website LandAcknowledgement.org, which has a crowdsourced database of more than 150 organizations or events that have issued land acknowledgements.

Almost everyone in left-leaning environments either went along with these rituals or quietly grumbled away from the prying eyes and ears of the social justice stukachi. Those few who openly took issue had to be ready for a fight. In 2022, University of Washington professor Stuart Reges protested the school’s adoption of a land acknowledgement by including a parody version in his winter 2022 syllabus reading, “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property, the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.” When students complained about feeling “unsafe”, Reges was investigated, disciplined, and warned to watch his behavior moving forward. He sued the university on free speech grounds and won.

Other critiques came from the left. As the National Governance Center noted in 2021, land acknowledgements could be problematic because non-indigenous people may craft them insensitively. However, reaching out to indigenous people and communities for help could also be problematic, as it asks them “to do free emotional labor. [...] Emotional labor is problematic because it’s time consuming and can place additional stress on Indigenous people.”

Holdouts in the crusade to politicize every aspect of life had to be shamed and vilified. As such, Americans were told that “white silence was violence” and that standing on the sidelines of the social justice movement’s cultural revolution made one part of the problem. Online and across the institutional landscape, cultural leftists spread various versions of a graphic known as the “Pyramid of White Supremacy”, visualizing the supposed way in which racial discrimination, violence, and even genocide are built atop a base of seemingly benign enabling attitudes and behaviors. On the very foundation of moral defects that lead to racial genocide was “remaining apolitical” and “apolitical beliefs.” This graphic was also used as educational or training material in American high schools, universities, progressive churches, and companies including Google, as well as in the UK to educate Parliamentary staffers.

It was all enough to make anyone reach for a drink — only, social justice controversies roiled the craft beer and wine communities too, complete with all the usual allegations of racism and “confronting demons.”

At a glance, it may be difficult to make sense of these trends without simply concluding that tens of millions of Americans literally lost their minds. But there was a method to the madness — uncoordinated and primarily organic — that shaped the cult of fragility and its effect on society in ways that seem almost inevitable in hindsight. Safetyism, as a psychological phenomenon, an ideological ethos, and an approach to life, was inextricable from the plague of hyper-politicization that swept American culture during the late 2010s and early 2020s. When radical beliefs converge with the perception that anyone who does not share them is a threat to one’s safety, the only logical outcome is, as we have seen, a protracted quest to transform every domain within reach into a safe space for that radicalism. To be sure, safetyism has receded somewhat from its most hysterical peak in 2020 to 2022, but the dynamic it created, whose effects are still felt today, underlies nearly every facet of progressive overreach documented in these archives.

Part XI: Memory-Hole Archive: Identity Worship and Lived Experience

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A version of this article was originally published in Queer Majority in June 2023. Read it here.

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“It is incomprehensible that we should know so little about such an important subject as sex, unless you realize the multiplicity of forces which have operated to dissuade the scientist, to intimidate the scientist, and to force him to cease research in these areas.”

— Alfred Kinsey, 1956

Bill Maher once joked that Republicans say sex is bad because with them, it always is. In the era of age-gap policing, the “toxic male gaze”, and conceptions of sexual misconduct and harassment expanded to include bad dates and awkwardly asking someone out, they have some stiff competition from across the political aisle. But at the end of the day, when it comes to sheer prudishness, Republicans, as Bertie Wooster might have put it, stand alone. They don’t like sex, they don’t want anyone enjoying it, and they certainly don’t want it studied. Such was the consensus among Indiana House Republicans when they voted to strip Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction of state funding in 2023. To anyone who follows the US culture wars even peripherally, they already know the pretext for this move. It’s the same pretext for every culturally conservative stance on matters of sex and sexuality since Constantine the Great fatefully traded Jupiter for Christ some 1,700 years ago: The Children!

In the case of Kinsey — both the institute and the man — the accusations go further than standard charges of corrupting the youth. Indiana Republicans, echoing generations of similar canards, have alleged that Alfred Kinsey, the enormously influential sex researcher who died in 1956, was a sexual abuser and exploiter of children. What’s more, they assert that the institute he founded in 1947 to study human sexuality continues his alleged perversions behind closed doors. While these accusations are troubling, false, and deserving of rebuttal, there is a deeper issue at play here. People right-of-center have long criticized the anti-intellectualism of social justice warriors who denigrate or even attempt to shut down legitimate lines of inquiry, such as the study of behavioral genetics, human intelligence, evolutionary psychology, or autogynephilia, on the grounds that such research is “harmful.” In going to war against perhaps the single largest sex research organization in the world, the cultural right succumbs to the same anti-intellectualism they accuse their opponents of. The simple truth is that seeking a more accurate understanding of the world virtually always ends up redounding to our benefit, a fact that’s easy to lose sight of when contorting oneself into a horseshoe.

The effort to block state funding to the Kinsey Institute began in the Indiana legislature with Rep. Lorissa Sweet, a Republican, who referred to Alfred Kinsey, without evidence, as a “sexual predator.” She went on to say “Who knows what they [the Kinsey Institute] are still hiding? Could they be hiding child predators?” before concluding, again without evidence, “By limiting the funding to Kinsey Institute through Indiana University’s tax dollars, we can be assured that we are not funding ongoing research committed by crimes.” Her proposal passed with a mostly party-line 53-34 House vote, and the budget subsequently passed the Indiana Senate and was signed into law by Governor Eric Holcomb. It has been in effect since July 2023.

The hostility the Kinsey Institute has faced is nothing new. From the purity movements of the 18th and 19th centuries to the Lavender Scare and the modern “groomer” panic, anti-sex and anti-LGBT bigots have long sought to suppress everything outside of matrimonial, heterosexual, missionary-position sex as a threat to the youth. Their Overton window is as narrow as a phallic hole cut into a bedsheet, and anyone who falls outside of its confines — gay and bisexual men, sex researchers, trans people, and more — are cast as sexual deviants or worse.

The Kinsey Institute, however, will be fine. State funds comprise only one-third of their total budget. The move to defund them is, in the final analysis, mostly symbolic — but what it symbolizes is a dark and persistent bias against Kinsey, his field, and all queer people.

Alfred Kinsey revolutionized the landscape of sex research and the perception of sex and sexuality with his groundbreaking books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), known collectively as the Kinsey Reports. These books allowed the public their first glimpse at data-driven insights into the sexual characteristics and proclivities of their neighbors. Perhaps his most indispensable contribution to sexual thought was in his invention of the Kinsey scale, a conceptual spectrum ranging from 0 to 6, where 0 represents complete heterosexuality, and 6 represents complete homosexuality — with everything in between representing bisexuality. This framework has allowed for an infinitely more robust and nuanced understanding of human sexuality that captures the true scope of bisexuality, so often overlooked. The psychologist Fritz Klein built on Kinsey’s scale to form the Klein grid, which includes aspects of sexuality such as past experiences and future desires to illustrate the ways in which an individual’s sexual orientation might shift over time — known as “sexual fluidity.”1

Kinsey’s critics have always hated that his work exposed the public to sexual matters they consider perverse, and allegedly helped spread liberal attitudes toward bisexuality, homosexuality, masturbation, and pornography. For as long as mainstream culture was aligned with their biases, they attacked Kinsey and those who continued his work on these grounds explicitly. When that approach was no longer viable, they leaned into unfounded claims that Kinsey sexually abused or experimented on children to derive parts of his research.

The genesis of these allegations stems from a single willful misunderstanding. Kinsey and his team interviewed or surveyed more than 18,000 people. A small handful of these participants were sexual abusers, including a pedophile named Rex King, whose accounts made their way into several pages of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. If Kinsey can be blamed for anything, it is for not reporting King to the police upon collecting his data. That, certainly, was a major ethical oversight. But an artifice of lies has been built from these few pages, from Judith Reisman’s defamatory anti-Kinsey screeds of the 1990s, to Matt Walsh’s documentary What is a Woman? (2022) (which repeated Reisman’s fabrications to over 185 million viewers on Twitter alone), to the above-mentioned rhetoric of State Congresswoman Lorissa Sweet.2 As Kinsey himself once said, “We are the recorders and reporters of facts — not the judges of the behaviors we describe.” Indiana Rep. Matt Pierce, who represents Indiana University’s district, described such falsehoods as “warmed-over internet memes that keep coming back” that are “based on old unproven allegations of conspiracies that did not exist.”

These same claims long ago carried over to the Kinsey Institute, which has stood baselessly accused of abusing children or harboring predators. The institute has endured decades of threats, harassment, disruptions, and defunding, despite having committed none of the deeds it has been charged with. But its researchers do something that enflames right-wing culture warriors almost as much: they do not exempt pedophilia as a topic of study, including how to prevent child sexual abuse from happening in the first place. Cue the cries of “degeneracy” from the balcony. But studying human behavior to better understand, mitigate, and prevent sexual abuse is not degeneracy — standing in the way of these efforts is. If the cultural right truly cared about protecting children, they would want scientists to glean as much insight as possible into the causes and mechanisms that lead to child sexual abuse so as to better prevent it before it occurs. It’s curious that these self-proclaimed defenders of children seem uninterested in gaining the knowledge needed to better protect our children.

Upon reflection, a more informed and intelligent approach to such grisly matters would deprive many troglodytes of a cherished outlet for righteous indignation. A society where child sexual abuse could be, to any appreciable degree, prevented before it occurs, would rob many a reply guy and gal of the opportunity to gleefully proclaim, as they are wont to do on social media, that sex offenders should be fed feet-first into wood chippers. One almost gets the sense that, in their eyes, a few young sacrificial lambs are worth the cost of justifying the most medieval impulses their amygdalae can pump out.

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Of course, to attribute such forethought to these lawmakers and their fellow travelers is to give them too much credit. They aren’t playing 4D chess so much as they’re playing the only card they have left. No serious person believes that the Kinsey Institute is harboring child rapists or conducting experiments on kids, but such accusations, even when false, are powerful. This is simply old-fashioned bigotry of the kind that the Kinsey Institute in particular, sex research in general, and the LGBT community as a whole have faced for generations.

All of this renders the right-leaning critique of leftist anti-intellectualism when it comes to human intelligence, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, or autogynephilia more than a little comical. “Facts don’t care about your feelings” doesn’t have quite the same ring on the heels of decades of puritanical attacks on and depraved lies about sex research. The fact remains that these are all worthy subjects of inquiry. The existence of racist pseudoscience around human intelligence doesn’t negate the usefulness of studying IQ. The fact that some people misuse evolutionary psychology or behavioral genetics to argue for racial essentialism doesn’t cancel the truths uncovered by these fields. The existence of transphobia doesn’t erase autogynephilia. And the incredible diversity of human sexual behavior — the good, the bad, and the ugly — does not make it any less valuable to study, but more so, if anything.

Kinsey’s contributions have reshaped the way we think and talk about human sexuality, regardless of anything his most fervent haters might say. And the institute that bears his name and lives on through his legacy has continued the kind of insightful, informative, and trailblazing research he did — with or without state funds. The future cannot be stopped. Short of the annihilation of the human race, or some calamity that sets us back to the Stone Age, the growth of knowledge will not be denied. What is most disturbing, aside from the ignorance, illiberalism, and bigotry of this episode, is the deeply misguided belief that the attempt to block knowledge is a noble thing.

Physicist David Deutsch, in his 2011 book, The Beginning of Infinity, observes that “The harm that can flow from any innovation that does not destroy the growth of knowledge is always finite; the good can be unlimited.” Knowledge begets knowledge in ways we can’t even begin to predict. Knowledge solves problems, opens minds, bridges divides, educates, informs, leads to breakthroughs, and sometimes collects dust for many years until it’s rediscovered and appreciated. This is not to say that knowledge cannot be gained unethically, or by hurting others. It can, and that’s wrong. But that’s not what Kinsey did, and it’s not what his institute has ever done. Notions of forbidden or dangerous knowledge are tropes science fiction writers use to sell books or screenplays. Here in the real world, history is nothing if not a cautionary tale of the cost in human life and misery of not possessing enough knowledge — not too much.

See also: “It’s Time To Bring the Oldest Profession Into the Light”

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In 2014, I was deeply depressed. Stuck in a job I hated, mired in student loan debt, and watching the decade of my 20s circle the drain with seemingly nothing to show for it, I underwent the second (and hopefully final) period of depression in my life. It felt as though my life was over, squandered, the last dregs of my best years slipping away as I helplessly watched. Life became a kind of purgatory — joyless, bleak, and increasingly unendurable. After several months spent locked in the dungeon of my own mind, I began to envision this miserable state as the only future I had to look forward to. At my lowest point, I distinctly remember thinking to myself that any life in which one constantly suffered this much with no prospect of improvement was not a life worth living. To be clear, ending my own life was never even a glint in my eye, but my desperation to climb out of depression pushed me to take the step that men in particular struggle so mightily with: asking for help.

I started seeing a clinical psychologist for talk therapy in early 2015. During our first session, he asked me if I’d ever meditated. I hadn’t. I’d read Sam Harris’s book Waking Up (2014) the year prior and was intrigued — though not enough to actually begin meditating. Alongside weekly sessions in which my therapist deftly curated the conversation I needed to have with myself, I began doing daily meditation exercises focusing on my breath and other bodily sensations. In Buddhism, this style of meditation is known as vipassana.

Though I was idly curious about the spiritual aspect of meditation, the practical benefits for my mental health were what moved me to actually take the practice up. As any meditator will attest, those early sessions were in equal measure frustrating and bewildering. I could not pay attention to the breath going in and out of my nose for even 10 seconds before getting lost in thought. I could not control my thoughts or emotions. Indeed, thoughts spontaneously sprung unbidden into existence out of the darkness, like some kind of quantum spookiness of the mind. I could wrench my focus onto something else with effort, but any attempt to just exist in the present moment lasted mere seconds before the tsunami of my inner monologue slammed into me.

I realized something fascinating: my mind had a mind of its own. But how could that be? If it’s “my” mind, why was it doing things independently of “me”? There was something deeper here to explore, but for the time being, I had more pressing concerns.

Two months in, my therapist said he didn’t think I needed him anymore. I felt better. I felt normal. I’ve never been a “happy” person, walking around with a resting dopey smile and a hair-trigger laugh reflex. But I felt like myself again. Talking through my problems had helped me intellectually understand the self-destructive and irrational ways I was framing my life, but it was meditation that interrupted my mind’s doom loop. The more I meditated, the easier it became to just pay attention to the moment, the less frequently I found myself making mental notes about intrusive thoughts and having to recenter on the breath. These moments of freedom let me think clearly for perhaps the first time. I was living a life that more than 99 percent of humans who had ever lived would have envied. My mental anguish, I realized, was simply a story I had told myself so many times I believed it. And like a magic trick fully understood, these stories lost their power once I saw through them. How did I ever muddle through life like a leashed animal existing at the beck and call of all these stories?

I continued meditating every day for over a year, building in the latter months up to around 45 minutes per sitting. I developed a capacity to sort of dissociate from my emotions. If I felt a wave of negative feelings well up from my subconscious, instead of drowning in them, I found myself comfortably floating above the surface and merely observing them. My relationship to my emotions changed. Makeitstopmakeitstopmakeitstop became a sense of curiosity as I internally poked, prodded, and catalogued my feelings like some kind of first-person scientist. Eventually, my daily practice lapsed, but the experience left me changed. It also planted a seed deep within my mind that in time became a nagging question.

As the years passed, my ears perked up whenever I came across discussions about meditation or Eastern philosophy. The central theme, from what I gathered, seemed to be seeing through the illusion of the self. This concept, sometimes called egolessness or the more cryptic-sounding “no-self”, refers to the realization that one’s sense of self — as a coherent, fixed agent distinct from consciousness and in proactive control of one’s experience — is, in fact, a fiction. This sense of self emerges from the mind’s compulsive need to construct and cling to narratives, reinforced by constant, often neurotic inner monologuing, distraction, and pattern recognition. Together, these tendencies stitch the threads of experience into a story with an author — the self — at its center. Alan Watts once described the self as a torch being whirled in a ring to create the appearance of a circle of fire. And this fiction functions as an engine of needless dissatisfaction and suffering. Status anxiety, the hedonic treadmill, and the negativity that arises from comparing oneself to others — all flow downstream from our identification with this illusory self.

I found it all a little hard to wrap my mind around at the time, yet I realized this was what had been bugging me while meditating years prior. Becoming aware that my mind had a mind of its own and that my conscious sense of self didn’t have the control it pretended to seemed an early step toward seeing through the self. But there is a world of difference between intellectually understanding the illusion of the self and actually experiencing it.

My New Year’s resolution for 2020 was to get back into meditation. At least, that was what I told myself. What I really wanted was to have the experience. I wanted to have that dolly zoom moment where I witnessed the self falling away in a glorious awakening from which I would emerge transformed. I began meditating for hours a day. I meditated while sitting, focusing on the breath; while walking or running, focusing on my footfalls; and while lying down, focusing on my body. I practiced meditations with no particular focus, meditations cultivating feelings of loving kindness, and meditations aimed at directly seeing through the self. When I wasn’t meditating, I binged literature on Eastern philosophy, from reference materials, to primary Buddhist texts, to Zen memoirs. I listened to hundreds of guided meditations, scores of Dharma talks and conversations about meditation, and read books from Eastern meditation masters and Western scientists alike.

The COVID lockdowns and restrictions only gave me more time to delve and practice. While the pandemic wreaked havoc around the world and identitarianism raged unchecked, I sat in contented silence trying to pierce through the illusion of identity itself. This gave me an entirely different perspective on the tumultuous events of that year. As the salience of identity exploded across the culture, it now seemed not merely obnoxious, essentialist, and illiberal, but also so very, very Western. The same people in society who seized every possible opportunity to denigrate the West did so through the most Western lens imaginable. Perhaps it was only fitting that these new political cults revolved around identity. Illusion is, after all, the organizing principle of religion.1

As the months piled up, however, no enlightenment came. I became more present, more focused, and less distracted. My capacity for boredom and need for constant stimulation diminished. I was more in tune with my thoughts and feelings than ever before. Yet I still hadn’t seen through the self and had my mind blown. How did you see something that wasn’t there? How did you see nothing? No amount of thinking, verbal instruction, or written description could guide me to the revelation I sought. Why was understanding that the self was a fiction, even coupled with hundreds of hours of meditation, insufficient to generate the experience I searched for? I was at a loss.

Once again, my meditation practice faltered after a little over a year, and once again, the years began to pass. I’d become a professional writer and quit my old job. My debts and depression were long gone, and for the first time in my life, my intellectual interests, creative passions, and career path converged. I never had found that elusive egoless breakthrough, but it no longer occupied my mind. In December 2024, I decided to dip a toe back into the meditation world and picked up a book that had been sitting on my reading list since 2020: Loch Kelly’s The Way of Effortless Mindfulness (2019). Kelly laid out a guide to integrate the experiences and insights of meditation into everyday life, not just when quietly sitting or lying. There was nothing particularly groundbreaking about the text. It was the sort of intermediate meditation advice I’d encountered dozens of times before, complete with the woo-woo language about “energy” and “chakras” that always earns an eye-roll from me. But it was exactly the book I needed to read at exactly the right moment in time. I don’t quite know why, but everything finally clicked.

I had been misled by the many accounts I’d read and heard into expecting some kind of dramatic event, some overwhelming experience of ineffable transcendence and awakening that leaves one radically altered. In the Zen teacher Henry Shukman’s beautifully written One Blade of Grass (2019), he recounted life-changing moments of spiritual epiphany and ego death in which he was physically and emotionally overwhelmed, in some cases even falling to the ground and uncontrollably sobbing. That wasn’t at all what my experience was like. In fact, it’s overstating it to even call it an “experience.” There were no fireworks. Not even a measly sparkler. Reading Loch Kelly’s book and running through the exercises he described, I realized that I’d already seen through the illusion of the self many years prior. It had happened so quietly that I never truly noticed, but once I finally did, it became clear, obvious even, that this was the way things had always been. It wasn’t an awakening. It was realizing that I’d always been awake and hadn’t recognized it. And once this occurred to me, there was no unseeing it. A switch had been flipped that could now be re-flipped at will.

In a sense, seeing through the self was anticlimactic. To borrow from the old adage about scientific discovery often attributed to Isaac Asimov, I’d spent so long seeking my eureka! moment only for it to take the form of Huh, that’s funny… In retrospect, it was always a little silly to be chasing what amounted to a kind of spiritual high that my particular brain, chemically unaided, may simply not be wired for. And yet, I can find nothing to regret in my “journey”, if we’re going to be pretentious about it. Life is experienced through the filter of the mind. Meditation, and the insights it facilitated, improved my mind, and thereby immensely improved my life. I still get lost in thought, swept away by emotions, and taken in by my inner monologue’s bullshit stories from time to time. But having the ability to flip the switch and begin again in any moment is a kind of superpower. Life is, after all, only as good as your mind will let it be. Nearly everything comes down to a matter of interpretation and perspective. In the final analysis, even my depression was a boon, because it set me on a path that left me far more happy, connected, and present than I’d ever been before. Some might see a kind of providence in that. I don’t. As I said, I’m just not wired that way.

See also: “Meaning Junkies”

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