Guest Essay: "The Apostate Reflex", by Bree Lindquist 1-11-25
From America's Premier Editorial Cartoonist
The Apostate Reflex
By Bree Lindquist
It’s a lonely, uncertain time to be a principled moderate right now. On the right are big personalities, big promises and big risks. On the left are simpering, scolding purity spirals and open disdain for the constituents needed to win elections. For individuals whose core values reject a wholesale approach to choosing a political party, it can feel daunting to reconcile a two-party system, let alone snag one of 2025’s standard issue starter packs for being a proper democrat or republican.
Many of us are neither billionaires or childless cat ladies. Where does one fit if they support women’s rights, but do not include males wearing dresses in that category? What if one is adamantly anti-censorship but doesn’t believe that obscenity has a place in school libraries? Does support for gay rights require an unquestioning alignment with every identity-based letter that follows the L, G, and B? Is it “right” or “left” to value the precious treasure that is our earth, but perhaps believe that fears about plastic drinking straws and fracking are just a bit overblown? What happens when you support people of every color and creed entering our great country and beginning the process of becoming a legal citizen, just perhaps not the violent criminals and those unwilling to culturally assimilate sufficiently to exist in a civil society?
I’ve largely just described myself. According to many on the left, this is enough to make me “far-right.” Pardon moi? Just a few short years ago, these intellectuals and radical, open-minded progressives were my friends, and I thought they knew me. I was close to one woman in particular, who agreed with me in private that men couldn’t truly be women or relate to our particular struggles, but she leapt at the first opportunity to publicly bludgeon me with a meaty, phobic virtue-hammer. She is the superior ally. Her prize is smug assurance that she is a Very Kind and Good Person, because, you see, she smites far-right bigots like me even if they have been her friend for years. Funny, how so much history and carnage rests in the wake of her kindness. Heavy is the burden of being on the right side of history, and what tremendous courage it takes to flatten and silence other women in the name of “inclusive” feminism.
While I don’t see getting together with “Janie” for girls’ night anytime soon, I do think that a light at the end of the tribalistic tunnel is on the horizon. A moderate or mixed approach to these issues isn’t unique or even particularly unusual, but the right seems to be tolerating it better, agreeing to disagree with other conservatives and even with left-of-center types who are disillusioned with what their party has become. Contrarily many people who were standard, run-of-the-mill liberals roughly a decade ago are getting screamed at right now by their own party for “switching sides” or becoming “far right.” My core values haven’t changed, but I think that the left has definitely gotten meaner and drifted further from center. The effect, then, is that I appear to be closer to right than center when I don’t think my core values are very different, at all.
This isn’t to say that my viewpoints haven’t shifted around those values. There are issues I supported strongly in 2016 that I feel completely differently about today, simply for having learned more about them. It’s uncomfortable to reframe a worldview, especially one that hinges on being a good person who cares about others, but my background is in linguistics. I’ve become increasingly and disturbingly aware of how “just be kind” can rapidly turn into “no debate” or “shut up”, which can rapidly turn into “capitulate completely to something you were once assured did not affect you.” The freedom to speak obvious truths in plain language should be above subjective and vague things like “kindness”, but once you read “control,” it becomes a bit plainer. This was never about decency, the “right side of history,” or claiming an objective moral high ground. It was about asserting dominance over anyone willing to tolerate that treatment from a supposed peer, and it turns out a lot of good, nice liberals were pretty easy to cow into silence about things we knew were wrong.
While I wasn’t going to be happy with any result of our last election, a possible silver lining is that the era of “with us or against us” and “no debate” seems to be receding, making way for nuance, sanity, and diverse patchworks in place of paint-by-numbers partisanship. While this country is still very much a two-party system and we’re unlikely to break free of that binary anytime soon, it’s possible to look at our friends and family as the complex people they are with values they have considered and weighed carefully, rather than “good” or “bad” according to whatever issue triggers your apostate reflex. All of us come at these issues informed by our unique life experiences, and maybe treating each other like equals again instead of performing a complex intersectional equation is the answer to getting back on the right path. As long as we all basically care more about finding the truth than which “side” it’s coming from, there’s hope.
The original essay can be found on Bree’s Substack. Please consider a free subscription as I build my readership!
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Or how about one with Newsom seeing his 2028 "ambitions" evaporate with the LA fires! Was reading there's ALREADY a recall headed up by Hollywood!
Has Ramirez done a cartoon with Biden, Newsom and Bass fiddling while (LA) Rome burns?