the cult of contradiction: a field guide to modern leftist logic
Yesterday, I fired off a quick post on đ summarizing what I saw as some of the modern Leftâs most glaring contradictions. I ended up thinking about it the rest of the day and figured this wasnât just snark. It was a thread worth pulling.
Because when you actually examine these slogansââbelieve all women,â âdonât police womenâs bodies,â âprotect trans kidsâ, etc.âthey donât hold up. Not consistently. Not logically. What you find beneath them isnât clarity, but selective outrage and manufactured consensus. A framework that only works when no one asks questions.
So thatâs what I did.
Quick heads up: this post is pretty lengthy and too long for email, so you might want to switch to read on the app :)
âBelieve all womenââ Unless she says a man exposed himself in the locker roomâthen sheâs a bigot
âBelieve all womenâ was never a neutral slogan. It was a blunt weapon, born from the ashes of Harvey Weinstein and welded into cultural policy by #MeToo. It didnât mean âlisten to women,â or âtake accusations seriouslyââboth reasonable ideals. It meant âbelieve without question.â The presumption of innocence? A patriarchal tool. Due process? An outdated obstacle to justice. The left turned âbelieve all womenâ into a doctrine that rejected inquiry and crowned emotion as king. But this moral absolutism fractured the moment it collided with another of their sacred pillars: gender ideology.
In 2021, a woman at Wi Spa in Los Angeles reported that a fully intact biological male had exposed himself in the womenâs locker room. The expected cultural responseâempathy, advocacy, maybe a GoFundMeânever arrived. Instead, the woman was branded a bigot on social media. Protesters showed up on behalf of the man, waving trans pride flags and screaming âtrans women are women!â on the spa steps. Leftist media outlets framed the story as manufactured right-wing hysteria.
This is the leftâs new standard: âBelieve all womenââunless her experience threatens the narrative. Unless she says something they donât like. Unless she sees something she wasnât supposed to see. A penis in a locker room? Thatâs not male nudityâitâs a gender-affirming moment of visibility. And if it makes you uncomfortable? Youâre the problem.
Weâve now entered the era of selective feminism, where only certain women qualify for protection. Female athletesâlike Riley Gaines, who was forced to share a podium and locker room with a biological male swimmerâare dismissed as âtransphobic.â In prisons across California and New Jersey, women have been raped and impregnated by âtrans womenâ placed in female facilities. When they speak up, theyâre ignoredâor worse, accused of hate.
This is more than hypocrisy. Itâs epistemic gaslighting. The same movement that demanded the world âbelieve all womenâ now demands those same women ignore their own eyes. To question gender orthodoxy is to commit social heresy. To describe what happened factuallyââa man exposed himselfââis to risk job loss, platform bans, or criminal charges in places like Canada or California.
The result is a worldview that collapses under its own contradictions. Women are sacredâunless theyâre conservative. Victims deserve supportâunless their assailant is in a dress. âSafe spaces for womenâ have become Trojan horses for male validation. And the feminist movement, once obsessed with empowering women to speak, now punishes them for speaking out of turn.
Progressivism only seems to believe women when their stories serve its dogma. When they don't, those same women become inconvenient, hysterical, or hateful. Itâs not about believing women. Itâs about selectively amplifying the ones who repeat the correct script.
âDonât police womenâs bodiesââ But celebrate mandatory veiling as âempowermentâ because itâs âculturalâ
The phrase âdonât police womenâs bodiesâ was meant to be a rejection of control, shame, and authoritarian oversight. Yet in the name of cultural sensitivity, many on the modern left now turn a blind eyeâor even offer applauseâto some of the most extreme forms of bodily control on the planet.
Take mandatory veiling. In Iran, women are beaten, arrested, and even killed for showing their hair. In Afghanistan, under Taliban rule, women who do not wear the full burqa may be denied access to school, work, or even medical care. These are not isolated abuses. They are enforced through religious law, backed by violent state power, and normalized through fear.
And yet, many progressive voices in the West contort themselves into praising the hijab as a symbol of liberation. Activists who would never tolerate a Christian woman being pressured into modesty champion Islamic dress codes as âempowering.â They share fashion editorials celebrating the burqa while ignoring the stories of women like Mahsa Aminiâkilled by Iranâs morality police for showing too much hair.
The contradiction is staggering: in Western contexts, a dress code is patriarchal oppression; in Islamic regimes, itâs cultural richness. Western feminists march topless through New York demanding autonomy, then kneel in solidarity with customs that punish women for showing their faces.
This isnât multiculturalism. Itâs selective blindness. A culture that forces women to cover up or be punished is not empoweringâitâs controlling. And excusing it under the guise of tolerance reveals the leftâs inability to hold all cultures to the same moral standard.
When you celebrate the symbols of oppression as empowerment, you erode the meaning of autonomy. âDonât police womenâs bodiesâ becomes a hollow slogan when you only apply it to Western men and ignore the systems where female bodies are literally state property.
The modern left claims to stand for womenâbut only selectively. Their solidarity ends where their ideological blind spots begin.