Our Struggle Series: False Flags: When Non-Leftist Agendas Disguise Themselves as Leftist Struggle

Our Struggle is a militant theoretical series dedicated to dismantling the illusions that pass for politics in our time. It refuses the comfort of spectacle, symbolic resistance, or shallow identity performance. Instead, it seeks to build a strategic framework grounded in material conditions, emotional clarity, and the sober recognition that we are, in fact, at war—against entrenched power, liberal containment, and the internalized habits that dull insurgency before it begins.

Read the previous attack here.

To begin this fourth attack, it must be made clear that there are movements today that wield confrontation, that risk confrontation, and that utilize rhetoric and symbols of struggle that imply a relationship with the left—but whose ends are not equity, and whose logic is selfishness. These are the false flags of a multitude of modern struggles: movements and political actors who drape themselves in the aesthetics, language, or posture of leftist revolt.

Ecological terrorism is one of the more blatantly obvious leftist false flags because of how insular its actors are. Of course, ecological terrorism is politically real. It confronts the state, disrupts capital, and seizes headlines. But its allegiance is not to collective emancipation. It operates with a purity logic that reduces the world to biospheric absolutes and leaves behind questions of redistribution, labor, and social equity. For example, an organization called sea shepard has for decades opposed the whaling practices of the Makah Tribe, an indigenous group located in Neah Bay, Washington. In a post titled, “Whaling in the Pacific Northwest Must Stay in the Past,” the organization writes:

The Makah voluntarily stopped hunting whales in the 1920s. They have since survived and evolved—like all cultures do—without taking another whale until one hunt in 1999. Now, 25 years later, the tribe seeks to revive this tradition. The problem? The numbers just don’t add up.

This application fails to demonstrate a nutritional or survival-based subsistence need. Data from the last hunt shows that only 63% of homes received any whale meat, and less than half received blubber. Even if a whale is killed, the per-person yield for interested tribal members would be a mere two to four pounds of meat. That’s not subsistence—that’s ceremonial.

Sea shepard looks at Indigenous food consumption as though its legitimacy is tethered to starvation-level desperation like applauding Man vs. Wild’s Bear Grylls for taking an extreme action like drinking his own piss, rather than employing alternative strategies, simply because the camera is rolling. See, if the Makah don’t turn every bit of blubber into a ration, every bone into a tool, they’re accused of masquerading as traditional. It’s settler voyeurism pretending to give a damn about the world. Ultimately though, numbers don’t lie. No matter how stupid their rhetoric is, the very data that they use to undermine the Makah undermines their argument. Indeed, 63% is the majority! If this distribution occurred from a single hunt, it suggests a broad desire and interest in the whale parts.

            Ecology and environmental protection are vital—but any movement that forgets people, or worse, values nonhuman life over human dignity, isn’t saving the planet. It’s betraying it. The environment is not a museum of pristine wilderness; it’s a living network that includes human culture, survival, and, tradition.

            Selfishness then, is the core reason that the ecological terrorist flag is a false one because it cloaks vanity in the illusion of justice. This is similar to performative leftist politics, which mistakes aesthetic outrage and purity tests for actual solidarity or structural change. For example, one of our writers years ago, while living in New York, worked with an organization called Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Committee. There came a point during a meeting where the topic of discussion centered around revolution and one person in the meeting said, “I’m not sure we want revolution.” Yes, the fuck you do! If not, get out of spaces with “Anarchist” in the title.

            To attend a meeting of an organization with “Anarchist” in the title and question revolution is vanity. It is also concerning that such a comment could be uttered with a speaker who valued the logic behind the words. Pop cultural interpretations of the zeitgeist that is post-structuralist thought might value this rhetorical ouroboros, where commitment is differed indefinitely in the name of critical nuance, but it is a form of epistemic self-sabotage. One could imagine a poststructuralist rationalizing this: Revolution is a signifier, and to embrace it too fully is to risk reification. But this kind of linguistic gymnastics is not a philosophy of liberation, it’s a philosophical or pseudo philosophical stalling tactic. To be clear, this isn’t an attack on poststructuralism, as Jaques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak and a multitude of other writers have deeply enriched the epistemology of liberation (in fact, Derrida’s writing on violence is very meaningful to The GroundUp), this is an attack on simplistic understandings.

            The desire to appear clever, skeptical, or above it all too often masquerades as wisdom. But it is not wisdom. It is a fear of consequences. A fear of the unknown. A fear of being ridiculed. A fear of failure. A fear of getting one’s hands dirty. It is the fear of consequences dressed in the garb of sophistication. MACC at the time this person said the comment was haute couture. Teen Vouge was writing articles about anarchism and its writers attended MACC meetings. The meetings seemed to be a runway of graduate ideas—radical aesthetics without material consequences.

            It is one thing to be skeptical about revolution as a liberal. It is a different matter to be skeptical about revolution as a socialist living in a capitalist country. To be unwilling to choose revolution as a person who does not live in a system that functions akin to their beliefs is a sign that such a person should shut their mouths and not attempt to theorize for others. This type of person is not a leader. They are ignorant at best and a parasite at worst.

            This tendency toward performance over consequence doesn’t stop at ecological militancy or pseudo-anarchist/socialist posture. It extends, with alarming consistency, into the domains of gender and sexuality politics.  

            In our essay “Abusive Metaphysical Politics Are Not Leftist,” we argue that identities that are interpolated as feminists or men’s rights activists have a stake to self interest separate from their potential investment in leftism and that is understandable. The same can be noted for those under ideology umbrellas for other gender politics such as transgender umbrellas or sexuality umbrellas. 

            Yet, what must be made clear is that while such identities may have overlapping interests with leftist aims—especially when confronting real violence or discrimination—their core commitments are often self-referential, orbiting around affirmation, recognition, and symbolic autonomy rather than collective liberation or material redistribution. When political energy is expended not toward structural transformation but toward the enforcement of metaphysical entitlements—“being seen,” “being validated,” “being believed”—the project ceases to be leftist. It becomes therapeutic, aesthetic, or at worst, a demand for unchecked individual sovereignty. Dignity is still critical and of the utmost importance, but dignity divorced from collective discipline and economic structure becomes unmoored, liable to drift into narcissistic self-expression.

Vain, selfish gender politics—those that elevate individual affirmation over shared material progress, such as the push for uncritical normalization of adolescent genital surgeries—are not expressions of freedom but distortions of it. This is not an anti-trans position; in fact, a truly pro-trans perspective requires us to distinguish between solidarity rooted in justice and vanity masked as politics. Leftism does not exist to validate every personal desire or identity performance. It exists to transform structures of oppression and build collective liberation. Therefore, the politics of gender and sex must be disciplined not by cultural consensus or symbolic inclusion, but by their relationship to justice, redistribution, and shared power.

Leftism does not exist to validate every personal desire or identity performance.

No serious political movement should pretend there are no physiological differences between someone who has gone through male puberty and cisgender women—especially in competitive sports, where this fact becomes materially relevant. Similarly, the irreversible medicalization of adolescents demands not celebration, but caution, reflection, and oversight rooted in social ethics, not consumer choice. A truly leftist project must reclaim its moral authority—not by rejecting trans lives, but by rejecting indulgent politics in favor of principled material discipline that serves the many, not the few.

This conflation of personal indulgence with political expression becomes even more unsettling when we examine how ideology now functions as a shield for behavior that would, in any prior era, be met with confusion—if not outrage. We are not simply living in an age of tolerance; we are living in an age where indulgence, when wrapped in the right buzzwords, is reframed as courage. Take for example the widely circulated story—found not on adult sites but on Facebook—of a grandmother, mother, and daughter separately producing adult OnlyFans content. If this is considered courage, Kirk Johnson, the man behind the widely circulated internet meme and shock video Jarsquatter, Alexey Tatarov, who inserted a jar inside his anus for the jar to then break and cause bleeding is like Joan of Ark!

We don’t want individuals engaging in debauchery to be featured on the left’s highlight reel. Being a former drug dealer or part of an intergenerational OnlyFans operation doesn’t make someone a hero—nor does it imply any inherent leadership ability. These stories may stir intrigue or evoke sympathy, but they are not emblems of leftist progress. Elevating such figures without critical examination dilutes the seriousness of political struggle and replaces collective discipline with spectacle. That this isn’t just happening, but is being algorithmically promoted, is emblematic of a deeper cultural drift: one where intergenerational pornography is marketed as empowerment, and the fact of its virality is treated as proof of moral progress.

We are not calling for Sharia law—but we must be honest about the fact that leftist politics, if it is to mean anything at all, must include mechanisms of discipline. What we are witnessing is not liberation but the ideological protection of indulgence for indulgence’s sake. And if leftism refuses to distinguish between radical freedom and performative collapse, it loses any claim to being the moral or material vanguard of history.

The mention of Sharia law in the previous paragraph was more appropriate than mentioning other systems of jurisprudence because again, while this is not a call for religious authoritarianism, it is a call for standards—real ones. To that end, we might look not to Islam as a theology, but as a disciplining body. By stripping Islam of its theistic metaphysics and divine ontology, we can instead draw on its structural and communal rigor—its mechanisms of moral and behavioral regulation embedded in jurisprudence. While someone like Abdullah Öcalan’s ideological adaptation of certain Islamic communal principles for the People's Defense Units/Women's Protection Units (YPG / YPJ), with a post-Marxist rejection of authoritarianism provided an ethical architecture in Rojava, what the american left lacks is an ethical architecture: one that refuses carceral punishments and dogmatic control, yet still insists on accountability, dignity enforcement, and meaningful consequences for transgression. Without this spine, leftism ceases to be a politics of transformation and becomes merely a mirror of liberal permissiveness—unmoored, incoherent, and ultimately powerless.

So what is needed is a secular analogue to something like hadd—not in a brutal way, but indeed as a real material discipline on the threshold between communal integrity and corrosive behavior. It is like the kneecapping of the Irish Republican Army in spirt, not because the end is violent, but because it communicates to a political body: You have violated the trust of the people, and the people remember.  

Public accountability is not censorship. It is the lifeblood of any movement that claims to care about the social good. When collective standards erode in the name of limitless self-expression, politics becomes little more than therapy for the self-obsessed. The case of the three generations of OnlyFans performers is not just a private matter, it is a public one, algorithmically elevated and absorbed into common discourse as if it carries some progressive valence. It does not. What it reflects is the failure of our political culture to say “no”—to decadence, to narcissism, to the slow erosion of dignity masked as empowerment.

This is not a call for repression, but for reclamation. Reclamation of purpose, of standards, of the seriousness required to build an emancipatory project that does more than mirror the decay of the dominant culture in a different aesthetic. We must be willing to discipline our narratives, not to exclude, but to clarify who is and who isn’t doing the revolutionary work. To say: this does not belong in our highlight reel. And we must develop ethical muscles to do so without apology.

And it is not just individual acts of decay that are at the heart of this matter. It is decay that is systemic. France, a republic that prides itself on secular rationalism and universal rights, criminalizes non-state-sanctioned paternity testing. Outside of a court order, a father who seeks biological certainty risks legal penalty. In a society that claims transparency as a civic virtue and autonomy as a moral cornerstone, this prohibition reveals a profound contradiction: the state defends epistemic clarity in the public sphere while restricting it in the most intimate domain of lineage and responsibility. Whether justified on grounds of social stability or privacy, the effect is unmistakable, and the question of fatherhood is subordinated to institutional management. In matters of fidelity and inheritance, the law does not trust the individual with knowledge of its own condition.

It is precisely this kind of contradiction that leads some critics of the West to speak of moral incoherence rather than freedom. Authoritarian systems, however oppressive, often present themselves as internally consistent: they do not veil their standards in procedural ambiguity or outsource moral clarity to bureaucratic discretion. This does not make them admirable, but it does explain why they appear to possess a form of structural integrity that liberal democracies often lack. The question is not whether regimes should be emulated, but why liberal societies so often sacrifice coherence in the name of permissiveness, and whether a non-authoritarian form of moral seriousness is possible.

Afghanistan as an Islamic republic does not simply repudiate western values, like how the modern Zapatistas repudiate capitalism but no longer wage war, but in fact, the taliban achieved military and political victory by outlasting western powers. Now, is this because as Seyyid Qutb writes, new leadership for humanity preserves and develops a blend of the creativity of Europe with high ideals and values of which Islam is the only system capable of sustaining? No, because high ideals and values exist all over the world and they can be embraced by the secular as well as the religious. As Öcalan (2015) writes, there is great importance in understanding the difference between cultural expansion that elevates with that that of colonialism, occupation, and forced assimilation. An example of the latter is the interwoven nature of Arabization and Islam and the interwoven nature of Zionism and Israel.

In fact, there is no need for there to be a metaphysical underpinning at all, if one holds that there are answers to moral questions and they are not reducible to anything else (Nagel in Korsgaard, 1996). Indeed, while the taliban refused the poeticized humanism of Rumi in favor of Sharia, they have also banned the very works of Qutb, whose Milestones electrified movements worldwide with its vanguardist commitment to Sharia! Al-qaeda, by contrast, was inspired by the work of Qutb and his emphasis on the vanguard and established a theologically framed insurgent praxis and with about half a million dollars inflicted over an estimated trillion dollars in economic and structural damage in america and on top of that, the sunk cost of western response through war. However, they saw violence as initiatory, rather than something that could be legitimate, like how in Qutibism, a moral ethical, and social transformation is required within the vanguard in order for violence to be pure, and al-qaeda utilized violence as a shortcut to political disruption. This is crystal clear when considering their ideological byproduct organizations like isis who through their rape and other extreme grotesque defilements of this world have made clear that they were not in possession of high ideals and values.

It is important to return to the notion of moral imperatives existing via material instances of suffering and pain when reflecting on hadd and on those who have indeed historically disciplined those within their sphere. God or gods are not required for a framework, but it must be real and it must be actionable. Pain and suffering obviously do not exhaust lived or even political reality, but they are dimensions of political and social reality relevant to leftism that give credence to leftist action. The answer to the moral matter of the pain and suffering of a group of people is the long-term elimination of it. Just as how militaries place trust in their commanders to determine how to complete a mission, the how of the elimination of pain of suffering is dependent on real, material circumstances, not theory. This nuance helps make clear that leftism requires moral seriousness and is necessarily in opposition to nihilism and rigid dogmatism.

To be absolutely clear, my inclusion of Qutb is out of respect and my inclusion of the taliban and al-qaeda and isis is for contrast and criticism. While the two former rather than the latter of those organizations are certainly complex in ideology, they flattened Qutb’s ideology into reductive violence and in the case of the taliban, engaged in erasure.

What then is most critical to critique is not intensity and fidelity, but of bad faith and spectacle. Certainly, Catholic philosophy through public interpretation has resulted in reductive violence through multiple inquisitions throughout history. A key point of note though, the very first decretal on abolishing heresy, that led to the Inquisitions, “Ad abolendam diversam haeresium pravitatem,” did not explicitly mandate the death penalty for heresy. Instead, it required convicted heretics to be turned over to the secular authorities to receive their animadversion debita (“due penalty” or “due punishment”). It was initially the secular authorities that engaged in the reductive violence and only later through imperial canon law, notably Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX, was heresy punished with formal severity.

Yet, critique must not calcify into cynicism. If the Catholic Church once exemplified a theology of violence through the Inquisitions—where fidelity to dogma was enforced with imperial severity—it must also be acknowledged when it reorients toward theological seriousness without coercion.

In this spirit, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s doctrinal note, “Una Caro,” a work written on praise of monogamy, represents modern institutional lucidity. To be clear, that noted institution previously known as the Congregation of the Holy Office, was once known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, so now what emerges is not the historical violent, murderous doctrinal enforcement of the previous institutions, but also a refusal to modernize doctrine to popular ideas that lead to internal suicide via loss of integrity.

“Una Caro,” or one flesh, invokes not only scriptural fidelity (Old Testament via “Song of Songs” as one example) but also a politics of commitment that is almost entirely missing from contemporary leftist discourses on relationships. It locates sexual ethics within a total vision of the person: embodied, faithful, vulnerable, and ultimately bound to a greater telos than self-expression.

In contrast to both the disorganized left’s collectively disorganized view of relationships and Qutibist literalism that reduces fidelity to ideological purity, “Una Caro” seeks to retrieve the moral dignity of monogamy without instrumentalizing it. This is neither coercion nor capitulation, but something far more rare: doctrinal seriousness without violence.

In the language of the I Ching, usually translated as “Book of Changes,” this move of the Catholic Church resonates deeply with Hexagram 37—Family/Dwelling People (家人, Jiā Rén). This is important because it makes clear this move can function secularly. The I Ching is not religious doctrine. At its core, Hexagram 37 emphasizes the centrality of ordered intimacy as a foundation or broader social structure. It teaches that the ethics of the household—rooted in mutual care, structural roles, and gentle authority—form the incubator for political and spiritual strength. Just as “Una Caro” refuses domination and deterioration, Hexagram 37 reveals that love is not a feeling unbound, but something that must be housed, structured, and sustained through ritual, responsibility, and clear moral commitments.

Now, this fourth attack has traced a fraught path through distortions of fidelity, ranging from the selfishness of the disorganized left to the dogmatic literalism of post-Qutbist thought and the Catholic Church during its punitive operations in the inquisitions but we also see that Abdullah Öcalan, Qutb, the Catholic Church through the modern “Una Caro" text and the I Ching with Hexagram 37 offer a perennialism of moral seriousness and structure that neither collapses into coercion nor disperses into meaninglessness. Purity is not the goal, but rather coherence is. Coherence for the left cannot be achieved without rejecting both disorganization and doctrinal excess.

This concludes the fourth and perhaps most culturally dissonant attack. In the next, I turn to the operational failures that plague so much antifascist, anarchist, socialist, and even liberal organizing—a kind of fatalistic unseriousness I call the que será, será left. This fifth attack is aimed at the normalization of disorganization: the refusal to train, to strategize, to plan, to take personal fitness and security seriously. It is a call to end the romance of amateurism in revolutionary spaces and to begin treating insurgency like the material task it is.

References

Korsgaard, C. M. (1996). The sources of normativity (O. O'Neill, Ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Öcalan, A. (2015). Manifesto for a democratic civilization, Volume I: Civilization, the age of masked Gods and disguised kings. New Compass Press.