On Cancellation and the Use of Power

At the risk of being viewed as a Boomer, which I am not, let us ponder the immortal lyrics of the band Kansas, from 1977: “I close my eyes / Only for a moment, and the moment’s gone.” Such a moment sparked for the American Right, a few weeks ago—the feeling that we were on the doorstep of ascendancy. In the past, this feeling has always been an illusion, swiftly dispelled and leaving the Left in ever-firmer and more malignant control. What will happen in 2024 remains to be seen, but the recent feeling of ascendancy has also already faded. It was inevitable; no great political change ever comes without a high price, and the greater the change, the higher the price. We must buy the ticket, and we must take the ride.

Someday, however, the ride will come to an end. And at that terminus will be a total Right victory, if we are favored by God and history, which even though it has no arrow points always in the direction of reality, and thus towards the Right. The Left will be consigned to the trash. It will return to the outer darkness, a forgotten and discredited anti-human theory, akin to Mithraism or the worship of Amon, of no relevance to the daily lives of men and women, as it was before the so-called Enlightenment wrenched the West from its path to glory. Thus, we should consider if and how the Right should use power against the enemies of the American nation, high or low, when we acquire such power. This will not happen today, or tomorrow, or even, perhaps, in my lifetime. There is a very long way to go before this question has practical application, but for the first time in my life, it seems at least a possible future.

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The immediate trigger for these thoughts was an online brouhaha a few weeks back, immediately after the Left-generated attempt to assassinate Donald Trump, the specific event which briefly awoke in the Right the feeling we might be in the ascendant. On X, the massively-followed account Libs of TikTok posted a short video, taken by a man questioning a woman at work about her online support for Donald Trump’s death. (She had posted to Facebook, “To [sic] bad they [sic] weren’t a better shooter!!!!!”) This took place at a Home Depot in upstate New York; the woman, Darcy Waldron Pinckney, was a cashier. She was a sad sack—aging, fat, and morose. Home Depot quickly announced she was no longer employed by the company (although whether she was fired or quit was not clear). She immediately disappeared entirely from the public eye (nor did she ever rise into the public eye except on X, and there only among those on the Right; this entire episode was ignored by Regime media and by the Left on social media). It is impossible to find out more about her; she deleted her Facebook account, and Google immediately manually scrubbed the cache of her account.

This was undoubtedly a successful, if very minor, exercise of what the Right has called for the past several years “cancellation”—the ubiquitous use by the Left of political and social power to cause actual harms to the life, and especially the livelihoods, of anyone whose destruction could prove a demonstration of Left dominance and advance the Left’s cause through instilling fear. (The tactic is used primarily against the Right, but also against those insufficiently Left.) The tactic of cancellation was extremely successful for the past decade, although the Left has reached diminishing returns using it in the past year, due to a combination of three factors. First, X being acquired by Elon Musk, which broke the Left’s absolute and total control of social media and thereby changed, to a small degree, the tone of public conversation. This has caused some cracks in the Regime’s Narrative, although it is still true that, for example, if someone had shot at Biden, it would still be the only topic in the “news,” with wall-to-wall 24-hour coverage combined with unending assaults on anyone on the Right, but in contrast the Regime is already succeeding in memory-holing the story both of Trump’s assassination attempt and his incredible reaction to it. Second, the current wars of the Israelis, which have led to a partial fracturing of the Left, especially with respect to the opinions of wealthy and powerful Jews, traditional supporters of the Left. And third, a modest preference cascade in 2024, which has led to, for example, it being permitted to point out anti-white hatred, when a year ago that would lead, and did lead, to total personal destruction for any person doing so.

Using cancellation, the Left destroyed the lives of a great many people, and more generally, succeeded in terrorizing all of American society for years in order to achieve their political ends. To take one of innumerable examples, in 2020 a random California public utility worker, one Emmanuel Cafferty, was seen cracking his knuckles while his hand was outside the window of his company truck. A nationwide mob was immediately generated, ludicrously claiming he was “flashing a white supremacist symbol,” and he was immediately fired. At any large corporation or entity, every single person who was Right-leaning has, especially since 2020, lived in fear of his political opinions being revealed to his detriment. This is not the Terror of the French Revolution, because today’s Left is hyper-feminized and shrinks, so far, from direct violence, but it is unprecedented in American history, myths about Communists in the 1950s notwithstanding.

Still, it seems unlikely that cancellation will ever again be as powerful a tool for the Left as it was; the Left relies heavily on spells being cast which hold society in thrall by suspending reality, and when those spells are broken, they cannot be re-cast in the same way. The traditional response of the Left is to move to direct violence as a result, as can already be seen in the Trump assassination attempt, so we should expect more of that. But cancellation, at least as practiced for the past decade, will never be as effective. True, little has changed in terms of permitted opinions at those entities controlled by the Left, including all white-collar jobs and many blue-collar jobs. For example, Microsoft allegedly dismantled its DEI apparatus, but you can be sure that the same Right opinions, such as expressing any support for Trump, that would get you fired last month will still get you fired next month.

Inside the Right’s media sphere, of growing importance because of the erosion of Left control, the Pinckney episode revealed a sharp divide. On one side were those who opposed exposing Pinckney, given that the intent was her cancellation. This took the form of three general arguments. The first was that cancellation was inherently bad, because it violated the core American value of free speech, and it was hypocritical of those on the Right, having complained (completely ineffectually and to the cackles and derision of the Left) about it for years, to immediately start using the same tactic the instant it became available to them. (Whether this was a unique moment in which the Right could use the tactic, immediately after the assassination attempt, and limited to that case, or a larger change in the Zeitgeist, we will discuss.) The second, related, was that her cancellation was a tactical error, certain to drive away centrists and the apolitical, whose support should be sought. Pinckney was not the enemy, merely a hapless pawn, and treating her as an enemy alienated those not on the Left whose favor we should be seeking. The third was that it was, in essence, immoral, unkind, and un-Christian. Attacking apparently weak, sad people was unjust. Instead mercy was called for, at least against such individuals, if not against the powerful on the Left. Supposedly, “An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind,” as Mahatma Gandhi probably did not say.

The illustrious Peachy Keenan adopted the third tack (though the three are not mutually exclusive). She posted, “I totally object to an older woman being fired from this type of job. It’s not her fault she is brainwashed. I forgive her; her life is hard enough. Maybe just ask her to delete?” I responded, not thinking much about it, “I disagree. We can only win when punishment for our enemies, all of them, is 10X or 100X what they have done to us for decades. (This is the first time I have disagreed with you!)” This exchange went (relatively) viral, leading to various followups, including Keenan’s “Look, I agree in theory, but this poor woman looks so sad and broken. In her individual case, perhaps mercy is better. Of course if she turns out to be a truly bad person, I would consider retracting!” and my “She is a truly bad person, because she supports the Left. True, only 5% or 10% of the Left is hardcore; the rest will just change their opinions when the change comes. But she signed up as a foot soldier for evil; she is responsible for the consequences. And her harm will advance the cause of good.” I also noted, “It’s the example that matters. All must fear real harm for helping the Left. Just like everyone on the Right has for years, only more. Pour encourager les autres.”

Various other figures weighed in, including Niccolo Soldo, whose work I greatly admire, but who responded very intemperately (perhaps, in his Croatian fastness, several glasses deep into a bottle of slivovitz). His objection, shorn of unproductive obscenities and insults, was the second, tactical one, and representative of a broad swathe of opinion. Thousands of other comments were offered. Far more famous people had similar arguments, revolving around Pinckney or one of several other individuals who faced employment consequences as a result of statements supporting the assassination of Trump. Scott Alexander, a very popular “centrist,” “rationalist” writer, an interesting thinker who is always horribly blinkered by his own ideological prior commitments and his total lack of history knowledge, weighed in, with a set of confused arguments and ludicrously unrealistic prescriptions. As with all such arguments, the matter disappeared in a few days, but as I say, it is worth carefully parsing out the discussion, because it has greater implications for our future.

We can divide the arguments supporting Pinckney’s cancellation into eleven, with some overlap among them. (At the end of this article are links to several pieces that contain some of various forms of these arguments.)

1) Pinckney would likely harm any person on the Right if she could, just as any typical leftist would. That she can’t is irrelevant, as are her internal mental processes and how she arrived at them (such as if she is brainwashed or not). More specifically, it is necessary to harm those who wish to harm us, in order that they, collectively, be dissuaded from harming us in the future. In game theory, this is called “tit for tat,” and it is the only way to play such a game that leads to any kind of stable equilibrium. Those who refuse end up utterly dominated, a situation that is very familiar to the Right. This does not mean that random people are to be harmed or targeted; that does not demonstrate anything to one’s opponent. It means, however, that any representative of one’s opponent will do for the purpose.

2) In fact, however, Pinckney does have plenty of power to harm those on the Right, even as a lowly Home Depot cashier. Apparently low-power individuals on the Left very often have great power over those on the Right. For example, many such individuals acted as eager enforcers for the Regime during the Wuhan Plague, getting their co-workers fired for such offenses as not accepting the Devil’s Shot, not wearing masks, or voicing objections to the various, ever-shifting forms of compliance to Regime dictates. They have also acted as thuggish hit men for the mandated anti-white hatred of the Regime during and since 2020, and for other Regime demands such as pretending men and women can change their sex. It is a historical fact, and a commonplace, that no Left regime has ever been able to maintain power without the help of such people, who for direct personal gain, to settle scores, and for psychological reasons, have always proven happy to assist evil. Among the worst offenders among the Left have always been such people; East Germany is perhaps the best-known example.

As I noted on X, I have little doubt that Pinckney is a true believer in Left principles, even if she thinks little about those principles. Under Stalinist Communism, she would have been an eager little beaver, helping send people to the Gulag. Under Pol Pot, she would have helped to hunt down and kill supposed intellectuals. In both cases she would have done so with glee and a feeling of luxuriant satisfaction, and gladly accepted the forthcoming rewards. It is always possible that Pinckney herself is an exception to this general rule; we cannot know for sure. But is a sad fact of human nature that people love to have power over others, and no exercise of power is more obvious and more satisfying than harming others, especially if at the same time you can tell yourself you are a wonderful person and bringing about the imminent utopia. Therefore, to claim that Pinckney, and millions of unknown others for whom she is a stand-in, is a nobody, merely a chattering busybody with no real impact, is false.

3) It is not an adequate response to say that we should instead attack only the powerful. First, the mighty on the Left are not available targets for the Right, which has very little power and usually fails to use what we do have, and when we try to use it, we are almost always neutered by our supposed allies (one reason Trump is so hated by the Left, because they perceive, perhaps correctly this time, he will not neuter his acolytes). Second, the more powerful the figure on the Left, the more certain that no actual harm will come to him, because the Left maintains an extensive ecosystem of permanent protection for all their allies. Thus, while Kimberly Cheatle, the incompetent and stupid sometime head of the Secret Service, a target Keenan specifically proposed, did resign, she will suffer no harm at all. (Nor did the Right force her to resign; she only resigned after her faction, the Jill Biden faction, was forced from power, and she would never have resigned otherwise.) You can be certain Cheatle will soon obtain a prestigious, well-paying job, and she will suffer zero social opprobrium. Rather, she will be lionized by everyone she knows, as a heroic and fierce woman who “stood up against the hatred of the Right.” At this moment, therefore, saying that the Right should only attack the powerful is simply an instruction to engage in performative, ineffective demands and not accomplish a single thing that has any concrete effect on the Left.

4) Even assuming, for the purposes of argument, that Pinckney does not want to, has not, and will not harm people on the Right, she supports the enemy in other ways. Therefore, she herself is an enemy, and therefore the distinction is one without a difference. She is an enemy soldier, even if the battle is not with weapons, or rather the Right, unlike the Left, has not yet picked up weapons. We return to tit-for-tat.

5) Turnabout is fair play, as a matter of simple justice, totally aside from practical considerations. The Left has done far worse to very many people, including recently throwing a dying grandmother in prison for praying at an abortuary, with the judge, who is named Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, openly laughing at her victim in court. What is sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander.

6) Cancellations by the Left and by the Right are not equivalent. Pinckney was doubtless easily able to find an equivalent job, because nobody on the Right pursued, or will pursue, her, and cashier jobs are easy to find. But more generally, the Left always, always protects any member of the Left who faces consequences for his actions in support of the Left, as rare as those people have been. The opposite is true for any person cancelled by the Left. No entities on the Right offer them new jobs or money, and the Left, which has infinite resources and, more importantly, a huge number of people who have no real lives and obtain their meaning by advancing Left causes (which is the main reason why Wikipedia is entirely curated by the Left) make it their business to pursue any Right person who is cancelled, so he cannot get another job. Thomas Achord, a teacher famously cancelled with the assistance of the odious Rod Dreher, is a good example. Another is Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who refuses to bake cakes for perverts, but has been viciously attacked for a decade by lavishly-funded organs of the Left seeking his personal destruction, even after he won a victory in the Supreme Court. Tens of thousands of other examples exist.

7) It is a nice and pleasing idea that we should have a rule that nobody should be cancelled, citing core American principles and offering soaring phrases about how matters should be, if we followed the principles of the Constitution. But, as it is often said, quoting Cormac McCarthy, if the rule that you followed led you to this place, of what use was the rule? This argument also imagines that there is some still-reachable civil society, a neutral public sphere, just waiting to be regained. That ship sailed from America a long time ago, when the Left first gained ascendancy in the 1960s.

It is certainly hypocritical to say one day that nobody should be cancelled because of abstract and universal principles, and the next day to eagerly engage in cancellation. So what? A foolish consistency, rather than necessary action to achieve a goal crucial to the survival of the nation, is Scrutonism, exaltation of being a beautiful loser. Winning, through the total destruction and elimination from history of the entire ideology of the Left, is the only goal. Any method that does not include destruction of innocents is legitimate. And, anyway, the objection should not be to cancellation in the abstract. It is that my allies, rather than my enemies, are the ones being cancelled. The Left should be cancelled, and expelled wholesale from our society. Free speech is a nice idea. It only works in a society which holds core values in common. The Left understands this, which is why it has always denied free speech to the Right any time it is able to do so.

8) A related, more abstract, false idea is that it is somehow inherently bad to wield power to political ends. You see comparisons in this instance to J. R. R. Tolkien’s One Ring, a claim that any exercise of political power destroys the wielder. This is self-evidently stupid and disingenuous, meant to disarm the Right. To say such things is to refute them, and to willingly go to the camps the Left is preparing for us, as they always do when they gain unbridled power.

9) It is not true that Christian charity, or mercy (again, more of which later) dictates that we ignore clear moral turpitude, or only respond to it with verbal chastisement. It does demand that we give the Left sinner food if she shows up at the food pantry in actual need, and that we pray for her to change her ways and behave in an appropriate manner—which does not necessarily include endorsing Trump, but does include wholly rejecting the Left.

10) Administering justice often requires acting in ways that cause others to suffer. For example, many on the Right call, absolutely correctly and necessarily, for mass deportations of all illegal migrants in America, along with others who have been wrongly granted citizenship or who have harmed America and Americans. While it will actually be quite easy to force illegals to self-deport, through such mechanisms as denying any public services or employment to them, even in that limited and very mild circumstance the Left will flood our media with pictures of crying children, wailing women, and stories of the hard lives of these criminals when they return to the countries they never should have left. If the Right cannot stomach a minor, transitory, harm to one person, we will never be able to do what needs to be done.

11) Cancellations by the Right are inherently limited to direct political ends. The same is not true of the Left, which, always and everywhere, demands never-ending humiliation rituals of victims, in order to conceal that their demands are insane and opposed to reality. This is why terror of random innocents is inevitable under Left domination, but never exists under the Right, which focuses on specific individuals and their specific actions. The Right has no need of humiliation rituals; therefore, their actions are strictly practical, not designed to impose a new ideology, because the Right has no ideology, only a desire to hew to reality (although reality can be perceived differently by different factions on the Right, a significant problem for the future victorious Right).

I generally agree with all of these arguments. We now turn to the counter-arguments on the Right, which are fewer in number. We should separate the tactical from the moral arguments. To be sure, on the Left, this distinction does not exist. What advances Left ideological goals is what is moral in the eyes of the Left. Almost anyone on the Left would be greatly puzzled by the idea that it was somehow immoral to cancel someone on the Right. The only immorality is failing to cancel someone on the Right, or not cancelling that person as aggressively as possible. The Right’s binding to morality, the same Christian morality which has always underpinned the Western civilization the Left seeks to destroy, limits our freedom of action. But there is no cure for that; throwing over Christian morality leads to, as we have seen more than once, atrocious outcomes.

The tactical arguments against cancelling Pinckney are, in general, worthless. None of their proponents ever identify any concrete example of them, because they are fantasies. They therefore immediately retreat to such weak sauce as bleating about “good will,” imagining that being perceived as being of good will, meaning staying one’s hand against political enemies, is a self-executing political benefit. Such arguments are very familiar fantasies; for my entire political life variations on such arguments have been used by those putatively on the Right to self-neuter their effectiveness, to preemptively surrender, because what their proponents really seek, really crave, is the approval of the Left, not the implementation of any Right policy. They can never give any examples of supposed conversion of centrists or “normies” to the Right resulting from moderating Right positions, because such examples do not exist. Conversions to the Right happen when reality intrudes on the fantasies around which most Americans revolve their political life, the result of being drenched their entire lives in unending propaganda. Americans who are neither Left nor Right (although Right is the default position of any normal person, and of something more than 99.99% of people throughout human history) do not decide whom to support based on such maneuvers. They never have, and they never will. Mostly, they follow what the ruling class endorses, and what propaganda teaches them to endorse. That’s not ideal, but what is quite clear is that persuasion through moderation is simply seen as weakness, or not seen at all.

A slightly more sensible, related argument, not precisely tactical, is that the Right should not now attempt to engage in cancellation, because it is not actually effective, since the Right still has very little power. As the Substack author Librarian of Celaeno says, cancelling Pinckney will have no effect on the New York Times and the laptop class. There is some truth here; the moment that the Right could get somebody cancelled for celebrating the assassination attempt has already passed, as the Left has re-asserted their control of the Narrative, a little weaker than it was before. Today Pinckney would no longer face any opprobrium for her post on Facebook. Certainly, it is pointless to try to exercise power one does not have, and except as related to the wars of the Israelis, it seems unlikely that at this moment anyone on the Left will be cancelled. Still, it is possible that the Right will achieve actual power soon, perhaps in the chaos surrounding the likely election of Trump in a few months. Thus, considering whether cancellation and similar tactics should be used is still important.

Another related argument, again not precisely tactical but also not moral, is that the Right should be magnanimous. Why, precisely, is never exactly explained. Apparently, since magnanimity is a good thing in the Western tradition, ever since Aristotle delineated its exercise, it is self-evidently clear that we should be magnanimous, and that doing so will yield benefits. But as I said on X, “People on the Right need to understand that magnanimity is only possible AFTER total victory. Trying to be magnanimous before that is either preemptive surrender or, at best, shooting yourself in the foot and your allies in the back.” If you search for a single example of magnanimity by the Left, you will be searching for a very long time, just as when Diogenes was searching for an honest man. There is a good reason for this, and it is not only the low and base character typical of those on the Left.

The moral arguments are more interesting, and of general applicability to any Right wielding of power upon the defeat of the Left. These boil down to an eternal question—should mercy or justice be exercised in any particular situation? Saint Thomas Aquinas said that mercy and justice were not in contradiction. But he was speaking of God’s mercy and justice, and that is not our topic today. Temporal mercy and temporal justice are often in contradiction, notably on display in a decision whether and to what extent to punish a criminal. A sovereign who pardons a man under sentence of death is showing mercy, but at least potentially eroding justice.

It should be obvious that insisting on placing temporal mercy before temporal justice is a very feminine characteristic, and this entire argument would not exist even sixty years ago, when the public square of our society was more properly masculine. And, we should also admit up front, justice no longer exists in America, which further changes the calculus. Or, more precisely, reliable justice no longer exists, and unreliable justice is no justice at all. The correct response is not to default to mercy out of a misplaced kindness, because we cannot at this moment impose total justice. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle said of King Stephen (1135–1154, and king during the Anarchy, about which I will write a separate article), “He was a mild man, and gentle and good, and did no justice.” The unreliability of our justice system, to be sure, has nothing to do with mildness or gentleness; it has to do with the Left weaponizing the justice system and thereby destroying the rule of law. We should, nonetheless, examine the question of mercy and justice based on first principles.

The short response is that mercy should never obtain over justice in political matters. It is useful, I think, to distinguish between types of enemies. People such as Pinckney are the public enemy, hostis, and such should be distinguished from the private enemy, inimicus. Last year I wrote extensively on this topic, in light of both Scripture and Christian practice, while discussing Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political. I will not repeat my analysis here, but it is highly relevant.

Schmitt cites the eighteenth-century Italian language specialist Egidio Forcellini, who wrote a massive Latin lexicon regarded as the standard reference, for the core of the distinction: “A public enemy (hostis) is one with whom we are at war publicly. . . . In this respect he differs from a private enemy [inimicus]. He is a person with whom we have private quarrels. They may be distinguished as follows: a private enemy is a person who hates us, whereas a public enemy is a person who fights against us.” (We can ignore that Pinckney also hates us, and we are tempted to hate her. The source of that hatred is public war, not a private quarrel; thus, she is hostis.) (A few critical responses were offered to my analysis of Schmitt, and I recently have drafted a detailed and, naturally, airtight, refutation of those responses, but this article is long enough already that I will not publish that refutation here. You will have to wait.)

A Christian should love the private enemy, and if we cannot meet that command of Christ, we should certainly show mercy to the private enemy. On the other hand, the public enemy, the one who, in Schmitt’s terms and in this instance, “intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence,” should never be shown mercy. It is a contradiction in terms, or a form of self-hatred and betrayal of those to whom you owe your loyalty, to do so.

That said, we should admit two limiting principles. The first is proportionality. Justice should certainly be exercised against our enemies who are not powerful, but the rigor and strictness of that justice should take into account that the powerful are far more guilty, and should face more extreme punishments. Simply because those latter cannot yet be reached does not mean that the extreme punishments justice demands we apply to them (such as confiscation of assets and exile, or what I propose as the future trivium of “confiscation, lustration, rustication”) should now be applied to the little evil people, even if we could do so. Moreover, even justice against the public enemy who are small fry has limits. For example, I do not think taking an action against Pinckney that would result in her destitution, her inability to find any job, would be appropriate (nor, certainly, would any kind of private violence), though as I say there is no chance of that today for any Right action. To be sure, the Left rejects this principle, but we are talking about morality, something the Left, practically by definition, lacks. Moreover, we should be aware of the madness of crowds, and avoid encouraging action based on what Gustave Le Bon identified as the different mind of a crowd. In a virtuous society this would not be necessary, but we live in a deracinated mass society, against the excesses of which we must always be on guard, even on the Right.

The second limiting principle is that we should always keep in mind that while people such as Pinckney are the enemy, they are not (usually) irredeemable. In any ideological system (defined, by James Burnham, as “a more or less systematic and self-contained set of ideas supposedly dealing with the nature of reality . . . and calling for a commitment independent of specific experience or events”), the vast majority of its adherents will, as I often point out, simply change their views when a new set of political arrangements, antithetical to the ideology to which they previously devoted their lives, arrives. Yes, this is not more likely, and will not happen sooner, if we stay our hand against Pinckney. It will be purely a consequence of the change of the dominant social power, the ruling class, and the principles which animate it. Still, we should remember that our goal is not to exclude Pinckney from our society, but to welcome her into it when she has adjusted her views. It is only the hard core of the Left, perhaps five or ten percent, who must be removed entirely from our society in order to cut out their cancer.

Finally, how we should implement justice after the final victory of the Right is an important topic. It is not that doing so will be difficult; all of Western history shows clear ways for a rigorous yet fair judicial process to be implemented. This will not be a mere inversion of the Left’s eternal terror. Whenever in history, whether in 1939 Spain, 1919 Finland, or 1973 Chile, when the Right administers justice, it is not terror at all. The Left dubs such justice “White Terrors,” but that is merely a tendentious lie, meant to excuse the Red Terror that inevitably arrives at the exact same time as total Left power. Such administration of justice by the Right has been, for the most part, simple direct justice. True, as with all human action, errors are sometimes made, and personal score-settling or ethnic hatred is sometimes allowed to taint the process, understandably but illegitimately. That is an argument for judicial rigor, not for rejecting the administration of justice.

But this article is long enough, and that topic is, at this moment, very theoretical. If such events come to pass, what will be done, and what can be done, will develop organically. And such events seem farther away than they did two weeks ago. No need to spend time on musing about abstractions. We should simply take away that our imperative is to constantly be on the offensive against any salient of the Left, whoever that may be.