The Kill-Switch People

You believe that? Whoa, hey, okay, buddy, if you wanna go there, I guess it’s up to you. I mean, if you can live with everybody knowing what kind of person you are, I mean, I personally wouldn’t go around ANNOUNCING I’M A BIGOT, but hey, you do you.

The reason it matters that there are people on the left who see reality in the ghastly debate over “trans kids,” and then speak about it openly as they’re smeared or flatly unpersoned from the precise ideological place where they live, is that the thing we currently code as the “left” is an extractive device that polices its ranks with theatrical smirking and eyerolling. The machine doesn’t debate: it gaslights. Donald Trump talks about fires and overdoses in homeless encampments in Portland; Nicholas Kristof minces around like a fake detective and smirks about how crazy it is to pretend that there are homeless drug addicts in Portland.

Nicholas Kristof@NickKristof

My video report from the perilous front lines of what President Trump described as “war-ravaged” Portland, a city “on fire,” requiring troops to come save us.

3:41 AM · Oct 6, 2025 · 1.99M Views

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5.84K Replies · 3.12K Reposts · 14.1K Likes

The point isn’t to debate or rebut, the point is to pronounce. It’s priestly, the pronouncement of doctrine: There are no homeless drug addicts in Portland, and it’s heresy to believe your own lying eyes.

Or, as I’ve said before, no one has ever explained Left Coast “progressive” politics as well as a short scene in the HBO mini-series Chernobyl. It is the doctrine of the Soviet Union that a Soviet nuclear reactor cannot explode, Comrade Junior Engineer, so think very carefully about the next words that come out of your mouth about the appearance of an explosion.

I watched as much of the gubernatorial debates in California and Oregon as I could stomach, which was about three minutes of each, and without digging into the tedious details, I just suggest this exercise: For the next month, watch election-focused debate with an eye toward how much you’re seeing an argument, and how much you’re seeing status-signaling and herding behavior about what kind of person you want to be seen as. You wanna clean up all the homeless encampments? Whoa, hey buddy, didn’t know you were one of these MAGA types, I guess we can send out one less invite for the dinner party.

Watch. You tell me.

The weird kids are Mean Girling over who gets to sit at their table in the cafeteria. The performance is becoming comically inept, but it’s what passes now as politics.

It’s an enforcement-centered project. If there are people inside their camp who start telling them that they’re saying things that don’t make any sense, the project springs a leak and deflates. People who draw their sense of their identity from being virtuously positioned with the Quality Learing Center extractive project destroy the whole thing if they say out loud that homeless encampments aren’t virtuous, Somali grifters are stealing Minnesota blind, and elective gender-affirming mastectomies for healthy fifteen year-olds are vicious and cruel. Patton thought that the only proper discipline was perfect discipline, and a Tina Kotek or a Gavin Newsom think the same thing. Your train needs to be on the tracks.