"The Left's Cynicism Blinds Us to Real Threats."

 

I shamelessly clipped this from Farcebook while taking a "Microbreak" from work ;) . A guy named Michael Smith wrote this, I follow him on that blighted platform.

2d ·

The left’s reflexive dismissal of conservative warnings creates a cognitive filter that obscures rising violence and extremism.

I stumbled upon something important over the weekend while writing an essay I called “A Review of a Review.” At the time, I thought my insight was about the subject matter itself—a book review by a leftist critic examining another leftist’s work, where the reviewer attempted to agree disagreeably with the original author’s premise. No matter how vigorously leftism engages in its internecine warfare, its practitioners somehow always unify around one core belief: they aren’t really the bad guys. Capitalists and capitalism are.

But the real discovery lay elsewhere. Both the book under review and the review itself expressed a foundational assumption of contemporary progressive thought: there are essentially no legitimate issues raised by the right. To the left, the real issue is the right itself. Political combat becomes purely a contest for power, waged through marketing, messaging, and advertising—a perpetual campaign to find an advantage lasting just long enough to survive the next election cycle.

This revelation returned to me this morning as I considered recent events: shootings at Brown University, the Bondi Beach attack in Sydney, Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the coordinated Transtifa attacks on churches and schools, and the virulent pro-Hamas, anti-Israel protests poisoning our campuses. Suddenly, the pattern clarified. The cynicism I identified in that book review doesn’t just describe progressive intellectual discourse—it actively obscures our ability to recognize and respond to genuine threats.

When the left treats conservative concerns as mere political theater, it creates a dangerous cognitive filter. If progressives—and this emphatically includes our media institutions—genuinely believe that issues only exist because the right amplifies them for electoral advantage, then those issues cannot be understood on their own terms. They become artifacts of political manipulation rather than problems demanding serious attention.

Consider the implications. Antisemitism isn’t evaluated as resurgent hatred with deep historical roots; it’s dismissed as a Republican talking point designed to divide Democratic constituencies. Radical Islamism isn’t examined as an ideology committed to violence against Western institutions; it’s reframed as blowback from American foreign policy. The phenomenon of troubled individuals claiming trans identity and committing acts of violence cannot be discussed candidly because doing so risks offending progressive pieties about gender ideology. Even discussions of untreated severe mental illness devolve into debates about healthcare access rather than confronting the reality of dangerous individuals circulating freely in our communities.

This isn’t merely an academic problem. When threats are systematically minimized or recontextualized as political opportunism, we lose the ability to assess risk accurately, allocate resources appropriately, or demand effective preventive action from our institutions.

If we truly understood the magnitude of these threats—if we could see past the obscuring lens of progressive cynicism—we would not be perpetually surprised by stabbings, immolations, acid attacks, assassinations, and ideologically motivated massacres. We would recognize the warning signs accumulating around us. We would demand that our educational institutions stop indoctrinating students in hatred of Israel and Western civilization. We would insist that our legal system stop releasing violent offenders and mentally unstable individuals back onto our streets. We would require our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to take seriously the networks of radicals operating openly in our midst.

The genius of this progressive epistemic closure is that it makes the left unfalsifiable. When crime rises, it’s because Republicans won’t fund social programs. When antisemitic violence surges on college campuses, it’s because Republicans weaponize accusations of antisemitism to silence legitimate criticism of Israel. When radical gender ideology produces troubled young people who commit violence, we’re told that the real danger comes from conservative refusal to affirm their identities. The actual evidence before our eyes—the patterns of violence, the networks of extremism, the institutional capture by dangerous ideologies—all of it dissolves into Republican scaremongering.

This dynamic creates a perverse situation where progressives can simultaneously claim moral authority for their “compassion” while enabling the very conditions that produce mass casualties. They can advocate for policies that predictably increase violence and disorder while blaming conservatives for noticing and objecting. They can dominate institutions that indoctrinate students in radical ideologies while insisting that the real threat comes from the political right’s rhetoric about these problems.

The cost of this cynicism is measured in bodies. Every time we’re told that concerns about radical Islam, revolutionary trans activism, or campus antisemitism are merely Republican electoral strategy, we lose an opportunity to prevent the next attack. Every time legitimate security concerns are dismissed as bigotry or fear-mongering, we allow the networks of radicalization to operate more freely.

We need a return to epistemic humility and honesty. We need institutions willing to acknowledge that threats can be real even when conservatives identify them. We need a media capable of investigating problems rather than reflexively defending progressive orthodoxy. And we need citizens courageous enough to trust their own observations over the comforting narrative that reduces all political conflict to a cynical game of electoral advantage.

Until then, we’ll continue to be surprised by the predictable consequences of threats we refused to take seriously.