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Emotional Terrorism Doesn’t Work Anymore, and That’s a Real Problem for the Left
If you’ll permit me a Dennis Miller–style reference, there’s an old movie — the fact that I’m referring to it as an old movie is absolutely depressing; I’m dating myself at this point, and that’s a lousy feeling, but I digress — which has faded into obscurity. Something I watched on Monday brought it back to mind.
The movie, Cold Comfort Farm, came out in 1995. It was an adaptation of a satirical 1932 novel by Stella Gibbons that lampooned rural English life in the 1930s, and it starred Kate Beckinsale, Rufus Sewell, and Ian McKellen, among others — for Beckinsale and Sewell, it was almost a debut performance.
The plot of the movie has Beckinsale as Flora, a young London woman in the 1930s suddenly having lost her parents in an accident and needing a place to live, and ultimately deciding to move in with relatives at Cold Comfort Farm — a dysfunctional hellhole of a place owned and run by a miserable old woman, Aunt Ada Doom, played by Sheila Burrell.
Aunt Ada is a masterful emotional terrorist.
She won’t stop telling people that she “saw something nasty in the woodshed” when she was a girl, and because of this traumatic experience she must be continuously catered to by the family members she immiserates. Flora doesn’t put up with this for very long before calling her out on her antics, and in a surprise, her behavior actually improves.
And then there’s a funny scene at the end when Seth, played by Sewell, has an opportunity to set off for Hollywood to be in the movies, which the family isn’t particularly pleased with, and the emotional terrorism is laid on especially thick… not to much avail.
I bring this up because we as a country are very much at the “Of course you did, but did it see you, baby?” stage of the show.
And the Aunt Adas of the world, otherwise known as the Democrat Party, are quite perplexed. But unlike Aunt Ada, it hasn’t quite struck them that the path forward isn’t emotional terrorism in pursuit of the status quo but instead some new ideas and better behavior.
As evidence of this, there’s a podcast interview that popped onto the interwebs a couple of days ago starring Ezra Klein — if you don’t remember him, he’s the troglodyte who pioneered the old JournoList back in the Obama days and currently writes a column at the New York Times you probably haven’t read — and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
I’m not going to make you watch the whole thing. That would be cruel, and I’m trying to be friendly. But there are a few clips from this interview that are fairly instructive in putting on display just how utterly inflexible and downright awful at introspection the elite Left is.
Here’s the first one. Klein is asking Coates where the Left can go now that the American public has utterly and completely rejected transgenderism as its signature 21st-century social and “civil rights” cause, and it’s like a couple of dinosaurs comparing notes on the Chicxulub meteor:
Ezra Klein calls the belief that women have a right to single-sex sports & spaces “fundamentally and morally wrong.”
He admits most Americans disagree, yet lacks the theory of mind to imagine that millions might support single-sex spaces for reasons other than hatred or… pic.twitter.com/hohXX2cjXD
— WomenAreReal (@WomenAreReals) September 29, 2025
Klein is asking Coates how the Left is going to reclaim the narrative when the “morally wrong” public has slapped them down for insisting that men be allowed to invade women’s spaces, which is blisteringly out of touch and even more bizarre for the fact that Klein seems, kind of, to grasp as much.
It doesn’t even occur to him that perhaps the public is right and he isn’t. He’s maintaining his own superiority while lamenting the failure of his side to impose its will on the rest of us.
But then it gets amazingly worse, as Coates, in a sparkling Aunt-Ada-in-blackface performance, brings the failure of transgender ideology into the paradigm of “my tradition” — namely, black victimization.
It doesn’t even occur to him that transgenderism, which is overwhelmingly an issue affecting affluent white female-led households, has precisely nothing to do with “his tradition.” And that attempting to equate the two, by making delusional people insisting the public share in and promote their delusions the logical extension of the civil rights movement, is throwing off black support from the Left.
Coates had an easy opportunity to make himself relevant again, but he wasn’t capable of doing it. All he had to say was, “Look, in the black community, there isn’t a lot of support for men in women’s locker rooms, and frankly, it was a mistake for the Democrats to hang our hats on this issue. Sometimes you have to take a loss and move on.”
Politically, that’s the sauce.
The problem is that Coates is every bit as arrogant and out of touch as Klein is, a problem made worse by the fact that he’s a one-trick pony who can’t process anything outside of the black victimization paradigm.
Then there’s this clip, which is outright hilarious, in which Klein and Coates accuse Charlie Kirk of having “denied the humanity” of trans people:
For those who wish to see more, there were 2 other times this issue came up. In this one Coates starts by claiming kids who identify as the opposite sex are being “beaten up” and “attacked.” The “dude” he refers to is Charlie Kirk who never advocated violence against kids. For… pic.twitter.com/q6GKexGEMN
— WomenAreReal (@WomenAreReals) September 29, 2025
Klein even brings up the word “deplorable,” which is a level of stupidity that calls into question how he ever became a thing in American media. Even Coates utterly rejects that, launching into a nice-guy lecture about how he’s at war with ideologies but not people.
That’s a highlight. It doesn’t last long…
Coates says here we are not worth talking to. Then Klein keeps pushing him to acknowledge the millions of us who don’t think men can be women. Coates doesn’t seem to be able to really face the face that the majority of Americans are not on his side. He resorts to the politeness… pic.twitter.com/oVObv2bKJv
— WomenAreReal (@WomenAreReals) September 29, 2025
So he can’t have a conversation with you unless you agree to call a man by a woman’s name, because not to do so is to deny that man his humanity.
Almost nobody who isn’t a card-carrying cultural Marxist believes this. And both Klein and Coates, at least on some level, get that. But it doesn’t matter.
Because Ta’Nehisi Coates saw something nasty in the woodshed, you see. And because of that, he must be coddled. He shouldn’t be asked to defend the proposition that insisting a man who pretends to be a woman is nonetheless a man is somehow hateful, because to ask that of Ta’Nehisi Coates is hateful in itself.
And since “my tradition” is all Ta’Nehisi Coates has in his woodshed, you know what his next characterization will be. Or maybe you don’t, you racist.
The easy conclusion one can draw from all of this is these are a couple of irrelevant midwits whose navel-gazing conversations might be subsidized by corporate media, but they’re nonetheless ridiculous and unworthy of our time. I don’t disagree with that conclusion.
But what I would say is I can’t find a whole lot of introspection on the Left any more incisive than this.
It’s all this bad.
They’re turning on the American people for having taken away the power they wielded against us in so hostile a fashion during the four years of Joe Biden’s nominal presidency, and all they have is victimization and name-calling. Ezra Klein can’t get past his animus for people who don’t conform to his worldview, and Ta’Nehisi Coates can’t get past the notion that the civil rights era, as it applies to “his tradition,” is over.
Neither one even seems to recognize the import of the Charlie Kirk assassination, building on a string of other horrors, which is to strip away any moral superiority the Left could even pretend to still possess.
And without that moral superiority, they have nothing.
Nobody cares that Coates saw something nasty in the woodshed. Everyone is tired of the dysfunction at Cold Comfort Farm and wants to move on.
But the Left desperately wants to keep us there. And we’re facing the question of what happens when terrorism of the emotional variety has lost its usefulness.
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