If the Democrat party is beginning to appear tired and devoid of new ideas and energy, you’re right, and that’s not just because its leadership is composed of dinosaurs like Biden, Pelosi, Sanders, and Schumer. Even if you were to remove the fossils, the party would suffer from the same enervated, dated quality. Every one of its ideas is stuck in the past, and that’s because its facts are stuck in the past. The latest example is the utterly fake claim that Matt Walsh was flashing covert swastikas on his X page.
There are two factual lines to unpack here, so I’ll start with the Democrat party’s being trapped in the mid-20th century.
Almost 20 years ago, when I was still writing as Bookworm, Thomas Lifson was kind enough to publish an essay I wrote entitled “Regressives.” In it, I pointed out that the Democrats’ political positions were tied to concerns in America that had been resolved decades ago.
Image created using AI.
Their anti-war stance saw them recycle the glory days of Vietnam. It’s true that our foray into Iraq was a bad idea, although that’s partly because the left, as it successfully did by the end of the Vietnam War, handicapped America’s ability to fight a war to victory.
However, 21st-century leftists never acknowledged the nature of our enemy, which was a nation directly hostile to America that gave aid and succor to those who had just launched a war against us. This was different from Vietnam, which was a country trapped between two massive warring nations. What mattered to the leftists was that they could recycle their Vietnam-era slogans.
They’ve been equally regressive on abortion, which they’re still framing as if it’s 1955. If women don’t get abortions, the land will be littered with coat hangers and starving, pregnant teenagers freezing to death on sidewalks because their cruel, parents threw them to the curb when they showed up pregnant. Nowadays, birth control is available at grocery stores, Plan B comes via the mail, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy is so normalized that nobody cares.
When it comes to race relations, it’s always 1963, with George Wallace talking about segregation today, tomorrow, and forever, and Orville Faubus turning firehoses and attack dogs on blacks. Leftists are unaffected by practical realities, such as a two-term black president, two of the most admired women in America (Michelle and Oprah) being black, the end of all racist laws, and the fact that Americans—at least, white Americans—have abandoned anti-black racism.
And of course, it’s always 1945, when the heroic Soviet Union bravely destroyed the Nazis (never mind the inconvenient fact that they were allies until Hitler violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). Within days of the end of the war, the left had successfully deleted fascism’s socialist roots, and attached the pejorative firmly to the Republican party, along with the contention that only fascists are racists (see, e.g., Hitler). Ergo, Republicans are racist and fascist.
That last is a convenient narrative package that came together in a massive and entirely faked storm of outrage over Matt Walsh refusing to have a struggle session about a comment someone left on a tweet Walsh had published. And the reason the comment was allegedly so awful was because it had a subliminal swastika in it that you can totally see if you’ve had it repeatedly flashed before your eyes like some mid-20th-century brainwashing technique of the type last used in Zoolander.
Briefly, Walsh attacked the claim that white people in South Africa aren’t “native,” despite having roots going back hundreds of years. A Trump hater came back with a response that includes an obviously AI-created picture showing several young blonde women:
These people are native to Europe. Not the Americas or Africa.
— Quadcarl (@quadcarl_carl) May 13, 2025
Sounds like you need to Google what the word native means. pic.twitter.com/W7XCUDDWuJ
Unbeknownst to all sane people, that photo is apparently a swastika. Now, you may not see a swastika, and I guarantee you that I don’t see a swastika, but if you look really carefully, use your imagination, hate someone powerfully enough, and have a little help from animation, you, too, will magically see a swastika. I cannot embed the post that originally made that charge, which includes both a helpful animation and a red ink drawing, but you can see it here.
Walsh had the appropriate response for this kind of thing, something all of us should commit to memory. (Language warning.)
I've been in the middle of some bullshit outrage cycles in my day, but the one that some of you cooked up this week is probably the fakest of all. There are even "conservatives" hounding me and demanding that I apologize for a hidden swastika that someone else posted in a tweet… https://t.co/gvqu2edWGL
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) May 15, 2025
I've been in the middle of some bullshit outrage cycles in my day, but the one that some of you cooked up this week is probably the fakest of all. There are even "conservatives" hounding me and demanding that I apologize for a hidden swastika that someone else posted in a tweet that I replied to.
Just to be perfectly clear to all of the slimy little smear merchants playing this game: I apologize for nothing. I owe you nothing. I will not explain myself to you. You all know exactly what you're doing. If anyone is owed an apology in this situation, it's me. But I don't expect one because that would require a level of honor and honesty that none of these trolls possess. Piss off. All of you. There's my statement, for the many who have asked.
Here’s Walsh’s entire breakdown of what happened:
I can’t add to Walsh’s analysis about this latest iteration of the left’s mid-20th-century obsession with fascism and racism. However, what I can do is point out one other throwback idea we’re seeing today from the left.
My father had on his bookshelf a slim volume that had been pressed upon him in the mid-1970s by an earnest leftist friend. It would, she said, reveal to him the malevolent capitalist machinations of big business to brainwash Americans: Subliminal imagery in advertising.
The book—and it might have been Vance Packard’s 1957 The Hidden Persuaders—promised that, if you looked hard enough at its blurry black-and-white reproductions of ice cubes in scotch and Coke advertisements, or studied the swirl of hair in shampoo ads, you would be one of the enlightened who could see through the subliminal brainwashing. (Most of it, of course, being all about sex.) That is exactly what we’re seeing here with the Matt Walsh kerfuffle.
In a way, conservatives are also locked in the past. Our past is the years from 1788 to 1791, the period of time over which the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified, complete with their timeless ideas about limited government and individual rights. The left, by contrast, is caught in a more recent past, one of tragic facts that are no longer operative and stupid ideas that really need to go away.