This is a list highlighting some of the excesses of the ideological left, which I will update and repost periodically, adding new items at the top.
There’s a lot of viciousness and error out there, and it’s being overshadowed and distorted by political bias and underreported by a profoundly dysfunctional legacy media. But most people tend to be decent, and most people will be disturbed by these examples. Shaming cancel mob members and uncovering ideological trojan horses and spotlighting corruption and violence and policy failures is the proper role of the media.
Remember: for every instance we hear about there are 10,000 more, and the mere threat of some of these results is enough to change individual behavior and warp society. Institutions and disingenuous status hierarchies instinctively seek secrecy and dissembling and avoid debate or accountability. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
A few months ago, I had an idea: an online ‘Archive of Woke Repression.’ It’s too easy for people in professional circles to ignore the wrongs and excesses of their own side, and instead to focus on the other side. This is a comfortable (if lazy) reflex, but it allows bad behavior and ideological craziness and mob dynamics to continue. When people are definitely confronted with these excesses, they’re usually too cowardly to resist or object, even when they know something is wrong.
When I converse with people on the left I often make claims that they disagree with (or at least claim to). Things like: the left is hostile to American pride and patriotism. The left has cancelled people and made campuses and workplaces fraught and frightening and conformist places on which to live and work. The left has badly damaged the selection criteria of police and firemen and air traffic controllers, and, in certain cases, the left is explicitly supportive of a kind of racial neo-segregation. The left’s policies are putting female prisoners at risk and destroying the quality of public education.
These claims are objectionable because, if true, they might represent excesses or misjudgments or abuses by the left. The fact that even many leftists feel this way tells me that our fundamental problem isn’t one of values, in most cases (although it often feels that way); it’s one of information.
has data up that indicates that even in blue states the party registration trends continue to move in an overall conservative direction:
Slow and steady wins the race. New York voted more than 12 points right of its party registration index (D+25.1%) in 2024, and has drifted further right with voter roll maintenance. No updates since February, but if it mirrors New Jersey’s changes (likely), New York will show a nice move rightward at the next update. At this rate, we could be looking at a single-digits race in 2028.
New Jersey is one to keep an eye on, with a large minority voting demographic that swung hard to the right for Trump in 2024, and an already large white working-class population.
Democrats have already lost almost 10% of their registration lead since November. If this trend continues, it is likely New Jersey will be within 3 points with J.D. Vance as the nominee in 2028. Accelerating this means pursuing gains in northeastern New Jersey, such as those that flipped Passaic County last fall.
Welcome news here, with Democrats down 10% from their November registration lead in the only state that moved to the left from 2020 to 2024 by registration (albeit by less than a tenth of a point).
One of the most corrupt electoral states in America (and one that holds political prisoners), Colorado’s shifting is being buoyed by the Latino realignment and needs major help in the Denver metro, along with strict election reform, to become competitive again.
Most people are amenable to changing their minds, and stories about federal agency corruption and illegal debanking of citizens and sex crimes committed by autogynephilic men and the real aims of immigration support nonprofits can shift their views. Cumulatively that exact thing is happening right now, I think, regardless of the vagaries and petty dramas of the Trump administration. I already wrote about the changes (which are dangerous for the ruling class) from a vertical to a horizontal information distribution system.
But the flow of information has been stymied, by personal bias and information siloing and an unwillingness to consider that one’s own side might be the malefactors. This possibility is literally unimaginable for most leftists, and only discrete examples can change their attitudes. The media interrupts the flow of information and algorithms and confirmation bias mostly do the rest.
If most leftists really believed that (rather than defending LGBTQ people) some members of their coalition wanted to completely change the cultural assumptions about sex and sexuality and consent and paraphilia, and if they believed that these same members wanted to begin this project during the early grades of elementary school, they would be horrified. They are able to persist in their denial because they purely consume media from sources which are about as determined to make progressives look good (or better than conservatives, at least) as anyone can possibly be without outright deception and fabrication. Sometimes they do those things too.
began a wave of outrage and anxiety in 2021, although the account featured almost no editorializing or original content. It was simply a series of reposts of progressives speaking about their own beliefs and actions. The poster was doxxed and the account was slammed as hateful, far-right, homophobic - all of the familiar slanders. It was deplatformed and called out by national political figures and defamed by waves of legacy media employees, all because it shone an uncomfortable light on the ostensible side of righteousness and truth.
Sometimes I wonder how people can exist in this society and have not been confronted with evidence regarding the policy disasters and ideological aims of progressives (COVID policy? Biden’s cognitive decline?!)… but then I remember our fractured and warped media environment. I know many people (older people, and young educated professionals without much personal interaction with the mainstream, especially) who would deny the claims that DEI has caused massive racial discrimination and hiring disadvantages for white males, or that it’s damaged the effectiveness of many organizations. I know people who would scoff at the claims that progressives have cancelled many, many decent professionals for simply spreading information they didn’t like (and not because it was incorrect). I could go on… but the only way to inform these people is with specifics. This is my Archive of Leftist Excess, a compendium of woke repression and harm. As new instances pop up I will add them (at the top of the page). I may even add categories, as time goes on.
The categories will be:
Cancel mobs
Leftist violence
Institutional damage
Ideological excess
I think that if people were honestly exposed to the broad range of ideological misbehavior, some of them might come to question their assumptions and their affiliations. As long as they become a bit more willing to consider ideas or have discussions with those they disagree with, I’m satisfied. Ideological capture only persists as long as people avoid real debate and internal honesty.
…let’s think about political emotion. Virtually every leader offers joy. I’m going to feed the children, heal the sick, and defend our borders. But virtually no leader offers unadulterated joy. Instead, politicians almost automatically combine hopeful promises with threats against enemies. If anyone gets in the way of our quest to feed the children, heal the sick, and defend our borders, let them beware. When pure evil stands between us and utopia, we push back. With all our righteous might. Because evil makes us angry.
Cruelty is the main emotion that politicians pander to. And cruelty is what every politician strives to deliver. They don’t want to make everyone happy. They want to make their friends happy by making their enemies suffer. Which requires them to not only identify enemies, but create an endless queue of enemies lest they run out.
That’s why totalitarian states, after they imprison and and murder all their admitted opponents, never declare final victory. Instead, they launch a new search for enemies among their so-called friends. Capitalist roaders. Trotskyists. Rootless cosmopolitans. To declare final victory would be to abandon anger. And to abandon anger is to abandon politics. Cruelty is the lifeblood of power-hunger.
…in 2021, Clements was the lead author of a controversial letter titled "In Defence of Science," published in The New Zealand Listener. The letter (commonly referred to as the “Listener Letter”) was a direct response to a proposed curriculum that sought to promote the discussion and analysis of how science has been used to support the dominance of Eurocentric views, including its role in the “colonization” of Māori peoples and the “suppression” of Māori knowledge. The curriculum also proposed that science itself, as a Western European invention, could be viewed as a tool of European dominance over Māori and other indigenous groups.
As a result of the letter's publication, Clements was removed from teaching duties, with accusations of racism leveled against him. Attempts to engage in a public debate on these issues were blocked, with no one on the opposing side willing to have an open discussion. Instead, efforts were made to cancel academics with differing viewpoints. Sound familiar? It’s the same political weaponization of the "racism" card, though from an indigenous perspective, aimed at undermining the scientific method in New Zealand.
It was during that overheated time when Sabatini was ejected from his perch atop biomedical research after he was tarred with the label of “sexual harasser,” an accusation that he denies to this day. He lost almost everything, including the lab he had in Cambridge, millions in federal grants, and the respect of his colleagues.
…we lost our funding last year after left-wing activists from the Guardian and Hope not Hate published an exposé on “race science” that blatantly violated journalistic ethics (and in the process named our funder).
…being neurodivergent and very attached to the truth, it felt important to inform the casting director that he’d been duped. I imagined he’d look at the unedited video, realise his mistake, we’d laugh, he’d delete it and we’d all move on, grateful that we hadn’t spread misinformation and fanned the flames of an already volatile situation.
What in fact followed was like that scene in a zombie movie, where the protagonist knocks something over and the dead-eyed horde suddenly turns as one, sensing fresh meat. The unbridled glee with which the casting director’s acolytes immediately started tearing me apart was horrifying. I was called transphobic, bigoted, hate-filled. I was told my hatred of this most vulnerable section of society whose very existence was being erased by hags like me was “sickening”.
The floodgates opened. The messages started to come in almost immediately - more artists (all men) cancelling their forthcoming releases because they couldn’t afford to be associated with me. Two separate musicians I’d given gigs to and released CDs by revealed to the world that they wouldn’t release anything else with me. Another, Phil Maguire, added he’d “noticed some transphobia” but oddly didn’t mention it to me as I was still promoting his music at the time.
I had some much-appreciated messages from female musicians - mainly to check I was OK (I wasn’t) although understandably none were prepared to defend me publicly.
I was a wreck, my beloved label was disintegrating in front of my eyes, people I considered friends were attacking me, and strangers were sending me horrific abuse.
I desperately tried some damage limitation - I apologised and, to my eternal shame, I repeated one of the sacred mantras “Trans Women are Women” (in my head that “are” actually meant “should be largely treated as if they are” - something I still believed then). But this regrettable self-abasement did no good, the damage was done and it appeared permanent.
When I lived in Seattle, they put up posters around my neighborhood with my home address, telling insane lies about me and instructing activists to show up at my door. Later, they sent letters to a few hundred of my neighbors, claiming I was a Nazi white supremacist. Death threats, references to my family, the whole deal. A few times, we had to pack up the kids and leave town.
One of these activists found one of my children at a park with the babysitter and yelled at him until he started crying. My son came home terrified. I figured out who this person was—a software developer who lived in the neighborhood—got his number, called him, delivered some “persuasive” words, and forced him to apologize to my son over the phone. I made sure he was much more frightened than my son had been.
Leftist activists organized employees within Microsoft to email-bomb my wife’s boss, claiming that she was a white supremacist. Thankfully, he thought it strange for her to be an Asian white supremacist and knew it was all a fabrication. I tracked down the ringleader and, “coincidentally,” he was fired a few months later. He overestimated his position and underestimated mine.
Canadian nurse Amy Hamm first learnt she was under investigation three years ago this month for making “discriminatory and derogatory statements regarding transgender people, while identifying [her]self as a nurse or nurse educator”. The British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives claimed that Hamm’s off-duty conduct violated the regulatory body’s professional standards around responsibility and accountability, client-focused provision of service, and ethical practice.
The resulting disciplinary process has now consumed years of the nurse’s life. Hearings in her case have been strung out across 21 days of testimony between September 2022 and November 2023, punctuated with months-long gaps. Hamm’s nursing licence and livelihood hang in the balance.
So what exactly did she do to warrant such an investigation? In the summer of 2020, Hamm helped co-sponsor an “I ♥ JK Rowling” billboard in Vancouver. She also tweeted and wrote publicly about her concerns around the loss of women-only services and spaces in her free time.
The disciplinary process is so drawn out and absurd that it could almost serve as a theatre piece for our times — from the actors (Hamm’s lawyers are up against a self-described “old white cisgender queer lawyer with disabilities” who spells her name without any capital letters) to the dialogue to the reviews. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s coverage has been predictably partisan, as indicated by the headline of a recent piece about her case: “Nurse tells B.C. hearing she’s not transphobic, but calls gender identity ‘metaphysical nonsense.’” The CBC is eager to reprint Hamm’s occasionally insensitive tweets but reluctant to give airtime to the substance of her case.
When philosopher Kathleen Stock and athletic coach Linda Blade testified as expert witnesses on Hamm’s behalf, opposing counsel declined to ask either woman a single question, perhaps fearing any elaboration on the common-sense views they share with Hamm. “We’ve had language for boys and girls, men and women, since the beginning of time,” Stock testified on Tuesday. “Biology hasn’t gone away” — something a nurse should know better than anyone — “but all of us have lost the ability to freely refer to facts about ourselves, important facts, for instance that we are a sexually dimorphic species.”
On Sunday, an Egyptian Uber driver named Mohamed Soliman used a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to set over a dozen people on fire as they peacefully marched through Boulder, Colorado, calling for the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. As he did so, Soliman shouted, “Free Palestine!”
…
The next day, a 72-year-old Jewish man was posting flyers about Israeli hostages on New York’s Upper East Side when someone slugged him in the head and shouted, “free Palestine!” Two weeks ago, someone shot and killed a young couple in D.C. outside the Capital Jewish Museum, yelling “free Palestine!” Almost one year ago, a man stabbed a Jewish man near the headquarters of the Chabad movement in Brooklyn, yelling “free Palestine!” Almost two years ago, a man broke into a Jewish family’s home in Los Angeles, yelling “kill Jews!” and “free Palestine!”
After splitting from the mainstream rationalists, Ziz began attracting a small cadre of followers who resonated with her uncompromising ethos. In online forums and private chats, she found kindred spirits: mostly young, brainy outsiders who shared her distrust of authority and her almost fanatical concern for the suffering of all sentient life. Many were fellow trans women or gender-nonconforming people, some on the autism spectrum – “smart, mostly autistic-ish transwomen who were extremely vulnerable and isolated,” as one community leader later described Ziz’s recruitment pool…
At this point, the FBI and multiple state agencies were actively hunting LaSota and any remaining Zizians. The pattern was clear: wherever this ideology went, death and chaos followed. Three violent deaths across three states had been linked to the group – from the blood-stained house in Pennsylvania to the sword fight in California.
In a surprisingly candid piece, two Women’s Studies researchers, Breanne Fahs and Michael Karger (2016), describe a blueprint for this strategy. They propose viewing Women’s Studies as a virus that “attaches to the ‘host’ bodies of other disciplines and disrupts and infects them” and “directs it to a new purpose” (p. 945). This is the Trojan Horse Strategy in a nutshell.
The Trojan Horse Strategy is not just theoretical. In 2023, pseudo-skeptics used it to gain temporary control of the German skeptical organization Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften (GWUP).
Over a few years, they infiltrated GWUP. Although they rejected the rigorous and impartial application of critical thinking—embracing woke ideology instead—they disguised themselves as skeptics. They adopted skeptical views on topics like astrology and homeopathy, participated in debunking pseudoscientific claims, expressed support for scientific inquiry, and made friends in the community, thus avoiding detection.
Like the Greek soldiers stealthily hiding in the Trojan horse, they “opened the gates,” recruiting more ideologically aligned pseudo-skeptics as GWUP members. In May 2023, they eventually gained control of the board and redirected GWUP “to a new purpose.” Using tactics of cancel culture (see Rauch, 2021; Lukianoff & Schlott, 2023), they systematically sabotaged skepticism’s epistemic immune response from within, as Zeller (2024) has documented.
…there were 300 speech codes in American elite universities by 1991, regulating what people were allowed to say. Affirmative action was a major policy, already in operation. You had attacks on the curriculum talking about Eurocentrism, going well beyond common sense changes. I don't think the ideas were that different, but I think the scale was different. And the other thing that was really different is that the mainstream media was not where academia was. David Rosado, who does big data work, has looked at 175 million academic abstracts and 25 million newspaper articles between 1970 and 2020. And what you can see is that the three awakenings—the late 1960s, the late 1980s and early 1990s, the mid 2010s onward—were very clear in academia, but they're not that clear in the media. Only the last one shows up. And that's because what social media does is it brings the radicalism of academia into contact with the mainstream media. And at the same time, the mainstream media is going through its own evolution towards a clickbait model, and therefore they need this emotional stuff trending on Twitter. And all of a sudden the mainstream media converges with academia in the 2010s.
Hilary Maloney, a trans-identified Victorian man, was convicted of serious sexual abuse against his daughter, including 19 instances over a month when she was five. Maloney, who began identifying as trans around the time of the abuse, photographed and filmed the assaults, sharing them online with a US paedophile
Maloney’s counsel, Mx Skaburskis (non-binary), argued that Maloney’s emotional distress, exacerbated by others not affirming his gender identity, contributed to his offending. Forensic psychiatrist Dr Rajan Darjee claimed that, as Maloney “identified and lived” as a woman and was “hormonally female,” his offending aligned with patterns seen in female perpetrators, which he argued indicated a low risk of reoffending.
Judge Nola Karapanagiotidis accepted these arguments and reduced Maloney’s sentence from a maximum of 25 years to 4 years and 9 months. Maloney is now housed in a women’s prison with a mother-and-baby unit, despite the seriousness of his child sex abuse convictions.
More recently, Bluesky users with major followings reveled in the prospect of violence against Jesse Singal, a center-left journalist who has ended up in progressive crosshairs because of his reporting about detransitioners and involvement in other heated debates regarding trans issues. Some consisted in crude death threats: “I think Jesse Singal should be beat to death in the streets,” one wrote. But a surprising number explicitly justified calls for violence as being necessary to defend themselves against the ways in which he supposedly put them at risk. “Jesse Singal and assorted grifters want us dead so i similarly want him dead,” another user wrote.1
Though they blatantly violated Bluesky’s restrictive community guidelines, the platform hardly took action against such accounts. It even failed to ban users who shared what they believed to be Singal’s private address or made especially graphic threats against him. Evidently, the people making decisions for the kinder, gentler platform don’t mind actual death threats—as long as they are directed against those who, in their judgment, have it coming to them.
That’s something I’ve heard so many times, in the past several years - people who are affected by disability, whose lives are intimately connected to disability, yet who feel that they have no right to have an opinion because standpoint theory has been so ruthlessly enforced in the disability discourse. When I was a guest on a podcast hosted by three women with adult schizophrenic children, they told me that they were glad I was there to say the things they couldn’t say, not having a psychotic disorder themselves. It broke my heart. They had spent their best years fighting to keep their severely disturbed children alive and out of long-term institutions; they had sacrificed so much. Of course they have the right to share their opinions about schizophrenia or mental health or disability or whatever else they would like to. And so do you and everyone else in the world because that is what democracy is. I am entitled to speak on “marginalized identities” to which I do not belong because I am a part of mankind. Homo sum. Fuck you.
Last March, in Resnick’s backyard, a therapist with the Chicago Anti-Racist Therapists Facebook group organized a “blacklist” of local Zionist therapists. “I’ve put together a list of therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to,” wrote Heba Ibrahim-Joudeh to her colleagues. “I’m certain there are more out there.” (The Illinois Department of Financial & Professional Regulation is currently investigating Ibrahim-Joudeh for engaging in “dishonorable, unethical, or unprofessional conduct.”)
…these are emotionally-driven individual circumstances, not matters of blanket policy. It is wholly inappropriate for therapists to promote their own commitment to “dismantling systems of oppression,” as Thema Bryant, former president of the American Psychological Association, directed them to do in an article about “decolonial psychology.”
America First Legal has released documents proving that Facebook gave the federal government a digital portal that enables the censorship of thousands of Facebook users during the Covid pandemic. I see the evidence as a clear “smoking gun” that cannot be explained away. It reveals censorship that is:
broad in scope and
comes directly from the federal government (and therefore violates the First Amendment).
It can only be described as “automated digital censorship,” and it is far beyond the scope of any previous violation of the First Amendment in American history.
…then came the release of the Twitter files in the fall of 2022. The Twitter files included vast number of emails between Twitter employees and federal government officials making it clear that the censorship was to a large extent driven by the federal government. But then the skeptics fell back on the argument that it was not systematic in scope and the federal government merely requested action. The federal government did not actually force social media companies to censor.
The “SAFETY Act,” AB 1955, signed by California Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, legally forbids schools from adopting any policy that would force them to disclose “any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent.” Schools may not, as a matter of policy, inform parents of a child’s new gender identity unless the child volunteers her approval. The law also prohibits schools from punishing any school employee found to have “supported a pupil” hurtling down a path toward risky and irreversible hormones and surgeries.
A man who enjoys sucking dick is not trans-gender: he is a homosexual. Unless, of course, he is pan-sexual. Parents! Guard your children. America has become a nation of perverts.
This is great. It amazes me how oblivious are the progressive shills in my socials to the damage that has been done to nice people. I'm trying to figure out why and how this is. How is it I know about each of these small-minded, cruel, non compassionate, non empathic, UNKIND actions, but they don't?
Here I give the phenomenon a name -- and if you have an unfriender with whom you would like to have a discussion, let me know:
A man who enjoys sucking dick is not trans-gender: he is a homosexual. Unless, of course, he is pan-sexual. Parents! Guard your children. America has become a nation of perverts.
This is great. It amazes me how oblivious are the progressive shills in my socials to the damage that has been done to nice people. I'm trying to figure out why and how this is. How is it I know about each of these small-minded, cruel, non compassionate, non empathic, UNKIND actions, but they don't?
Here I give the phenomenon a name -- and if you have an unfriender with whom you would like to have a discussion, let me know:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dogl/p/the-dumb-meme?r=eo3qf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false