The Left Accuses The Right Of Hate To Avoid Debate And Silence Opposition
Conservatives' views on marriage, transgenderism, abortion, race, and more are based on reason, science, economics, and the Bible — not hate.Conservatives' views on marriage, transgenderism, abortion, race, and more are based on reason, science, economics, and the Bible — not hate.Charlie Kirk’s Life And Death Show Why We Must Fight To Win
The right of 2025 is significantly different from the right of previous generations — and Charlie Kirk deserves a lot of credit.The ‘normie conquest’: Millions just joined the right overnight
My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue. So I am telling you, my liberal friends and leftists everywhere. This is what has happened.
I’m not talking about people who are “online.” I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive-thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues.
These normal, middle-of-the-road, nonpolitical citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics.
Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious. And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left. Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly.
I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and — absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine — you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own.
Here are the facts.
1) Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman — a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter — stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over.
2) Two days later, tens of millions of Americans saw on video Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family.
Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept.
3) Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man getting shot in the neck, these same people logged on to Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it but cheering it.
These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are factual statements nevertheless.
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Here’s what it means for Democrats reading this: These normal, middle-of-the-road, nonpolitical citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics.
After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families — the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not. These people are now sprinting — not jogging, not walking, but racing — to the right.
Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened.
When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice.
They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends — their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges — and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter BS.
All BS. Not even smart BS, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ BS. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells.
And they blame you. Because even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their families' safety.
When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and constantly jokes — “jokes” — about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.”
They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin.
They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep.
And they blame you. Because even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social media struggle sessions has now turned to .30-06 bullet holes.
When these Americans log on to social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst.
These people — whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve — start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person.
And they blame you. Because even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them.
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For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but BS.
In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post nonsensical statistics about reductions in reported crime. In reality, anyone who’s been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, and victims do not waste their time reporting it to cops who don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors who seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanors.
In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but nonsensical whataboutism. “What about January 6?” Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares any more.
“What about Paul Pelosi?” That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. Also: Paul who?
“What about regulations on assault rifles?” That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.
In response to teachers, health care workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more BS and misdirection.
“It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.
“I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs — especially their taxpayer-funded jobs — for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.
All BS. Not even smart BS, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ BS. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells. You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it. Because I’m right, and as you reflect on this, you know I’m right.
The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members last week. We have a mandate to ensure that these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do. If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared as a post on X (formerly Twitter).
Charlie Kirk: A good and faithful servant
When Charlie Kirk was asked in an interview how he would want to be remembered, he answered without hesitation.
“I want to be remembered for courage for my faith. That would be the most important thing. The most important thing is my faith in my life,” he said.
In honor of Charlie’s wish, BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock says, “I think he will be,” before reading Matthew 25:23: “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness.”
“I think God is well pleased with Charlie Kirk and what he accomplished in his 31 years of life,” he says.
Kirk accomplished more in his 31 years than most people do in a lifetime — including becoming a major part of America’s strong faith-based conservative base.
“I really don’t like political partisanship, but there is a difference between the two political dynamics, the left and the right. And the difference is at their base, and I’m talking about the hardcore base of the conservative movement. It’s all based on biblical principles,” Whitlock explains.
“Charlie Kirk was a part of that base, that evangelical part of the conservative movement that really is trying to inflict, impose, influence government policies through a biblical lens,” he continues.
However, this is what angered leftists and the mainstream media the most, who labeled Kirk as polarizing.
“For the left, the most passionate people are the most secular people. … They stand shoulder to shoulder with the transgender crowd, the Alphabet Mafia, the pro-abortion crowd … and it’s because their worldview isn’t really biblical,” Whitlock says.
Rather, their worldview is “racial.”
And Charlie aimed to help the leftist youth see the world for more than the color of someone’s skin or a rainbow of genders.
“And that’s why I say hats off to Charlie Kirk. That in some ways, today is a celebration of a great young man, of someone that at an early age figured out how to match his talents with an activity and a passion and a life’s work that glorified and honored God,” Whitlock says.
“He recognized that this world has become so political, and that politics are driving so much of our worldview, that if he doesn’t inject Christianity and a biblical worldview into politics, we’re going to lose more and more people, and this world is going to become more and more worldly and secular, more and more hostile to God,” he continues.
“And Satan realized this man had to be stopped, because he was having too much impact on this world,” he says. “He was converting and opening the eyes of too many young people, and he had to be stopped.”
Want more from Jason Whitlock?
To enjoy more fearless conversations at the crossroads of culture, faith, sports, and comedy with Jason Whitlock, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
How To Stop MAGA From Getting Corrupted By Its Own Success
The current debates on the Right will determine whether this new American conservative coalition will remain American or conservative at all.Leftists' favorite F-word — and why they'll never drop it
I notice to my profound disappointment that two of my major scholarly projects landed with a thud. Despite years of research and two books on fascism and antifascism, my findings have been ignored by both the left and the right — including the so-called conservative media establishment.
That’s a pity, especially with so much loose talk about “fascists” running around Washington these days.
Fascism, as it existed in the 20th century, is dead. Antifascism, as it is wielded today, is a political weapon that thrives by manufacturing enemies.
My argument is straightforward: Fascism was a popular European movement in the interwar period, shaped by several conditions unique to that era — returning soldiers who saw themselves as a “front generation” after World War I, economic turmoil in countries like Italy, France, Romania, and Spain, disillusionment with corrupt parliamentary systems, and a “cult of the leader.”
Fascist movements also fed on fears of the Soviet takeover of Russia. Unlike the communists, who worked to spark revolutions across Europe, fascist groups pushed a revolutionary nationalist ideology.
The most representative example was Benito Mussolini’s Italian movement, which came to power after his March on Rome in October 1922. Italy was the only country to establish a full-fledged fascist government, although fascist or fascist-like parties held influence in coalitions elsewhere. The Italian regime blended a cult of the leader with corporatist economics and nostalgia for imperial glory.
Contrary to the later alliance with Hitler, Mussolini’s government initially drew support from patriotic Italian Jews and between 1934 and 1936 led European opposition to Nazi Germany, denouncing its anti-Semitism as barbaric. The 1938 anti-Jewish laws came only under heavy German influence.
Nazism was not “generic” fascism. Hannah Arendt was right to classify it as totalitarian and genocidal. While Hitler borrowed certain trappings from Latin fascists, Nazi Germany drew far more from Stalin’s Soviet model — particularly in its use of terror, secret police, and propaganda to remake reality.
Equating Mussolini’s authoritarian nationalism with Hitler’s genocidal regime is intellectually lazy, even if Mussolini’s disastrous decision to ally with Nazi Germany at the 11th hour paved the way for the comparison.
My critic Jacob Siegel accuses me of drawing this distinction to “sanitize” fascism. Not so. I do not treat it as an archaic movement out of nostalgia but because it is irrelevant to the contemporary West, which is dominated instead by a woke, bureaucratic left.
Antifascism, however, is another matter. It began with Marxists — and later communist regimes — branding capitalist nations that resisted revolution as “fascist.” The Frankfurt School and its American heirs expanded the label to cover ideas and movements far removed from Mussolini or Hitler. By the 1950s, an “F-scale” was used to screen government employees and teachers for supposed fascist sympathies.
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Today, “antifascists” slap the term on anything that conflicts with their politics or lifestyle. Esteemed Yale professors Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley insist our current president is not only a fascist but possibly a Nazi. In their view, opposing any part of the feminist or LGBTQ agenda puts one on the road to Hitlerian tyranny.
This rhetorical game serves a purpose: It shields the accusers from the obvious countercharge that they are the true totalitarians. In my book on antifascism, written as Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots engulfed American cities in 2020, I documented how the American left and its European counterparts mobilize with the same discipline and ruthlessness as the Nazis before they took power.
The difference is that today’s left faces no organized counterforce comparable to the German communists — and enjoys the support of a compliant media. That media not only excuses leftist violence but portrays it as justified. This mirrors the Nazi and communist tactic of claiming to be under siege even while holding power, using the manufactured threat as a pretext to crush dissent.
Fascism, as it existed in the 20th century, is dead. Antifascism, as it is wielded today, is a political weapon that thrives by manufacturing enemies. And the left is using it with remarkable success.
Progressive castoffs don’t get to define the right
When woke mobs began chasing off guest speakers from college campuses and elite institutions started investigating scientists over minor infractions against gender orthodoxy, a certain class of moderate progressives realized its reign was ending. Figures like Sam Harris, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shermer weren’t conservatives by any stretch. In the George W. Bush or Barack Obama years, they would have qualified as mainstream progressives. But they couldn’t keep pace with the radical left.
These disaffected progressives needed a new label. But they couldn’t bring themselves to align with the “backward” conservatives they’d spent careers ridiculing. Venture capitalist Eric Weinstein coined the term “Intellectual Dark Web,” which Weiss attempted to popularize in the New York Times. But most settled on “classical liberal” to describe their stance. The problem? They had spent years rejecting classical liberalism.
Disillusioned progressives are not conservatives. They’re not classical liberals, either. They don’t get to define the future of the right.
“Classical liberal” serves as the ideal label for repackaging Obama-era liberalism in a way that reassures Republicans while keeping a safe distance from the woke left. It sounds moderate compared to identity politics. It evokes America’s founders — Washington, Jefferson, Adams. If you want to appear reasonable to conservatives while shielding yourself from attacks on your right flank, aligning with the founders is a smart move.
Whether the branding strategy was intentional remains debatable. What’s not in question is how badly this self-description distorted classical liberalism.
Some members of the Intellectual Dark Web drifted right. Most did not. They held tightly to progressive instincts. Many were atheists. Some had built careers in the New Atheist movement, penning books mocking Christianity and debating apologists for sport. Several were openly gay, and most championed same-sex marriage. These were not defenders of tradition — they spent decades undermining it.
They didn’t oppose the revolution. They led it — until the mob turned on the parts they still cherished, like feminism or science.
Toleration of all ... except atheists
When the Intellectual Dark Web embraced the “classical liberal” label, it did so to defend free speech. Most of these disillusioned progressives had been canceled — for “misgendering” someone, for not parroting the latest racial orthodoxies, or for refusing to bow to ideological litmus tests. They longed for an earlier version of progressivism, one where they still held the reins, and radical activists didn’t dictate the terms of debate.
This shared frustration became the rallying point between conservatives and anti-woke liberals. Free speech offered common ground, so both sides leaned into it. But classical liberalism involves far more than vague nods to open dialogue.
Some trace liberalism’s roots to Machiavelli or Hobbes. But in the American tradition, it begins with John Locke. Much of the Declaration of Independence reads like Thomas Jefferson channeling Locke — right down to the line about “life, liberty, and property,” slightly rewritten as “the pursuit of happiness.”
In “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” Locke argued for religious toleration among Christian sects. He even entertained the idea of tolerating Catholics — if they renounced allegiance to the pope. But Locke drew a hard line at one group: atheists.
“Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God,” Locke wrote. “Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist ... [they] undermine and destroy all religion can have no pretense of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration.”
For Locke, atheism was social acid. It dissolved the moral glue holding a nation together. A silent unbeliever who kept to himself might avoid trouble — but even then, Locke saw no reason to trust such a man with power. Atheism, in Locke’s view, posed a civilizational threat.
Indispensable religion
Now, consider the irony. Many of today’s self-declared “classical liberals” rose to prominence attacking religion. They led the New Atheist crusade. They mocked believers, ridiculed Christianity, and wrote bestsellers deriding faith as delusion. These weren’t defenders of liberal order. They launched a secular jihad against the very moral foundation that made liberalism possible.
Their adoption of the “classical liberal” label isn’t just unserious. It’s either historically illiterate or deliberately deceptive.
It’s a mistake to treat America’s founders as a monolith. They disagreed — often sharply — and those disagreements animate much of the "Federalist Papers." But one point remains clear: Their understanding of free speech and religious liberty diverged sharply from modern secular assumptions.
RELATED: Labeling you ‘phobic’ is how the left dodges real arguments
Even after the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified, several states retained official churches. Courts regularly upheld blasphemy laws well into the 20th century. Some state supreme courts continued defending them into the 1970s. Blue laws, which restrict commerce on Sundays to preserve the Sabbath, remain on the books in several states.
John Adams put it plainly: The Constitution was “made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The founders, and the citizens they represented, expected America to function as an explicitly Christian nation. Free speech and religious liberty existed within that framework — not apart from it.
Skin suit liberalism
So when non-woke liberals claim that “classical liberalism” demands a secular or religiously neutral government, they misrepresent history. That idea would have struck the founders as absurd. The Constitution was not written for New Atheists. Adams said so himself.
Faced with these historical facts, critics usually pivot. They argue that America has morally advanced beyond its founding values. Today, we tolerate non-Christian religions, recognize women’s rights, and legalize same-sex marriage. These changes, they claim, bring us closer to “true” American principles like freedom and equality.
Classical liberalism was a real political tradition — one that helped shape the American founding. It deserves serious treatment. Watching it get paraded around by people who reject its core values is exhausting. If Locke or Adams saw progressive atheists wearing classical liberalism like a skin suit, they’d spin in their graves.
The secular liberalism of the 1990s and early 2000s is not classical liberalism. It isn’t even an ally of conservatism. The non-woke left served as useful co-belligerents against the radical fringe, but they were never true allies — and they should never be allowed to lead the conservative movement.
Some have earned respect. Carl Benjamin, Jordan Peterson, and others have taken real steps to the right, even toward Christianity. That deserves credit. But let’s not kid ourselves. Many who still fly the “classical liberal” banner don’t believe in the values it represents. They reject its religious foundation. They rewrite its history. They co-opt its label while advancing a worldview its founders would have rejected outright.
Disillusioned progressives are not conservatives. They’re not classical liberals, either. They don’t get to define the future of the right. And they certainly don’t get to lead it.
Labeling you ‘phobic’ is how the left dodges real arguments
No one wants to be called a coward. But fear is a natural and important human emotion. It gives us caution and hesitance in situations that pose a danger to oneself or others. Nevertheless, fear must be rational, and it must be controlled. Being afraid of the wrong things — or being excessively afraid of things that pose trivial risks — can be crippling.
Despite being a core component of human experience, fear is stigmatized in our society. Americans, in general, tend to be risk-takers. We instinctively recoil at cowardice. So it’s strange that the people who are dedicated to “destigmatizing” everything in our society are the same ones who work tirelessly to amplify the stigma attached to fear.
Don’t accept the framing. Don’t let the debate become a psychiatric evaluation. Don’t apologize for noticing reality.
Here, I refer to a common trend in political discourse — the left’s attribution of “phobias” to political opponents. You know the epithets: homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, transphobia. Some may bristle at the claim that this fixation on phobias is a strategic tactic used exclusively by the political left. But it’s undeniable: What equivalent “phobic” label do conservatives use to discredit progressives?
We don’t have an equivalent.
Are we to believe, then, that the political left is without fear? Certainly not. Many progressives treat Christianity with the same suspicion that some on the right harbor for the LGBTQ agenda. No one calls the former group “Christophobes,” but the latter are routinely charged as homophobic. Globalists often disdain the nationalist politics of identity, referring to nationalists as xenophobes. But no one calls the Americans who disparage everything about our nation “oikophobes” (people with an irrational fear of home).
This double standard shows that the labeling of “phobias” is a rhetorical strategy. But how does it work?
Abusing the ‘phobic’ label
Start by asking who gets branded “phobic” — and for what. These days, it doesn’t take much. Express moral concerns about “gender reassignment” surgeries for children? You’re a transphobe. Feel fatigued by the endless parade of “Pride” observances on the calendar? You’re a homophobe. Object to the illegal entry of millions of unvetted foreigners? You’re a xenophobe — just another American unwilling to embrace people “searching for a better life.”
The ease with which the left assigns the “phobic” label undermines its credibility. Can someone oppose gay marriage without harboring fear of gay people? Can a citizen reject open borders as reckless policy without fearing foreigners? Can one favor vetting immigrants from Muslim-majority countries without fearing Muslims as a group?
Two answers follow. The first, and more reasonable, says yes — of course people can hold such views without irrational fear. That would make the “phobic” smear inaccurate. But if that’s true, why does the left cling so fiercely to these labels? The second answer assumes the opposite: that you must be afraid — of gays, of immigrants, of Muslims — if you hold such views. But if every opinion stems from fear, then “phobia” becomes a catch-all insult, not a diagnosis.
And yet the accusation sticks. Why?
Exploiting social fears
The power of the “phobic” label stems from how society treats fear. We treat fear not as a natural response, but as a sign of weakness or irrationality — especially when aimed at supposedly harmless things.
Admitting fear carries a social cost. Labeling someone “phobic” pressures the person to conform, not through persuasion but through social coercion. It’s a tactic, not an argument. It manipulates the desire for status and respect by suggesting the presence of a psychological defect. And it works — not because it’s true, but because it shames.
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Are unvetted illegal immigrants always harmless? No. Most aren’t violent, but some are dangerous. Yet the “xenophobic” smear exists to deny that fact and humiliate anyone who dares say it aloud. Does importing large numbers of military-age men from Yemen pose no threat? Some Yemenis are admirable people. But recent history offers proof that some have come here to commit acts of terrorism. Labeling such concerns “Islamophobic” is an attempt to gaslight the public — dismissing valid fears and punishing the act of remembering.
Diagnosing as ‘crazy’
The label does more than stigmatize. It diagnoses. “Phobia” is a clinical term. To call someone a homophobe isn’t just to accuse the person of bigotry; it’s to classify the person as mentally ill. Arachnophobes are “crazy.” Agoraphobes are crazy. And society doesn’t argue with crazy people — it ignores them. Once someone becomes “irrational,” you don’t debate that person. You dismiss him. His views no longer require engagement. They require containment.
Attaching a “phobic” label turns political opposition into psychological pathology. It justifies censorship and marginalization. Ironically, the only people the left eagerly diagnoses and silences are those it brands with a phobia. So much for compassion around mental illness.
Conservatives must reject this tactic outright. Don’t accept the framing. Don’t let the debate become a psychiatric evaluation. Don’t apologize for noticing reality. Push back, not only by refusing the label but by highlighting the contradiction. If leftists truly care about destigmatizing mental illness, they should stop flinging “phobia” at every disagreement. Expose the hypocrisy. Force them to play by their own rules — and win.
Democrats want a new Joe Rogan — but their dogma won’t allow it
A New York Times report this week revealed how the Democratic Party is mobilizing its donor class in a coordinated effort to reclaim cultural dominance. In the aftermath of the 2024 election, the dominant progressive narrative has avoided serious self-critique. Rather than acknowledge Kamala Harris’ unpopularity or the unappealing nature of her platform, Democrats have instead blamed independent media — most notably Joe Rogan’s podcast — for her defeat.
This obsession with podcasting has driven Democrats to propose 26 separate initiatives aimed at restoring their lost cultural dominance, backed by tens of millions of donor dollars. But no matter how much they spend, they cannot purchase the one thing they now lack: authenticity.
The Democratic Party cannot manufacture its own Joe Rogan, because its ideology forbids the conditions that make someone like Rogan possible.
When politics becomes a surrogate religion, every policy becomes an article of faith. Apostasy, even for strategic reasons, is unthinkable. The 2024 election dealt a decisive blow to the progressive project. In a normal political environment, such a loss would prompt recalibration. But for Democrats, adjustment is impossible. Wokeness is no longer a means to an end — it has become the end itself.
Some within the party briefly suggested a return to the economic populism associated with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Those suggestions were quickly silenced. Party elites rejected substance in favor of narrative, attributing their defeat not to ideology but to communication failure. Their solution is to manufacture a parallel influencer ecosystem — essentially, a Manhattan Project for progressive social media.
Democratic strategists openly discuss their desire to create a “left-wing Joe Rogan.” The irony is glaring: They already had one. His name was Joe Rogan. But they pushed him out of the coalition for refusing to submit to ideological conformity.
Progressives recognize the importance of cultural power. What they fail to grasp is that the culture they hope to reproduce cannot be engineered through funding or message discipline. The problem is not the messenger — it’s the message.
Rogan and other prominent podcasters such as Tim Dillon and Theo Von are not natural conservatives. They are comedians, drawn toward irreverence and instinctively opposed to rigid social norms. Popular culture has long associated moral puritanism with the religious right, but for decades now, it has been the left enforcing an increasingly suffocating moral orthodoxy. That men like Rogan have drifted away from progressivism under pressure from this new puritanism only underscores how deeply censorious the modern left has become.
The New York Times story concedes as much. It quotes Democratic consultants who say the goal is to “avoid the hall monitor mentality” that dominates their political brand. But that mentality is not a rhetorical accident — it is central to their identity.
Progressivism, as practiced today, functions like a disciplinary institution. Its adherents find moral satisfaction in correction and control. This dynamic alienates key demographics, especially young men, who have left the party in large numbers. And yet the behavior continues, because it is integral to the ideological structure. Asking the left to abandon its scolding posture is like asking a devout Christian to deny Christ — it’s not just a tactic; it’s the organizing principle.
Podcasting feels authentic not because conservatives suddenly became more truthful but because the podcast space allowed genuine conversations to emerge. Legacy conservative media was often as sterile and contrived as its progressive counterpart. But podcasting, by its decentralized and long-form nature, made room for the unscripted. And when people are allowed to speak freely, their conclusions tend to drift right — not because of partisanship but because truth tends to align with natural order, and natural order is inherently at odds with progressive orthodoxy.
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The GOP had no role in building the podcast sphere — and to its discredit, it never would have tried. Republican institutions still treat culture as peripheral to politics, investing only in short-term electoral returns. Democrats, by contrast, understand that cultural influence is a long game. That’s why they’re panicking now.
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter may not have resulted in immediate legislative victories, but it was arguably the most important right-aligned political event of the past decade. It shifted the terrain of public discourse in ways that conventional politics never could.
This is the source of the left’s anxiety. The podcast sphere, despite its independence from traditional conservative infrastructure, now functions as a cultural counterweight. Not because it was funded by think tanks or coordinated by campaigns but because it grew organically out of cultural exhaustion. Its voices include comedians, disillusioned academics, and rogue cartoonists like Scott Adams — people driven not by ideology but by the sense that something fundamental in their world had broken.
The Democratic Party cannot manufacture its own Joe Rogan, because its ideology forbids the conditions that make someone like Rogan possible. It cannot reach the audiences it most desperately needs — especially young white men — because it has built its entire moral framework around blaming them for the ills of society.
Conservatives should take note. The left understands that culture drives politics. The right must learn the same lesson — and fast. While the right didn’t build the podcast sphere, it can nurture and expand it. That requires more than talking points or candidate funding. It requires investment in art, literature, music, and media that affirm reality and speak to a deeper longing for order and meaning.
Cultural power matters. The left knows this. The right must act like it does, too — before the window of opportunity closes.
The revolutionary who switched sides — and never wavered
David Horowitz, the ex-radical firebrand who spent the last 40 years of his life exposing the left’s lies, hypocrisies, and crimes, died on April 29 after a long battle with cancer. He was 86.
A former Marxist intellectual and New Left insider who became one of the most prolific and pugilistic conservative writers of his time, Horowitz was many things: essayist, agitator, memoirist, mentor, and iconoclast. But above all, he was a political street fighter of the first order. He saw himself on a battlefield of ideas — and he had no interest in compromise.
Horowitz spent the second half of his life warning Americans about the first half. And he never, ever backed down.
He was also my first boss.
Born in Forest Hills, New York, in 1939 to Communist Party members, Horowitz was steeped in ideological certainty from the cradle. He earned degrees at Columbia and UC Berkeley, gravitated toward literary criticism, and helped lead the radical journal Ramparts in the 1960s. By the early ’70s, he was deep in the orbit of the Black Panthers, whose criminality and murder of Horowitz’s friend Betty Van Patter all but obliterated his faith in the left.
That trauma marked the turning point and the beginning of a long journey rightward. He completed his break from his old comrades in 1985, when he and his longtime friend and collaborator Peter Collier published a scorching essay in the Washington Post Magazine with the cheeky title “Lefties for Reagan.”
“One of the few saving graces of age is a deeper perspective on the passions of youth,” they wrote. “Looking back on the left’s revolutionary enthusiasms of the last 25 years, we have painfully learned what should have been obvious all along: that we live in an imperfect world that is bettered only with great difficulty and easily made worse — much worse. This is a conservative assessment, but on the basis of half a lifetime’s experience, it seems about right.”
Horowitz would later write in his autobiography that his “moral conscience could no longer be reconciled with the lies of the Left.” If it could kill and lie and justify it all in the name of justice, what the hell kind of justice was it?
Horowitz’s political evolution was more than a turn — it was a total break. And once broken, he threw himself into the cause of exposing the radicalism, corruption, and totalitarian impulses of his former comrades. He brought to the right a kind of inside knowledge and rhetorical ferocity that few others could match.
In the late 1980s, he and Collier (who died in 2019) launched the Center for the Study of Popular Culture — originally just a room in Horowitz’s house in the San Fernando Valley. “The name identified its focus,” Horowitz wrote, “but also made it harder for the Left to attack.” It wasn’t a think tank like Heritage or Cato. “Our combative temperament was hardly suited to policy analysis,” he admitted. The CSPC would become the David Horowitz Freedom Center in 1998 — what Horowitz proudly called a “battle tank.”
I started working there in 1994, fresh out of college. David and Peter gave me my first real job. I wasn’t there long — only a couple of years — but the lessons stuck. When I gave notice to join the Claremont Institute, Peter warned me: “I certainly wish you luck. I don’t think David will take the news very well, though.” Oh, boy, was he right.
“JESUS CHRIST! HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO ME?” was David’s immediate, explosive reaction. Such outbursts were legendary in the office — others had gotten the same treatment — but after a talk, he settled down. I finished my two weeks, and he shook my hand and wished me well as I left.
It took me a while to understand his wild response. But as he admitted in “Radical Son,” he had “a strain of loyalty in me” and “an inability to let go of something I had committed myself to.” That loyalty was fierce. And once you were in David’s circle — whether as comrade or colleague — he expected you to stay. Nothing mattered but the cause. “I would not run when things got tough,” he wrote of his hesitation to break from the Panthers. It was personal for him, always.
Peter once described his friend to me as “four-fifths of a human being.” That was generous on some days. Horowitz could be cold, irascible, and prone to volcanic rage. But he also had a great heart, one which bore scars from a lifetime of tragedy and regret. One of his most affecting books is “A Cracking of the Heart,” the 2009 memoir of his rocky relationship with his daughter Sarah, a gifted writer in her own right, who died suddenly in 2008 at the age of 44. It’s the reflection of a fully formed human being.
I was proud to publish David’s work years later. It always tickled me when he pitched articles — my old boss, pitching me — but I was pleased to publish them out of gratitude for the start he and Peter gave me.
While David became famous for his political transformation, in some ways he never changed. “You can take the boy out of the left,” one wag quipped, “but you can’t take the left out of the boy.” Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, David’s son, put it even more precisely: “While David became known for his change in views, in a sense he never changed at all.” His method of ideological engagement — fierce, unrelenting, totalizing, moralistic — remained constant. Once an ideologue, always an ideologue.
And thank God for that.
David launched and encouraged the careers of many others, including Donald Trump’s domestic adviser Stephen Miller and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. His Freedom Center helped shape the new generation of conservative activists — and sharpened the right’s sense of urgency and resolve. Though he often complained that Republicans lacked the stomach to fight, he lived long enough to see another political pugilist from Queens take and retake the Oval Office.
His nine-volume “The Black Book of the American Left” was arguably his life’s last great project, modeled in part on “The Black Book of Communism.” Where others flinched or equivocated, Horowitz named the threat. The left wasn’t simply wrong — it was dangerous, deceitful, and, at its root, totalitarian.
David Horowitz is survived by his wife, April, four children, and several grandchildren.
He spent the second half of his life warning Americans about the first half. And he never, ever backed down.
Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at Chronicles Magazine.
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