The Left Is Smashing Valuable Taboos and Radicalizing Everyone

One of the most chilling things I’ve ever seen was on a tour of a riverboat casino in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Amid all the gleaming, hopelessly rigged slot machines, I spotted a little kiosk and asked the tour guide about it. He said, “It’s an ATM in case you run out of cash. And when you do, that’s not a problem. You can actually use this ATM to take out a mortgage on your house.”

As the son of a compulsive gambler, I felt my gorge rise and had to get off the boat before I threw up.

Now I’m feeling the same kind of nausea, but on a global scale. The Left across the Western world is acting like a gambling addict hopped up on cocaine, recklessly betting everything and mortgaging our common home — or at least our common values, which the Left is aggressively discrediting by shamelessly abusing them. For instance, the charge that Donald Trump is acting like a “dictator” by issuing the kinds of orders that Barack Obama and Joe Biden used routinely. Scott Jennings is only the latest to notice that such reckless charges backfire:

Calling President Trump a “dictator” for the past 4 years put him back in the White House—decisively I might add.

All these years later, the left still doesn’t get it ‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/GdkoKyuFIs

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) May 1, 2025

But cheapening language, and watering down the real meaning of evil things such as dictators, does something more and worse. It helps to discredit our common moral vocabulary and actually prepares the way for people to slink back into old, once discredited evils. Let me explain. 

The Postwar Consensus, Corrupted

After the Second World War exposed the horrors of Nazi crimes — and drew a discreet veil of propaganda over Communist horrors — most decent people in the West settled on what has been called the “Postwar Consensus”: We agreed that tribalism, racism, imperialism, legal inequality, aggressive nationalism, and one-party dictatorships were profoundly terrible things … and if anyone was in doubt, all he needed to do was review the transcripts of the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. Our grandparents’ aversion to each one of these things grew out of a common Christian culture, and for a little while after the war, humane Christian values experienced a renaissance. (The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights is in one sense a profoundly Christian document. Certainly no pagan or Muslim culture could have produced it.)

But the Christian inspiration for liberal values was pretty quickly forgotten. Indeed, by the early 1960s our elites had already begun to turn a hostile scrutiny against the core institutions of the West that had defeated the Nazis and was containing the Communists: the church, the traditional family, the nation-state, and the historic civilization common to Europe and America. Wasn’t each of those things oppressive in its own way? Didn’t each wield power, discriminate against some people, and marginalize dissenters … just as the Nazis had?

The New Left, buoyed by resistance to our stupid war in Vietnam, began to treat the countries which had defeated the fascists as if they’d collaborated with them instead, and the values that drove British and American soldiers to fight as hardly distinct from the motives that goaded the Nazis. Suddenly, adherence to traditional church teachings, patriotism, and perennial sexual ethics were all symptoms of the “Authoritarian Personality,” which would lead to fascism returning if they weren’t aggressively countered.

No, the intellectuals who made such claims didn’t really believe them. They just knew that they’d work — that they’d help cripple opposition to every piece of sexual experimentation, social engineering, and wealth redistribution. The “fascist” card trumped everything.

A Wheelbarrow Full of Race Cards

Fast-forward to the present, when asserting that the human species has only two sexes, not 47 ever-shifting genders, gets labeled as “harmful” hate speech. Want to restrain massive immigration by poor people likely to vote for socialism, or do you maybe even want to deport some gang members? That’s dangerous, un-Christian xenophobia — never mind that it was the policy of every Christian country in history. To hold onto power, the Left is happy to label every political stance to the right of Antifa as “racist” or “fascist.” And opportunists in the Republican Party were happy to grab the same cudgels to hammer their populist rivals. Witness the phony moralism of the NeverTrump movement, which began as a defense of “conservative principles” and ended as a Soros-funded chapter of Evangelicals for Harris.

The Left is wearing out valuable moral taboos, inflating the currency just as the Weimar Republic did. Soon it will take a wheelbarrow full of “race” cards to buy a loaf of bread. By equating common sense, patriotism, religious faith, and any attitude short of masochistic self-hatred with “fascism,” the Left is by this point practically recruiting right-wing extremists.

And sadly, people are answering the call.

Where Hate Comes From

Let me end with a short, chilling 1917 poem by one of the greatest modern writers, Rudyard Kipling. He wrote it as the body count piled up in the First World War and millions of British citizens mourned their family members killed or maimed at the hands of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany — which had invaded neutral Belgium, forcing the British government to honor a long-standing treaty, and go to war. Since then, Germany had abused civilians, burned medieval universities, and unleashed the scourge of poison gas on the world. That same year, Germany would infect Russia with Bolshevism, shipping Vladimir Lenin to St. Petersburg, where he would seize power and impose the most ruthless dictatorship yet known to man.

After all this, and all the British dead, Kipling felt among his own people a groundswell of dark emotion, which he considered justified but also unsettling. Here’s what he wrote:

The Beginnings

It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late
With long arrears to make good,
When the English began to hate.

They were not easily moved,
They were icy-willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the English began to hate.

Their voices were even and low,
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show,
When the English began to hate.

It was not preached to the crowd,
It was not taught by the State.
No man spoke it aloud,
When the English began to hate.

It was not suddenly bred,
It will not swiftly abate,
Through the chill years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the English began to hate.

Are we on the road Kipling warned of? Alas, I’m afraid we’ve been on it for quite some time.

The Left has hollowed out our language for identifying real extremism and given undeserved credence to tribalists. Its abuse of lawfare, its activist judges destroying the separation of powers, and its incessant claim that whenever the Right wields power we face the threat of “dictatorship” have all undermined key pillars in the postwar consensus. The Left has prepared the way for a dark and dangerous future. We must hold to our Christian principles and be ready to rein in our own people when they get out of control. They’re guard dogs who’ve been poked for too long, and at some point their leashes will snap.