Never Forget? New York just did

From Marx to Mecca, the Left's strange Jihadist bedfellows. An anti-Western pillow pamphlet.

This is a guest post from the JPF family by

TL Miller

, originally published on his Substack

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Never Forget? New York just did

By TL Miller

I used to think I understood the Left.

I was raised on it, civil rights marches, feminist icons, Bill Hicks monologues, and anti-war protests that actually meant something. It stood for freedom. Bodily autonomy. Workers’ rights. Liberation. You know, liberation. As in, “Don’t tell me how to live, pray, or fuck.”

And then one day in 2020, it all began to unravel. I'm not going to re-litigate covid here. I can’t relive that trauma today.

Then, after October 7th came “Queers for Palestine,” complete with rainbow flags fluttering beneath hand-painted slogans like “No Pride in Genocide.” These were the same people who, just weeks earlier, would cancel you for misgendering a houseplant. And now they were waving signs in support of a regime that thinks RuPaul should be executed by rooftop gravity test.

At first I thought it was irony. Performance art. Maybe a Banksy thing.

But no. It was ideology. Or maybe ideology’s bloated corpse, animated by resentment and filtered through TikTok.

My left-leaning friends were blindsided. Some of them just checked out. Others nodded along like pod people. And me? I found James Lindsay, the accidental prophet. A weary white guy with a dry sense of humor and the thousand-yard stare of someone who’s read too many post modernists. He didn’t deliver me into conservatism, not exactly. But he made it okay to say, out loud, “Hey… this is insane, right?” My excommunication from my former artsy circles followed quikly.

And then New York, New York! Rank-voted in Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who openly refers to Hamas’s massacre on October 7th as “armed struggle.”

Let that sink in.

The city that lost nearly 3,000 people to jihadists on a clear September morning now sends a man to the state assembly who posts poetic meditations about “decolonization” when innocent civilians are being slaughtered in their homes.

New York.

Never forget? You memory-holed 9/11 so fast it should be studied as a psychological phenomenon.

We used to have bipartisan clarity on terrorism. Now we have elected officials rationalizing it through the lens of “resistance.” Hamas murders families, kidnaps children, rapes women, and Mamdani reaches for Fanon.

You’d think a city once soaked in the ash of terror would hesitate before handing the mic to someone who thinks the perpetrators just need better framing. But no. Because in this new religion of grievance and guilt, all sins are forgiven, so long as you hate the West enough. Again, my center-left friends, my truly Liberal friends were astounded.

You’ve maybe heard the name Frantz Fanon, if you haven’t, you’ve felt his influence.

The progressive Left worships him like a saint, patron of oppressed peoples, decolonization, and beating the crap out of whitey.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote:

“Violence is man re-creating himself.”

And for some on the Left, that line was enough. If violence can recreate the man, then terrorism is just self-care with a higher body count.

But Fanon wasn’t just edgy. He was poetic. And dangerous:

“Decolonization reeks of red hot cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be first, the first must be last, violently.”

To Fanon, the West was irredeemable. Every hierarchy, every power structure, racist. Every Western value, tainted. And so any resistance, any, was holy. Even if it meant swapping out secular democracy for clerical fascism. The key was rage. The rage made it pure.

And now you know why modern activists scream louder than they think.

Then there’s Michel Foucault, philosopher, masochist, and patron saint of slippery definitions. Foucault visited Iran in 1978 and got the kind of spiritual thrill most French intellectuals only get from leather bars and amphetamines. He called the Islamic Revolution:

“The most modern and the most insane revolt — a revolt that wants to return to the spiritual source of being.”

Read that again. This was about the same time women were being dragged off for showing too much ankle hair. But to Foucault, theocracy was somehow more authentic than liberal democracy. Why?

Because the West, to him, was a sterile machine. He wanted meaning. And what better place to find it than under the boot of the Ayatollah?

“There will perhaps be a day when this Iranian experience will disclose to us something which is universally applicable,” he wrote.

Spoiler alert: it did. Just not the way he hoped.

Then comes Edward Said, the velvet-gloved architect of liberal guilt. His book Orientalism argued that Western scholarship about the East wasn’t really about knowledge, it was about control. He wasn’t entirely wrong. But what began as a critique of colonial arrogance soon became a muzzle for anyone with the nerve to criticize honor killings or Sharia law.

“The Orient was almost a European invention,” he wrote. “A place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories, and landscapes…”

Sure. But also executions, child marriages, and theocratic terror. Somehow, that part got lost in translation.

She later clarified that she didn’t endorse them. Just wanted to understand them. Which is the kind of moral flexibility that gets you tenure and a private driver.

In Toronto, a pride float demanded an end to Zionism while waving a trans flag. In Chicago, an LGBTQ+ activist group tweeted support for October 7th — the day Hamas murdered, raped, and kidnapped civilians. The tweet was taken down, but the sentiment lingered like a bruise.

The Shah fell because an unlikely coalition of Marxists, feminists, students, and Islamists decided they hated him more than they hated each other. They called it a revolution. The Islamists called it a beginning.

So when the Islamists come for Britain, or France, or Germany, the useful idiots with progress flag shirts and socialist TikTok accounts will be the first to go.

The Left became the shrill mother, seeking discipline. Craving order. Yearning, deep down, for the lash.

They became masochists, like Foucault, but without the reading list. They don’t want to understand power. They want to feel it.

They romanticize the noble savage with a stone in his hand. They want the boot, the robe, the shout from the minaret. They want to be told what to do, what to wear, when to speak. They want the lash, and they want it to hurt.

It’s cultural BDSM masquerading as solidarity.

And like all bad kink scenes, it ends in shame, regret, and a very awkward morning-after text.