Here’s an observation that explains more about our exhausted political discourse than a dozen explainers on progressive moral confusion.
“It’s amazing how much leftist discourse consists of pretending not to understand what’s plainly being said — thus making discourse impossible.”
Clarifying, isn’t it?
This piece is about that habit – what I’ve come to think of as strategic incomprehension, especially on the left. It’s the deliberate act of pretending not to understand what’s being said, because understanding it would concede the argument.
To be clear, I’m not talking about the old left, the one your granddad supported via a trade union. This isn’t a piece about thoughtful left-of-centre liberals, either – the kind who still believe in reason, common sense and individual liberty. Most of these people are perfectly capable of good-faith arguments and moral seriousness.
I’m referring to that infuriating habit of discussing complex issues in a way that has little interest in what’s true and every interest in looking holier-than-thou. It’s everywhere, left and right, but especially prevalent among those who treat politics as a moral identity.
You know who I’m talking about. Let’s call him Oliver, the modern-day progressive leftist and sociology grad, who thinks disagreement is an act of violence and believes the BBC is still an impartial news source rather than a propaganda outfit. He’s fluent in the jargon of social justice but selective in its application. He sports a keffiyeh and joins a noisy activist march, but is suddenly mute when injustice happens on “the wrong side” – you know, like when the Iranian people rise up against the murderously oppressive Islamic regime. Awkward.
If you’ve discussed Iran in recent days or the Israel-Palestine conflict at any point, you’ll recognise the tactics immediately. Oliver will sweep into the comment section with finger-wagging sermons disguised as principled objections. As you start to respond, you quickly pick up on the usual evasions and rhetorical traps.
It’s not just the ad hominem attacks and whataboutery – all political tribes indulge this, and I’ll cover the “woke right” version in a follow-up post. I’m talking about a sort of discourse judo, where your intellectual honesty is used as leverage against you.
What follows is a short guide to spotting these tactics, identifying bad faith and knowing when to walk away.
Understand what you’re dealing with
It’s critical to understand that you’re not having a standard disagreement – one where two adults test claims against reality and figure out what’s true.
Today’s leftists are rarely arguing in good faith because good faith means risking moral status, which is what most of this is about. Their beliefs are identity markers first and foremost, badges worn to signal tribal allegiance. To concede a point isn’t to update a mental model of the world but to depart from the tribe – or be ejected from it.
That’s why your request for clarity feels to them like aggression. The irritated, sometimes even abusive, response occurs because your questioning threatens not just their opinion, but their conception of themselves as a Good Person™.
This helps explain responses to world events that are so at odds with their stated values. When Iranian women burn their hijabs, why do they look away or mumble some excuse rather than show solidarity? Why is Islamist violence immediately reframed as a lesson in “Islamophobia”? Why does Palestine attract obsessive activism while Sudan barely registers?
It’s because the leftist is operating from a deeply embedded moral framework – a manual rather than a conscience – that allows for only particular kinds of victims and tolerates certain types of villains, preferably Western ones.
Learn the moves
This is where dealing with a leftist really counts. Let’s get into the ugly matter of how these conversations play out, especially online.
A typical exchange might look like this:
You: Islamism is a problem. We should be able to talk about it plainly.
Leftist: So you hate Muslims. [conflation]
You: No, I’m talking about Islamism – ideology, not people.
Leftist: Why are you so obsessed with this? [motive attack]
You: It matters because…
Leftist: You don’t care about children dying in Gaza? [moral reframing]
You: That isn’t what I said.
Leftist: Wow. Mask off. [status signalling]
Once you’ve seen the script laid out like this, the individual moves are easy to recognise.
It begins with feigned incomprehension. “So what you’re saying is that all Muslims are extremists?” “You don’t care about children dying?” “Why do you just hate trans people?” None of these follow logically from what was said.
That’s the point. The leftist doesn’t actually misunderstand you; they’re deploying a defensive manoeuvre designed to shift the exchange from truth to tone.
Then come the category errors and the deliberate blurring of distinctions. Islam becomes Muslims. Gender ideology becomes compassion. Borders are synonymous with hatred. Biological rigour is genocide by another name.
Notice how these distinctions are perfectly well understood in other contexts. Science is deferred to religiously when it supports the right belief — studies affirming gender dysphoria are welcomed, for example. But the same body of research suggesting most adolescents grow out of it is suddenly “problematic”. The leftist abandons the principle the moment it becomes inconvenient.
Next comes moral reframing, which shifts the focus from the substance of your response to your inferred motives. The aim is to make the act of noticing somehow suspicious in itself, like “Why are you so concerned with immigration?”, which translates to the target audience as “you’re a racist”.
The point of the exchange is to reward performance rather than gain understanding. Misreading an opponent in the most damning way possible is a deliberate ploy, signalling loyalty to the tribe and inviting applause from onlookers who already agree.
If you take one thing from this article, it’s this. The argument isn’t really aimed at you. It’s aimed at the tribe. The actual exchange is just raw material for maintaining status before a cultivated audience of fellow travellers.
Notice who pays the price
Always keep in mind the revealing and damning question: who suffers as a result of this (often wilful) confusion? It’s rarely the Western activist playing bongos outside a Christmas market, while screeching genocidal slogans.
The cost of this moral exhibitionism is paid for by the women in Iran, beaten or executed for defying clerics. Western feminists who should be first in line to declare solidarity with women struggling against theological tyranny abandon them because it complicates a fashionable narrative about Islam.
It’s paid for by Venezuelans, who endure poverty and repression while Western progressives romanticise socialism over a vegan latte and become furious when a dictator is deposed, as we saw recently.
Then we have the Jewish communities, whose anxiety is dismissed because Israel is the evildoer. In other words, Jews have what’s coming to them. Some leftists positively celebrate pogroms that any decent person sees for the evil that they are. They’ll still tell you they’re on “the right side of history”.
Or consider the white working-class girls abused by grooming gangs. A nation’s children, subject to organised rape, get ignored by the same people who lecture the rest of us on our moral failings. Why? Because they don’t fit neatly into the approved hierarchy of victimhood.
This is the dirty secret of the progressive class. They’re exquisitely sensitive to symbolic harm and remarkably indifferent to actual suffering when that suffering is ideologically misaligned.
Don’t accept the framing
The leftist will try to force you into defending claims you didn’t make. Don’t play along. You don’t need to explain, yet again, that criticising Islam as an ideology isn’t synonymous with hatred towards Muslims. You don’t need to preface every gender-critical sentence with a disclaimer about compassion.
And you don’t need to apologise for noticing that some cultures are better than others for human flourishing.
Instead, calmly restate the argument, call out the evasion, then stop.
Here are a few ways to go about it:
“I didn’t say that. If you want to argue, argue with what I actually said.”
“That’s a category error. You’re deliberately conflating two separate things”.
“You’re not arguing in good faith, so I’m not continuing this discussion”.
It isn’t rude to set these boundaries. This is about intellectual honesty and fair rules of engagement. The leftist counts on your desire to be seen as decent and reasonable – because you are those things. Once you stop trying to prove as much, their leverage disappears.
Know when to walk away
Some conversations simply can’t be salvaged. The reason is that the leftist cannot afford to understand you despite all the evidence and reasoning you put their way. Very likely every facet of their life – their job, friends, status, and sense of self – depends on them not seeing certain things.
In such cases, the only winning move is to refuse to play a game whose rules they’ve set to their own unfair advantage. Walking away isn’t cowardice or admission of defeat. You’re under no obligation to exhaust yourself arguing with someone whose main aim is to flatter their own sense of self-worth rather than discovering what’s true.
But it goes deeper than this. Refusal to play along is actually a form of moral seriousness. When you decline to take part in bad-faith conversations, you’re defending something more important than winning an argument. You’re defending the principle of honest discourse itself.
Every time you engage in good faith with someone operating dishonestly, you legitimise the pretence that what’s happening is a genuine exchange of ideas, making their evasions look like reasonable disagreement. It isn’t.
Refusal is how you hold the line.
This also explains why blocking is often the correct response. When leftists screech, “I thought you were for free speech!” as you disengage, they reveal yet another category error. Blocking someone isn’t denying their right to speak; it’s exercising your right not to listen. Free speech doesn’t mean compelled attention.
What this is for
The aim in all of this isn’t to “own” the leftist or win applause for your own side – that’s just playing the same game. So-called conservatives degrade themselves constantly when they do this.
The aim is simpler and more important. It’s to protect your own clarity – your own sanity, even. When you recognise that a conversation has stopped being about truth and has become a performance, you avoid getting dragged into linguistic quicksand, which is exactly where the leftist wants you to be, hence their obsession with policing the language.
Moral certainty is a powerful intoxicant. It animates so much of the current derangements on the left because it flatters the ego and relieves the burden of thought. But a politics that replaces thinking with certainty is a form of blindness that always hurts the wrong people.
Once you see that, dealing with a leftist becomes much easier. Often, it simply means not playing the game at all.
As the useful maxim goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into — particularly when that position is being used to protect their moral identity.
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I’m working on a companion piece about dealing with the “woke right” – right-wing movements that have adopted many of the same tactics as the woke left. Should be out next Sunday. If that sounds interesting, feel free to subscribe.
Excellent piece, insightful and amusing on point as always. I'm glad you differentiated between the old left and the new lot because they are totally different things. I'm not even sure right and left make sense anymore. We need new and better names. Woke was useful for a bit, and progressive didn't always used to be derogatory, but they've made it so.