2 hours ago
3
SETH BARRON is the The Post’s Associate Editorial Page Editor, and the author of “The Last Days of New York” and the new book “Weaponized: The Left’s Capture and Destruction of America’s Sacred Institutions” (Humanix Books, out now). In the adapted excerpt below, he writes about weaponization and the current political landscape.
We have heard a lot about “weaponization” over the last few years. On social media, it has become a kind of shorthand, like the word “gaslighting,” for anything that someone finds annoying or unscrupulous.
For instance, it is common among relationship counselors or observers of the dynamics between men and women to talk about “weaponized incompetence.”
This phrase usually refers to men pretending not to understand how to handle young children or the complexities of meal prep to get out of doing housework. Men have used their alleged inability to do things as a defensive weapon in their war with women.
Or you might hear about “weaponized intimacy,” which occurs when someone withholds love or sex to get their partner to do what they want — such as, I guess, meal prep or taking care of the kids.
My intention is less to talk about weaponization in the sense of interpersonal relations and more about the core meaning of the term as it relates to the contemporary political scene. In America today, weaponization refers to the use of ostensibly neutral institutions or concepts for political or ideological ends that would be difficult to achieve without leveraging the good reputation of those institutions.
It is common, for instance, to hear about “the politics of cruelty,” the title of a 1994 book by feminist Kate Millet. Millet’s book was about the use of torture by authoritarian regimes, but the term has been repurposed to characterize conservative policies as cruel.
Work requirements for food stamps or making public benches difficult to sleep on are examples of the politics of cruelty.
But consider, for instance, the ways that immigration — a process that Americans generally look kindly on — has been made a tool for the disruption of American political life, the suppression of wages, and the eradication of American cultural memory.
Citizenship has been devalued, weaponized, and turned against the citizens of the country, who are told in so many words that their time at the helm is over.
Policing, which historically has maintained a high reputation among the public, has been systematically and tendentiously tied to the legacy of slavery and a narrative of global oppression in order to disrupt public order, allocate tax dollars to “community based” radical social-service nonprofit organizations, and ultimately further an agenda of destruction of Western values and society.
Owning a home is central to American identity, and people dream of possessing space — extra rooms, wide lawns, capacious garages — as tiny symbols of the American frontier. But private homeownership is at the root of everything wrong with modern society to the Left, which wishes to verticalize housing in the form of dense, forcibly integrated complexes proximate to mass transit. Local zoning laws are being systematically dismantled in state legislatures in order to impose densification upon the American people.
Education is the great cultural equalizer, binding Americans with a shared process of socialization that, good or bad, offers a common register of experience. But public education has been captured by teachers unions, “educrats,” and leftist activists who have turned schools into indoctrination camps for progressive nostrums.
This is not a new phenomenon, certainly. The history of war is the history of exploiting sentiments to convince the population to sacrifice its children to a greater cause. Governments play on love of country, or religion, or xenophobia to get the people to act collectively.
That’s why popular mottos like, “Think globally, act locally” are so insidious. “Acting locally” is sensible, because people can look around themselves and their communities and arrive at a reasonable determination of what to do. But “thinking globally” demands that you place your local action in a wider context, rooted in an overriding ideology that was helpfully thought through for you.
So, for instance, it becomes a matter of urgency for Americans to stop using fossil fuels, because their combustion leads to climate change, even though developing economies will continue to burn oil and coal in quantities that dwarf our expensive efforts to transition to wind and solar energy. Well, that’s just a matter of us setting a good example in “global thinking” for our benighted brothers in Asia and Africa. Kind of like, “We’ll commit suicide today, and you can join us tomorrow!”
A lot of Leftist argumentation is structured like this. During her 2016 presidential campaign Hillary Clinton declared in Harlem, “We face a complex set of economic, social, and political challenges. They are intersectional, they are reinforcing, and we have got to take them all on.” No half measures; all or nothing.
“All struggles are interconnected” is the essence of Critical Race Theory (CRT), stemming from its core insight about “intersectionality.” CRT is built around the idea that a black woman suffers not just from sexism and racism separately, but from both at once, which makes it exponentially more complicated.
This leads to a hierarchy of oppression and fostered the whole Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) industry during the Biden presidency. Though some of the architecture of CRT/DEI is being dismantled, it persists under the surface, like one of those coal seam fires that can burn underground for decades.
The logic of intersectionality is pernicious, because it compels agreement and negates reasoning. Vladimir Lenin, a master of totalitarian witticisms, said, “Who says A must say B,” meaning that if you can convince people to accept certain premises, it’s a weak leader who can’t force them to accept the next step, and the next, until they have arrived at the pre-arranged consensus that was waiting for them all along.
“Queer liberation means defund the police,” tweets Zohran Mamdani. “Free Palestine is a climate justice issue,” explains the Climate Justice Initiative. Prism Reports explains that “prison abolition is environmental justice.”
Gun violence, according to the American Medical Association, is a “public health issue,” and so is “structural racism.” The ACLU tells us that “trans rights are women’s rights,” and the League of Conservation Voters reminds us that “climate justice must include LGBTQ+ justice.”
The Transgender Law Center is even more expansive, letting us know that “Trans justice is migrant justice, disability justice, racial justice, environmental justice, reproductive justice, economic justice, and gender justice. An agenda for trans liberation is a blueprint for liberation for all.”
Democrat Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, channeling a Maoist struggle session, told the Senate Budget Committee, “Reproductive justice is economic justice. Restricting one restricts the other.”
We could do this all day, playing “Six Degrees of Exhortation.” Every cause is every other cause, and being a single-issue voter is a form of false consciousness. What is needed is an awakening to the reality that all struggles are one struggle.
Zohran Mamdani has always drawn a straight line between Zionism and the American capitalist police state. At a 2023 Democratic Socialists of America panel discussion, Mamdani explained to the audience, “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF . . . We have so many opportunities to make clear the ways in which that struggle over there is tied to capitalist interests over here.”
It is essential to the hard Left anti-police Defund narrative that colonialist brutality be a backdrop to everyday policing in a liberal democracy. Casting the police as violently occupying enemy territory — like Israeli occupation of the West Bank or the US Army patrolling “strategic hamlets” in Vietnam — enables the Left to overlay Third World liberation struggles on American racial politics.
It’s not enough to seek reform of troubled police departments or discipline for bad officers, because the entire system is as rotten and disgusting as British rule in India or French domination of Algeria. So, gentrification literally becomes settler-colonialism, with black or Latino residents of a poor neighborhood in the role of exploited and displaced indigenous people if white people move in.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson chose to discontinue his predecessor Lori Lightfoot’s “accountability Mondays,” when her staff would gather to analyze weekend violence. “I’ve been clear about this from the very beginning,” Johnson explained in June of 2024. “If we truly want to address the root causes of violence in our communities, we must make lasting, long-term investments in our people.”
The word “investment” is often used by progressive politicians to avoid the word “spending,” which is more apt.
But Johnson’s real point is that “accountability” is the wrong way to look at Chicago violence. No one, least of all Mayor Johnson, should be held accountable for the dozens of shootings that typically happen on a busy Chicago weekend. Blaming him, or even blaming the shooters, is another form of blaming the victim. As he says, the “root cause” of violence is the lack of “lasting, long-term investments in our people.”
When someone is shot, it’s a problem of gun violence. When someone is stabbed, shoved in front of a subway car, or beaten to death, it’s usually a failure of mental health and housing policy. In either case, the answer is never, “We need to have more money for policing.” It’s always, “Look at all the money we waste on the police.”
Copyright © 2026 by Seth Barron. From the forthcoming book Weaponized: The Left’s Capture and Destruction of America’s Sacred Institutions by Seth Barron to be published by Humanix Books. Printed by permission.
English (US)