spiked94%
How ‘progressives’ became the new reactionaries 38%
By Patrick West91%
7/30/2026, 9:55:05 PM
Keywords: History, Universities
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Politically Right Leaning Bias, Straw Man, and Indoctrination, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 24.9% saturation with 274 hits. Analysis detected 1,387 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,100 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 43.1% and a BS Rank of 38% (14,238 of 22,831 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 62.40% of the article peer group.
One of the most conspicuous aspects of politics these days is just how topsy-turvy everything now seems, and how bemusing our state of affairs would strike a time-traveller from 20 years ago.
The Islamist terror attack at a Pride event in Berlin last Saturday inevitably exposed, once more, how progressives have got themselves in a terrible tangle, trying in recent years to render compatible the radical trans movement and their enthusiasm for Palestine – all under the spurious banner of ‘intersectionality’.
Suddenly, ‘Queers for Palestine’ doesn’t seem to be just a bad joke anymore.
Now it seems a dark affront to reality itself.
That atrocity also reminded us how many on the right have seemingly become more sympathetic to women’s and gay rights.
This may be out of expediency – those of an unfashionable right-wing disposition may be seeking any allies they can get.
But irrespective of motives, this change is remarkable considering that, back in the 1980s, the biggest homophobes and opponents of women’s rights were on the right.
JK Rowling has become a champion of the gender-critical movement in the face of trans ideology.
Yet it’s often forgotten that before 2018, she was known as one of the Labour Party’s biggest backers, a supporter of social welfare, and a person reviled in many right-wing circles for her negative depiction of suburban, conservative life in her Harry Potter books.
Many felt she just didn’t like men.
Yet the left’s authoritarian turn has provoked a widespread rethink among those previously that way inclined, like Graham Linehan, who in his autobiography talks of his previous liberal-left credentials, or Josh Howie, the GB News presenter who does so similarly on Free Speech Nation.
The journalist and author David Goodhart made a similar journey even earlier.
These figures embody and voice a perception that the modern left has lost its way.
They see it as too fond of a detached hyper-liberal ideology, or – as witnessed over the debate on Brexit – as globalist and hostile to the ‘deplorable’ working class.
Confusingly to many, it’s the left who are the top-down authoritarians today.
It’s they who denounce free speech.
It’s those preaching ‘Be Kind’ politics who are responsible for the most unbridled hate.
This perverse inversion can be observed in just how reactionary and irrational parts of the progressive left have become.
They think that boys should only behave in a masculine manner, and if they don’t, they should have a sex change.
They think your mind and moral worth are determined by your skin colour.
Want unlimited, ad-free access?
Become a spiked supporter.
This transformation has been brought home, yet again, in a two-part documentary now streaming on BBC iPlayer.
Speechless is the work of the Canadian filmmaker Ric Bienstock, whose mother survived Auschwitz, and who has been alarmed to see what has taken place on campuses on both sides of the Atlantic.
It’s a snapshot into a world turned upside down.
As Bienstock wrote in the Telegraph last week, it is now a world where ‘white-supremacy culture’ no longer refers to neo-Nazis, but to ‘traits such as perfectionism, individualism and objectivity’.
In a conversation with Erec Smith, a black professor of rhetoric at York College in Pennsylvania, he revealed how he was accused of white supremacy for seeking to uphold his belief that students should be taught standard English.
‘It’s a strange feeling to be called a white supremacist by a white person’, Smith reflected.
Then there was the most obvious irony, which made itself clear after the 7 October 2023 attacks: that the teachers and activists who for years seemed happy to silence others for their hurtful words were now promoting a blood libel against the Jewish people, glorying in the violence performed against them.
‘Zionism is white supremacy’ is now the mantra repeated across universities, Bienstock says.
The lessons to draw from this development are many.
One is that woke is still not dead and will be with us for years.
Another is that ideologies that become unmoored from real life will always enable intolerance, because cults always throw up a detached elite who regard themselves as a righteous elect.
And lastly, a love of power, and the desire to build the world anew, will forever corrupt human souls – especially if they are hypnotised by the seductive language of ‘love’ and ‘compassion’.
History’s first virtue-signallers
Today’s politics may represent a disconcerting rupture with the recent past, but there’s nothing new about human beings being driven mad by ideologies that enable them to feel powerful and morally superior to others.
In Judea around the first century AD, the most famous kind of hypocrites, virtue-signallers and moralising loudmouths were the Pharisees – a puritanical Jewish sect who wouldn’t be out of place on campus today.
They were not only condemned by Jesus (according to Matthew 23), but also later by Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in 1887 of ‘that Pharisee tactic of the sick, the loud gesture, whose favourite part is that of “righteous indignation”… this hoarse indignant bark of the sickly dog, the biting, rabid deceit of such “righteous” Pharisees.’
While the Bible foretold that ‘the poor will always be with us’, it also intimated that we would forever be subject to the likes of Gary Lineker and his ‘patriotic millionaires’, what with their loud ‘righteous’ gestures.
Don’t be gulled by the animal-rights racket
Most people in Britain will have become increasingly aware of the more audacious behaviour of herring gulls in recent years.
Following a spate of gull attacks in recent summers, a marine reserve in Berwickshire has introduced a ‘gull ranger’ to improve the birds’ relations with humans.
Patrick Safford, a former ecological consultant, will teach people how to behave to ‘avoid conflict’ with the birds.
‘They’re really intelligent and adaptable’, explains Safford, ‘and it’s always frustrated me that the minority of them that get into conflict with people can get them a lot of hate’.
It’s always frustrating when people justify rights for lesser beings on the grounds that they’re ‘really intelligent’.
That, on its own, is no criterion for affording something rights.
The AI model that went rogue last week was also ‘really intelligent’.
So were the Replicants in the film Blade Runner.
So are spies.
Beings should only be afforded rights or compassion by us on three criteria: if they are sentient, if they can feel pain, and if they pose no threat to us.
Patrick West is a columnist for spiked and author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017).
Follow him on X: @patrickxwest.
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.