The Revolution Devours Its Own Children

But if the left throws you out, the right will gladly take you in

by Stephen Baskerville (July 2024)

Tucker Carlson recently interviewed a Senate aide who accused Joe Biden of sexual assault and was ostracized and persecuted for it by the leftist establishment where she was working.

While I sympathize with her plight to a point, she is hoist with her own petard. She worked in the “domestic violence” industry, where she undoubtedly ruined countless lives with the trumped-up accusations that are routinely weaponized, especially in divorce-custody cases. Her mistake was to believe her own piffle: that accusations like “sexual assault” and “domestic violence” bear some relation to actual assault or violence. They do not, and they have nothing to do with justice. They are political weapons whose purpose is to eliminate inconvenient men, whether it is your child’s father or some political figure disfavored by the establishment left (or sometimes the establishment right, as Julian Assange discovered). It follows that they will never be authorized for use against feminists’ political allies. For decades, Biden was the feminists’ main champion in Congress, perennially sponsoring the notorious Violence Against Women Act, that began the wholesale destruction of civil liberties in America.

This has become a pattern: conservatives showcasing refugees from the left (usually female ones in distress), giving them microphones, and putting them on stage to fight their battles for them.

Predictably, this allows the radicals to take control of the debate and set its terms. Feminist Naomi Wolf now enjoys the uncritical patronage by the right, from which she lambasts her erstwhile comrades on the left for their “misogyny” —and berates the rest of us for our “patriarchalism,” “racism,” “sexism,” “sexual harassment,” and the usual. Conservative media like the Epoch Times, who regularly provide her with extended platforms, apparently expect us all to nod in agreement: “Yes, that is what is wrong with the left: its misogyny.” Thus does leftist ideology wheedle its way into the bastions of the right and the minds of us all. (See Janice Fiamengo’s “Voting Like Women Will Not Save Us.”)

The larger result of this ploy is to displace morality with ideology, as moral principles are discarded and forgotten and replaced by ideological jargon. The right-wing political class no longer expresses its outrage at the left in the name of moral decency (ironically, as the left’s agenda becomes increasingly indecent), but now in the idiom of women’s rights and other sexual ideology.

That cross-dressing men gain access to feminist bastions like women’s sports elicits enormous indignation, because feminists (rather inconsistent and unprincipled ones, Fiamengo observes) can be trotted out on stage to denounce it. (She points out that it was the feminists who introduced the notion that sex or “gender” is fluid.) Meanwhile, far more serious, indeed hideous, mutilation of children in the name of that same “transgenderism,” endorsed by the mainstream liberal-left including the Biden administration, is a secondary concern. Denouncing that would threaten feminist ideology by replacing it with simple human decency. (Carlson himself does denounce it, forthrightly.)

Likewise, one need only observe the zeal with which conservative politicos abandon stigmas against quaint, old-fashioned concepts like adultery or fornication and adopt sexualized agitprop jargon, whose full implications they do not understand, when they accuse Clinton of “sexual harassment” or Muslims of “homophobia.”

All this is an admission of weakness and emasculation by the right. So impotent and frightened are conservative men to articulate their own moral principles that they surrender their independent voices and reduce themselves to taking sides in the sexual left’s intramural, sectarian squabbles. This allows the left to control and neuter its own opposition.

I realize that the reasoning is to show that the latest leftist outrage is so extreme that it has become too much even for some leftists, who find themselves victimized or who flee for other reasons. But this can be pointed out in a few words. It does not require giving them two hour platforms to normalize their ideological spin.

The notion that these people and their agenda are discredited, that they have supported a pernicious ideology that harms innocent people and therefore deserve no further legitimacy—at least until they do some serious soul-searching and show some contrition for the harm they have done—seems not to occur to their newfound comrades in the conservative political class. Far from requiring some amends, the conservative establishment seems eager to swell their own ranks with ideologically and morally questionable people. In fact, they thrust the ideologues into the media spotlight where they can further eclipse and marginalize less aggressive people who were right all along.

In addition to weakness and cowardice, what this also reflects among professional conservatives is an absence of fixed principles and a lust for political advantage and power at all costs. Were they to articulate their own principles in their own words—without ideological spin and without seeking the approval of the radical left—it would alienate some supporters and donors, because that is the inevitable cost of having principles and living by them. Welcoming deserters from the left unconditionally is like Democrats welcoming masses of illegal immigrants: It immediately expands your power base but dilutes the overall quality of the pool.

Carlson does have principles, but such are the dynamics driving the political professionals that even its most principled members are under constant pressure to confine themselves within the currently acceptable range of views dictated by the collusion between the professional classes of left and right. Were he to get in the path of the almighty domestic violence juggernaut, for example, he would be “canceled” even more ruthlessly than he was at Fox News. The fact that he now has his own platform would not protect him for a minute.

All this not only ratchets our politics leftward; it also explains today’s triumph of the far left in the United States. For the left only wins, after all, because the right loses.

And the right loses because—Carlson himself observes—it is emasculated. And this emasculation is the conscious goal of the specifically sexual left: Sexual radicals triumphed over their rivals before they triumphed over the rest of us. The feminists long ago outmaneuvered the liberals, democratic socialists, and orthodox Marxists to take control of the left. Now they enlist conservative assistance in consolidating their power against the fringe left of homosexualists and transgenderists. This follows the pattern familiar from every modern revolution: first overtake and eliminate the moderates on your right, and then mop up the fringe fanatics on your left.

Conservative cowardice and opportunism is what has allowed radical ideology to wheedle its way into our collective consciousness, drive out standard moral principles, herd us into collectivist mentalities, ratchet the “mainstream” discourse to ever-greater heights of extremism, and render us all impotent to resist and too intimidated even to try.

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Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw.  His most recent book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” – and What to Do about It, has just been published by Arktos.  His other books and articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.

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