THE TAKEDOWN I PROMISED: Trans Violence, Narrative Inversion, and the Institutional Closed Loop
Kalliope Jones, the Shelburne Falls household, and six years of manufactured victimhood, institutional complicity, and the politics of protected identity
John F. Sendelbach
I. The Story That Arrived Before the Evidence
I have spent six years watching a story about me travel through Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, like some particularly persistent communicable disease for which the local institutions have apparently decided there is no vaccine. It has appeared in newspaper articles, social-media posts, police reports, committee discussions, court proceedings, landlord correspondence, and the informal conversations that constitute the unofficial government of a small town. The story has been remarkably consistent, almost impressively so: I am the problem. The people who have complained about me are the people who need protection. My attempts to document what happened are evidence that I cannot let it go. The records I produce are further evidence of my supposed pathology. And the institutions that might otherwise be expected to examine those records have repeatedly demonstrated an almost supernatural ability to discover reasons not to look too closely. Somewhere along the way, a relatively ordinary principle of due process was apparently misplaced in the village recycling bin, replaced by a laminated card reading BELIEVE THE ESTABLISHED NARRATIVE, DO NOT DISTURB.
So let me begin with the title. This is the takedown I promised. Not the kind involving fists, firearms, or somebody being deposited in the Deerfield River, but the kind that takes apart a public narrative using its own timestamps, recordings, correspondence, court records, admissions, and institutional paperwork. The phrase has a history of its own. On a brutally hot day, approximately ninety degrees, I was outside distributing water and trying to have conversations with people in the community. I was speaking with the original organizer of the June 6, 2020 protest, asking him a series of questions about the events surrounding that demonstration. He was not particularly enthusiastic about the questions, which is putting it diplomatically. In the middle of that conversation, Alouette Batteau pulled up in her car, stopped in a dangerous intersection, and, with considerable snark, announced, "Hi, John." I responded, "I'm gonna take you down." I was not threatening to assault an eighteen-year-old in front of approximately fifty witnesses. The context was a public dispute involving damaging videos, hostile commentary, and the continuing consequences of a narrative that had already done considerable damage to my reputation and livelihood. What I meant was that I intended to expose and dismantle the public account that had been constructed around me and press for the removal of videos and commentary that I believed were putting me in peril. It was a rhetorical promise of public accountability, not a declaration of physical violence. That distinction is apparently too inconvenient for the established narrative, which prefers to extract five words, discard the surrounding circumstances, and announce that the dangerous man has once again revealed himself. Meanwhile, the videos themselves had attracted violent comments, including comments about throwing me off a bridge. Somehow, the person trying to get those videos and comments removed became the person accused of threatening violence. You almost have to admire the engineering. It is a machine that can turn a fire extinguisher into an arson weapon if the right person happens to be holding it.
I have come to call the mechanism the Cold Cruel Sidestep. It begins with a recognizable sequence: deny or minimize the conduct, attack the person documenting it, and reverse the positions of victim and offender. The more consequential maneuver comes afterward. The people who initiated the conflict can reduce their visible activity while the person attempting to establish what happened is left carrying the entire burden of explanation. I document, request records, appeal, write, and ask institutions to reconsider. My persistence then becomes the new subject. Why am I still talking about it? Why won't I let it go? Why am I so obsessed? The original conduct gradually disappears behind a second accusation: that the person trying to establish what happened is himself the problem. I call the institutional continuation of this process Distributed Maintenance. It requires neither a conspiracy nor a secret meeting in a candlelit basement. A newspaper preserves an old framing, a committee declines to revisit a decision, a police report formalizes a complaint without interviewing the person accused, a public agency receives documentation without meaningfully responding, and a later institution treats the earlier institution's paperwork as background fact. Each participant handles one small piece. Nobody has to accept responsibility for the cumulative result. The narrative maintains itself, rather like a municipal compost heap that has somehow acquired a legal department.
I am not writing as an outside observer. I am the person whose name appeared in the headlines, whose work became the subject of a petition, whose phone went into the Deerfield River, whose medical records document physiological episodes during this sequence, and whose requests for correction have largely gone unanswered. I have recordings, correspondence, reports, court documents, timestamps, photographs, and other records. I have put much of the material online because I learned that an account can be repeated long after the evidence that should qualify it has been forgotten. There is an important distinction throughout this essay between what I witnessed, what appears in recordings, what is established by court records, what other people alleged, and what I conclude from the sequence. Those categories are not interchangeable, and I do not intend to pretend otherwise. In fact, the argument depends on keeping them separate. An allegation is not a finding. A recording is not a complete history simply because somebody pressed the button. A court disposition is not necessarily a contested trial verdict. An interpretation is not a fact merely because I happen to believe it. The same standards I am asking others to apply must apply to me.
This is also why I am interested in the Zizians. Andy Ngo, speaking on the Winston Marshall Show about his reporting on the group, described a small cluster of highly intelligent young adults, most of them trans-identified, emerging from effective-altruist, rationalist, and AI-safety communities around the San Francisco Bay Area. Their online writing combined artificial-intelligence risk arguments with theories of hemispheric dominance, vegan anarchism, and the need for a prepared vanguard. Individuals associated with the circle were linked to multiple acts of lethal violence, including the shooting death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont, the stabbing of a landlord, and a double homicide. The disturbing issue was not simply that people with unusual intellectual interests became violent. It was that extreme conduct could be incorporated into an ideological framework that continued to justify action after people had died. Explanation could become a mechanism for dissolving agency. Individuals could be presented primarily as vulnerable people caught up in a complicated intellectual environment rather than as adults responsible for their own decisions.
I am not equating the Zizians with anyone in Shelburne Falls. The scale and consequences are entirely different. Nobody in the household discussed here has been charged with homicide, and there is no equivalence between a documented local assault and a series of killings. Nor am I suggesting that transgender identity causes violence. That would be an intellectually lazy conclusion, and it is not my argument. Identity does not establish conduct, and demographic correlation does not establish causation. My interest is narrower: what happens when a claim to vulnerability becomes an interpretive shield, when the behavior of the person making the claim receives less scrutiny than the behavior of the person accused, and when institutions become so invested in their original moral arrangement that contradictory evidence is absorbed rather than allowed to change the story? The Shelburne Falls record gives me an opportunity to examine that mechanism at a scale where the documents are accessible. I can show when a video began, what was said on a recording, what a report contained, what a judge did after hearing audio, what defendants admitted in court, and what appeared on Instagram afterward. Readers do not have to accept my interpretation simply because I experienced these events. They can examine the record and reach their own conclusions.
II. Kalliope Jones: The First Public Story
In September 2015, Kalliope Jones consisted of Isabella DeHerdt, Alouette Batteau, and Amelia Chalfant, then between fourteen and sixteen years old. They placed third in the junior division of a Battle of the Bands at the Three County Fair in Northampton. One judge's notes included the phrase "use the sultry to draw in the crowd" and a bonus point marked "Chicks Rock." The band posted the score sheet and a statement criticizing the comment as sexist and inappropriate for minors. The post spread, and Billboard, MassLive, Seventeen, and other outlets covered the controversy as an example of teenage girls confronting sexism. The volunteer judge requested anonymity because he feared retaliation. The fair's general manager argued that the reaction was publicity-driven and suggested that the intended meaning had been closer to "soulful." Those qualifications did not travel quite as far as the original accusation. Funny how that works. A handwritten judging note can become a national morality play in the time it takes somebody to refresh Facebook, while the subsequent qualifications are left waiting for a ride home.
Catherine Hennessey, speaking as the mother, told TODAY.com that the issue was not principally about the fair or the judges but about whether teenage girls should be evaluated according to their sex appeal. That was a legitimate question. A judge at a youth event should be able to explain language that can reasonably be interpreted as sexualizing minors, and teenage performers should not be expected to accept the idea that their bodies are part of a musical evaluation. I am not arguing that the girls had no right to object. They did. What interests me is what followed: a handwritten note became a national story, the girls became representatives of a larger cause, their mother became an advocate, and the judge became the subject of a public controversy. The episode established a moral arrangement that was extraordinarily easy to communicate: young girls had been wronged, and the public was being asked to recognize the injustice. There is nothing inherently wrong with a public campaign. The difficulty begins when the campaign becomes a permanent credential, a kind of lifetime institutional membership card that can influence how later conduct is interpreted. Once a person or group has been publicly established as the defender of a vulnerable class, the authority acquired through that identity can remain available long after the original event has become ancient history.
By 2024 and 2025, the musical project, now involving Isabella DeHerdt, Wes Chalfant, and Alouette "Lou" Batteau, described itself on TikTok as a "boy band." Promotional imagery included open shirts, tongue-out poses, heavy makeup, and a white tank top printed with the word "boy." The band's materials spoke of bending "gender-genre-genius," and interviews described members as queer and non-binary. One member stated in 2025 that the three were "people who are queer, members are non-binary, mixed, on birth control" and that they occupied space others did not want them to occupy. Alouette is referred to with they/them pronouns in family correspondence. People are entitled to change their presentation, identities, aesthetics, and artistic direction. A band can evolve, and nobody should be frozen forever in the image they presented as a teenager. Nor does a provocative promotional photograph prove misconduct. But the evolution raises an entirely reasonable question about consistency. The 2015 campaign condemned language the band considered sexualizing. The later promotional identity incorporated open shirts, suggestive poses, and deliberately gendered performance. There may be a perfectly coherent distinction between sexualization imposed by an outsider and self-directed performance. If so, explain it. That is what discussion is for. The distinction does not become illegitimate merely because somebody asks for it.
The problem I see is not that people change. It is that the public narrative does not seem to change with them. The original campaign remains available as a source of moral authority, while later conduct is interpreted through the same protective framework. The household's subsequent invocation of LGBTQ-protection language in disputes with me did not require the original public identity to be reconsidered or later events to be examined independently. When the judge's note was examined, context mattered. When the band changed its presentation, context mattered. When I am accused, however, the conclusion frequently seems to arrive before the context has even been invited into the room. I am not asking for a different standard. I am asking for the same one.
III. The Household and the Language of Protection
Alouette is the only child of Katherine Hennessey and Henry, known as Brook, Batteau. In an email dated September 6, 2024, to the landlord of The Mill, Hennessey referred to "my adult child, Alouette (Lou)" while requesting that I be evicted. The phrase is ordinary enough in contemporary family correspondence, but the surrounding household dynamics and the repeated invocation of protective language have become relevant to the disputes I am documenting. The term "adult child" also has a specific meaning in the Adult Children of Alcoholics fellowship, where it describes adults whose patterns of attachment, conflict, and self-regulation may have been shaped by growing up in a dysfunctional household. That meaning should not be casually imposed on an individual simply because the phrase appears in an email. There have been local allegations concerning the parents' past substance use, including opiates, but those allegations do not appear in the filings I have reviewed, and I am not presenting them as established facts. I have no basis to diagnose this family or explain its private relationships from a collection of public encounters.
I have observed the family together in public. Hennessey is taller than Batteau and, in the confrontations I have examined, often appears to be the person who moves into close proximity or intervenes when he is speaking. Batteau, in his seventies, has described his voice as a blend of Roy Orbison and David Byrne and sings in a high, light register. These are observations, not psychological diagnoses. I cannot tell readers what happens inside a household from a handful of encounters, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise. What is relevant is the public identity repeatedly invoked in disputes involving me: protecting LGBTQ people, defending a vulnerable adult child, and responding to hostility. That language can describe genuine injustice. It can also become a frame through which subsequent events are interpreted before the evidence is examined. There is a difference between protecting someone from abuse and protecting someone from scrutiny, between recognizing that a person has been harmed and deciding that the harm they report automatically establishes another person's guilt, and between respecting an identity and treating it as a credential that places its bearer beyond ordinary examination. I do not need to know the family's private psychology to make that point. I need to establish what happened in the encounters I witnessed, what the recordings show, and how institutions handled the documentation.
IV. June 6, 2020: The Camera Starts Late
On June 6, 2020, an unannounced gathering closed the Iron Bridge in Shelburne Falls on a retail Saturday. The Bridge of Flowers was already closed because of the pandemic, leaving the Iron Bridge as the only other crossing between the two sides of the village. My studio was nearby, and local businesses had already endured months of closures and reduced traffic. Nobody had notified the merchants that the bridge would be closed. I walked out of my studio and began filming. I objected to the closure and aspects of the gathering. Sonny Walters approached and continued after I asked her several times to stop. Additional people formed a half-circle that, as I experienced it, held me against the railing. Katherine Hennessey brought her face to within approximately twelve inches of mine and said they were acting because they loved me. Alouette began recording after the circle had formed and people had stepped back. That timing matters. The video that circulated did not begin with the encounter; it began after a consequential part of the encounter had already occurred. The camera did not need to fabricate anything. It simply needed to start late enough that viewers could see my reaction without seeing the sequence that produced it. In the modern attention economy, apparently, editing is optional when chronology can do the work for you.
I objected and walked away. Members of the group followed. On the far side of the bridge, Hennessey again closed distance with a clenched fist. She and another woman blocked my path while officers watched. Alouette later wrote that it had been a challenge not to "deck" me. Comments beneath the circulating video included calls to throw me off the bridge. A petition gathered more than six hundred signatures in three days and named my bench on the Bridge of Flowers. The Greenfield Recorder published stories quoting committee members who treated the petition's direction positively and reported that I had declined to comment. I was not asked about the sequence on the bridge or about the Black Stones of Africa I had installed in 2011. The public account was established at speed: video, petition, newspaper, moral verdict. The artist whose work was being discussed became the subject of the controversy, while the people involved in the encounter were positioned as those responding to him. I have never claimed that every word I said that morning was perfect. I was frustrated, I had been surrounded, and I was objecting to the closure of a public crossing on a day when local merchants needed business. I am not asking readers to approve every expression of frustration. I am asking them to look at the sequence rather than treating the most conveniently circulated fragment as the entire event.
A video is not a complete account merely because it is a recording. Its start time matters, its omissions matter, and its framing matters. A camera can accurately record everything it shows while producing a misleading account of the event as a whole. If a recording begins after people have formed a circle, viewers cannot see how the circle formed. If the public sees only the reaction, it may mistake the reaction for the beginning. The petition also named my public artwork. The Black Stones of Africa had been installed in 2011, years before anyone on that bridge decided what kind of person I was. I had worked with people of different backgrounds throughout my career, helped install the Sojourner Truth Memorial in Florence, and collaborated with Mohammad Yaseen, a Jordanian refugee with family in Gaza. My work was already part of the public landscape. None of that prevented a short video and its surrounding commentary from defining me as a racist in the local conversation. I do not offer my professional history as proof that I could never say anything objectionable. I offer it as evidence that the label was not the product of a complete examination of my life or work. The village's response was not to weigh my argument about the bridge closure. It was to decide what kind of man I was and then proceed as though the question had been settled.
V. The Water, the Organizer, and the Promised Takedown
The later encounter involving the water distribution is particularly revealing because it demonstrates how a statement can be detached from its setting and converted into an entirely different allegation. On an approximately ninety-degree day, I was outside handing out water and attempting to engage people in conversation. I was speaking with the original organizer of the June 6, 2020 protest and asking him questions about the event. He was not especially pleased with the direction of the conversation. While we were speaking, Alouette arrived by car, stopped in the middle of a dangerous intersection, and greeted me with a sarcastic "Hi, John." I responded, "I'm gonna take you down." There were approximately fifty people in the surrounding area. The statement was about taking apart the public narrative and exposing what I believed had been a damaging campaign against me. It was not a promise to physically attack her. The setting, the ongoing conversation, the public audience, and the dispute over the videos are essential context. My concern was that the videos and comments beneath them had become a continuing source of reputational damage and potential danger. I wanted the material removed, and I wanted the people responsible to understand that I intended to challenge the narrative publicly.
Of course, the phrase was immediately available for another interpretation, and that interpretation was the one most useful to the established account. Instead of examining what the videos contained, the comments beneath them, the reason I was trying to have them removed, and the public context in which the exchange occurred, the focus could be shifted to five words spoken by the person complaining about the original material. Suddenly I was the threatening figure. The videos and their violent comments became background noise. The attempt to secure their removal became evidence of aggression. This is the Cold Cruel Sidestep in miniature: the original grievance disappears, the person raising it becomes the new subject, and the institution is presented with a conveniently simplified question about an allegedly threatening sentence. I am not claiming that nobody could interpret the phrase differently. I am saying that an interpretation should not be mistaken for the only possible meaning, especially when the surrounding circumstances are available for examination. A public takedown of a damaging narrative is not the same thing as a physical takedown of a person. If the distinction is too subtle for the local rumor mill, perhaps the rumor mill should consider taking a remedial course in reading comprehension.
VI. June 29: The Recording That Shows the Distance
The June 29, 2020 transcript records another encounter. I remained stationary while members of the family approached. Alouette moved from roughly ten feet away to within approximately two feet and said she had spoken to lawyers, could obtain a restraining order, and would do so. Katherine said on the recording that she hated me and that hatred was not against the law. Brook told me to stop my "white whining." Alouette's posts included the statement that she was around far too many white people. These are words that appear in the recording and posts; readers can examine them and decide what they establish. I am not claiming that one recording resolves every dispute. I am saying that a recording should be considered when a later account characterizes the encounter. If someone says I threatened them, the recording is relevant. If someone says I was the person approaching, the recording is relevant. If someone characterizes an exchange as being about race, the actual words are relevant. The evidence should not be replaced by a later summary that has already decided what the words mean.
I began to understand that the central problem was not simply that people disagreed with me. People are entitled to disagree with my work, politics, temperament, opinions, and conduct. They are entitled to criticize me. The problem was that the public narrative could become detached from the underlying event and then serve as the starting point for the next institutional decision. Each subsequent encounter was interpreted against the accumulated reputation created by the earlier one. A person could approach me, speak aggressively, or make a provocative statement, but the public account would still begin with the assumption that I was the aggressor. Once that arrangement became established, every new event could be squeezed into the same template. The original story did not have to survive examination. It only had to survive long enough to become the background.
VII. When the Narrative Enters the Official Record
Reports from 2021 and 2023 show complaints being entered without a prior statement from me. One report records that speaking with me does not work and directs the complainant to seek a harassment order, citing other issues in town. A 2023 ex parte order based on an affidavit alleging homicidal tendencies was vacated after a judge heard audio in which the words were "I will never get along with the likes of you," followed by laughter. No probable cause was found on the companion criminal complaint. Bardwell is recorded stating that he could not charge false reports. Jenkins, who approved 2023 paperwork without having met me, is a defendant in a federal case in which a judge allowed a false-arrest claim against him to proceed, finding the allegations sufficient to suggest that misleading information had been provided and that probable cause had clearly been lacking. The procedural distinctions are important. An allegation in a complaint is not a judicial finding. A claim allowed to proceed is not a final judgment. An order vacated after a judge hears audio does not establish that every person involved acted maliciously. I am not asking readers to collapse those categories. I am asking them not to collapse them in the opposite direction, either. An allegation does not become established fact merely because someone typed it into a police report.
A report can acquire a life of its own, particularly when subsequent institutions treat official paperwork as a substitute for independent investigation. The next person who encounters the report may not know that the accused was never interviewed. The next institution may not know that the underlying allegation was later contradicted by audio. The report becomes background, the background becomes apparent history, and the person named in it is expected to overcome a record created without his participation. This is a particularly elegant administrative arrangement if the objective is to make correction difficult: the original complainant gets to speak, the official records the complaint, the accused is not heard, and later readers treat the resulting document as though it emerged from a neutral investigation. I have repeatedly encountered this problem. I am not asking for special treatment. I am asking for the ordinary opportunity to be heard before an account of my conduct becomes an institutional fact. Police departments should examine available evidence and hear from the person accused. If they do not, the resulting report should not be presented as though it were an impartial finding.
VIII. The Bridge of Flowers: Public Property, Private Governance
The Bridge of Flowers is a public structure owned by the Fire District. Its gardens have been managed through a committee whose seats are filled internally, without public elections or term limits. In 2020, the committee discussed the petition concerning me in private sessions and did not contact me. A plaque was installed near the stones I had helped set. The governance issue is separate from the quality of the volunteers' gardening. I understand the labor involved in maintaining a public garden. I have spent my professional life designing, building, planting, and maintaining landscapes. I am not dismissing the people who keep the bridge beautiful. I am asking who is accountable for decisions made in the name of a public landmark. A committee can do excellent horticultural work and still have an accountability problem. Those propositions are not mutually exclusive, however inconvenient that may be for people who prefer a single flattering description of their institution.
Szpila later denied quotations in which she had reportedly engaged the spirit of the petition. That denial occurred in the presence of a witness who had worked on the bench. The committee replaced a soil mix it acknowledged had underperformed. I had identified the specification as unsuitable. My horticultural critique, coming from someone trained in floriculture and with permanent work installed on the bridge, received no meaningful engagement. In 2026 I published an op-ed calling for an open process, accountability to the owning district, and term limits. The committee did not reply. It is possible to disagree with my proposal. It is possible to explain why the existing structure is preferable. What is difficult to justify is treating a public question about public governance as though the person asking it has committed an act of social vandalism. The volunteers who water plants and deadhead flowers should not be held responsible for decisions they did not make. Equally, the fact that volunteers work hard does not confer an unreviewable right to govern a public landmark. A beautiful garden can exist within an opaque governance structure. Both facts can be true. The committee did not need to accept every allegation I made. It needed to decide whether it would contact me, examine the sequence, and consider the public process. It did not.
IX. November 30, 2025: The Phone in the River
On November 30, 2025, outside Floodwater Brewing, timestamps and Livingston's sworn statement describe Brook Batteau shoving me off the curb and Hennessey engaging while the phone I was using to record was taken and thrown into the river. Livingston recorded Batteau's explanation as five years of grievance. The defendants later admitted facts sufficient for guilty findings on assault and battery. The cases were continued without a finding for six months, with fifty-yard stay-away and no-contact conditions. Hennessey also faced a separate malicious-destruction-of-property charge, which was continued generally, with $429.99 restitution for the phone. The phone went into the Deerfield River. The restitution check carried the docket number. I want to be exact about the legal disposition: the defendants submitted to facts sufficient to warrant findings of guilty on assault and battery, and the cases were continued without a finding. This was not a trial verdict following a contested evidentiary hearing, but it was also not merely my allegation. It was a formal court disposition involving conditions and restitution. Those distinctions should be maintained, not selectively forgotten whenever they become inconvenient.
While on bail, Alouette posted an Instagram caption directed at "my stalker," with an overlaid lyric: "I never wished so much to kill a man with my bare hands." A comment wishing harm was left unremoved. The chief classified the post as part of a musical performance. The classification was copied to the district attorney. The timing was included in my referral: eleven days after a Harassment Prevention Order hearing and days before arraignment. I am not arguing that music is unprotected expression. A lyric about violence does not automatically become a threat, and artistic expression deserves protection. The question is whether the artistic frame should end the inquiry before the surrounding circumstances are considered. The caption identified the person who had recently been assaulted as a stalker. The post appeared while the defendants were on bail and subject to stay-away conditions. The lyric and comment existed within that context. The classification may have been made in good faith. I cannot know what was in the chief's mind. But I can examine the result: a communication identifying the recent victim of an admitted assault as a stalker, paired with violent imagery, was processed as performance, while the existing public narrative in which I was the persistent aggressor remained intact. The person who had been assaulted was still being described as the stalker. Apparently the narrative had a very effective memory for my alleged offenses and a rather selective one for everything that happened afterward.
X. The Body Keeps a Record
My atrial-fibrillation episodes are dated in relation to these encounters. I experienced an episode lasting approximately a month after seeing Alouette at The Mill in September 2024. My heart rate reached 180 on the morning of the October 2025 encounter with the chief. I experienced further episodes after the November 30 assault and after a 2026 hearing. An EMS LIFEPAK 15 reading was captured at the State Police barracks during the formal complaint. These records do not establish another person's intent. They do not prove the cause of every episode, and they do not determine the legal meaning of a confrontation. They establish that I experienced measurable physiological events at particular times. They are part of the record of what this sequence has cost me.
The institutions can separate events into administrative compartments. The police report concerns one date, the committee meeting another, the newspaper story may be six years old, and the court hearing is assigned its own docket number. The body does not experience the sequence as a collection of unrelated filing exercises. It experiences the accumulated stress. The heart monitor does not know that one agency has finished processing its paperwork while another has yet to respond to a records request. It does not recognize jurisdictional boundaries, committee schedules, or the soothing bureaucratic fiction that each new incident exists independently of the previous one. I am not presenting medical readings as proof of anyone else's motives. I am presenting them as part of the human cost that disappears when institutions examine only their individual fragments and refuse to consider the cumulative sequence.
XI. The Closed Loop and the Progressive Institution
At this point the story is no longer exclusively about one household or one town. The same institutional mechanism can be found wherever an organization adopts a moral framework that decides in advance who is vulnerable, who is dangerous, and whose account deserves to be believed. The political contest in the United States and Europe is not conducted only at elections. It is conducted inside universities, school systems, newsrooms, professional associations, human-resources departments, philanthropic foundations, regulatory agencies, technology companies, and the administrative layers of government. Elections determine who occupies public office. They do not automatically replace the assumptions embedded in the institutions those officials inherit. For decades, much of the American and European cultural establishment moved toward a progressive understanding of social and political life. Much of that movement began with legitimate objectives: equal treatment under law, protection against discrimination, access to education, removal of barriers to opportunity, and recognition of people who had been excluded or mistreated. Those achievements matter. I am not arguing that the civil-rights movement was a mistake or that discrimination should be ignored. I am arguing that a moral vocabulary developed to identify genuine injustice can become a comprehensive theory of society and eventually a professional system for deciding who is permitted to speak, what can be taught, which opinions are respectable, and whose objections demonstrate a moral defect.
The far left's institutional influence is not identical to having a left-wing government in power. A government changes at an election. Institutional cultures, professional norms, hiring networks, accreditation standards, administrative procedures, and the language used to define acceptable conduct can persist across administrations. A movement does not have to win every election if it has already influenced the people who write the rules, train the staff, certify professional competence, establish curriculum, and decide what constitutes reputational risk. This is not simply a matter of counting liberals in a faculty lounge. Research examining hundreds of thousands of social-science abstracts has found a pronounced left-of-center orientation in politically relevant academic research, with the researchers noting that the imbalance was driven more by center-left than far-left academics. That distinction matters. An institution does not need to be staffed by revolutionaries to develop an ideological monoculture. A large number of conventional, professionally successful people can share enough assumptions that certain questions become unfashionable, certain conclusions become professionally costly, and certain perspectives become difficult to encounter in the classroom.
A 2024 survey of more than 6,000 American faculty members found substantial self-censorship. Some faculty members reported toning down their writing because of potential controversy; others reported feeling unable to speak freely because of possible reactions from students, administrators, or colleagues. Conservative faculty reported greater discomfort expressing their views than liberal faculty. This does not establish that every university has been captured by the far left. It does demonstrate that an institution dedicated to examining ideas can develop an informal hierarchy of permissible opinion without issuing a formal prohibition. Nobody needs to ban a book if the people who might assign it have learned that doing so is professionally hazardous. Nobody needs to prohibit an argument if the person making it understands that the consequences may include a disciplinary meeting, complaint, lost invitation, damaged career, or public denunciation. The formal right to speak can remain while the practical cost of speaking rises. The institution can congratulate itself on preserving freedom of expression while quietly constructing a professional environment in which exercising that freedom becomes an increasingly expensive hobby.
This is how institutional influence becomes more durable than electoral power. Once a university describes itself primarily as an institution responsible for protecting students from harmful ideas rather than preparing them to examine difficult ones, its priorities change. Once an employer treats disagreement as a potential threat to psychological safety, its human-resources department acquires a new kind of jurisdiction. Once a professional association defines competence partly through conformity to a prescribed moral vocabulary, membership and advancement become instruments of ideological discipline. Once a newsroom treats the identity of the speaker as a central factor in deciding whether an assertion is legitimate, the distinction between evidence and assertion begins to give way to a hierarchy of approved narrators. The language is generally managerial rather than revolutionary. It appears in policy manuals, mandatory training, conduct codes, strategic plans, institutional statements, professional standards, and carefully worded announcements about community values. Nobody needs to announce that a political philosophy has become the house doctrine. It can simply be embedded in the definitions. Disagreement becomes harm, dissent becomes hostility, questioning the framework becomes evidence that one has not understood it, and the institution can insist that it is not enforcing an ideology at all. It is merely enforcing its standards. How convenient.
The far left's advantage in this arrangement is not that it has persuaded every American or European to embrace its entire program. It is that certain ideas have become institutional defaults in influential sectors, particularly parts of higher education, cultural production, professional advocacy, and corporate administration. A movement can lose support among the general public while retaining influence over the people who write training materials, establish professional expectations, advise administrators, prepare curriculum, manage communications, and define reputational risk. The distance between public opinion and institutional opinion can become politically explosive. People discover that organizations governing important parts of their lives do not speak their language, share their assumptions, or consider them legitimate participants in the discussion. They vote against politicians associated with those assumptions and discover that the underlying procedures remain. They object to the language and are told that it is simply professional. They ask for evidence and are told that the request itself reveals a failure to understand the issue
