Guest Essay: "All Quiet on the Leftist Front" by Bree Lindquist 2-22-25
From America's Premier Editorial Cartoonist
All Quiet on the Leftist Front
By Bree Lindquist
My social media has been very quiet for the last few days.
Did it just become unfashionable to put a watermelon wedge emoji in your bio? Chant “from the river to the sea?” Hang around college campuses accosting Jewish students? It must have, because I’m convinced that for many of the suddenly silent people I follow, fashion is the only thing guiding the needle on their moral compass, if they could be said to have one at all.
Why was antisemitism ever fashionable, in the United States, no less?
The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
-Aldous Huxley
Blind piety isn’t goodness. Standing up for your own rights is not hatred. And sacrificing society’s most vulnerable on the altars of ideology and agenda is hardly “progressive.” Most reasonable people living in a free society would agree with all of the above claims, but depending on who you ask, the devil is in the details. “Pious”, in what way? What exactly are the “rights” you’re standing up for? And who are society’s most vulnerable?
Increasingly, the answers leftists give to the above questions fail to satisfy my sense of justice. I don’t believe that only fundamentalist conservative Christians can be blindly pious towards some ideal or cause. I reject the claim that “rights aren’t like pie”, because sometimes, the demands of one group will absolutely infringe on the rights of another. And I call bullshit, with my whole chest, on the claim that the most vulnerable people are comfortably first-world men in dresses who want access to women’s protected spaces, because the most vulnerable remain who they have always been: women and children, like Shiri Bibas and her sons Ariel and Kfir.
A society that fails to prioritize the safety and welfare of women and children has achieved terminal velocity toward its fall. This can be illustrated in the culture of terror nurtured so lovingly by Hamas in Palestine, where their own women and children are used as human shields and chattel, and neighboring women and children are raped and slaughtered without remorse or shame.
Hamas did not just kill these gentle innocents. They were brutally murdered, in fear and pain, a reality that their surviving husband and father must contend with for the rest of his life. He survived, but he may never live again, learning in increasingly lurid detail how the futures of his most precious loved ones were snuffed out.
I think differently about old friends and cherished family members who have thrown their support behind Palestine. Not just now, in the uncomfortable wake of a hideous war crime that breaks the rules of the Geneva Convention like it’s a checklist. On October 7, 2023, when other Israeli mothers and infants were killed sadistically and the massacre was livestreamed for the world to see, these same people bent over backward to minimize the carnage, or even justify it as an act of resistance. Simultaneously, and not coincidentally, they bent over backwards to minimize the vulnerability of women and children in our own country. They went through so much effort to pretend that the unspeakable was just propaganda, or not a really big deal, that it was some kind of comeuppance for past wrongs, or even that it was justice at the hands of oppressed freedom fighters.
I find it deeply ironic that those who fling the word “Nazi” around the most freely in 2025 seem to have no problem with actual mass-killings of Jewish people. There’s apparently nothing to see in Gaza, because Elon Musk’s spastic hand gestures require far more attention, outrage, and analysis. The Bibas family’s murders are difficult for all of us to look at directly, but I’m sure that’s even truer when one has spent the last few years marching lock-step with the notion that they always have the moral upper hand and champion all the correct causes by merit of being on the “right side of history.” If they can look into shining eyes full of innocence and promise and fail to see victims, I wonder if they have paused to consider what else they might be capable of.
It’s easy (and disappointing) to conclude that a “Nazi” is nothing more than a caricature in their minds, one that is always heroic and satisfying to punch in the face. It’s also easy and disappointing to conclude that, in our Brave New World, it’s crucial for these individuals to have a designated villain to direct all their wrath toward, and expect congratulations from their “compassionate” friends afterward. This power fantasy of justified violence guards them from the kind of self-examination that would allow them to recognize where injustice and evil are actually occurring, and to whom. In this way, the leftists supporting Palestine with their whole chests are perfectly matched with Hamas.
I’m looking at a picture of the Bibas family in happier times. Shiri and her husband Yarden smile into the camera, embracing their young sons Ariel and Kfir. If this ideal isn’t worth fighting to protect, please tell me what is left.
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A society that fails to prioritize the safety and welfare of women and children has achieved terminal velocity toward its fall. This can be illustrated in the culture of terror nurtured so lovingly by Hamas in Palestine, where their own women and children are used as human shields and chattel, and neighboring women and children are raped and slaughtered without remorse or shame.
Hamas did not just kill these gentle innocents. They were brutally murdered, in fear and pain, a reality that their surviving husband and father must contend with for the rest of his life. He survived, but he may never live again, learning in increasingly lurid detail how the futures of his most precious loved ones were snuffed out.