There’s a moment that keeps replaying in my mind, one that crystallizes everything wrong with how some progressives have started to operate, how they’ve convinced themselves that the rules don’t apply to them as long as their targets are sufficiently deserving. It happened recently with Secular Talk, when Kyle Kulinski posted a video covering Alex Jones spreading obviously fake, AI-generated images claiming that New York politician Zohran Mamdani was somehow Jeffrey Epstein’s child. The images were absurd, transparently fabricated, the kind of conspiracy theory garbage that Jones traffics in regularly. Calling this out was necessary, important even. Disinformation destroys democracy, and Jones is one of its most prolific peddlers. But the way Kulinski chose to frame this critique, the editorial decisions he made in presenting it, reveal something deeply troubling about how progressives are starting to mirror the very behaviors they claim to oppose.
The video title contained the n-word, barely censored with an asterisk replacing a single letter, the kind of censorship that doesn’t actually censor anything because everyone reading it knows exactly what word is being invoked. In the video itself, while covering Twitter reactions to Jones’s conspiracy theory, Kulinski highlighted a comment that used the uncensored version of that slur. When he read the comment aloud, he censored himself verbally, but the word remained fully visible on screen throughout that segment. Viewers could see it, unobscured, displayed for consumption. And here’s the thing that we need to sit with, the uncomfortable reality that demands our attention: he didn’t have to show that comment at all.
Think about it for a second. Alex Jones spread a fake image connecting a politician to a dead pedophile. People on Twitter called it out as fake. That’s the story. That’s the point. Kulinski could have selected from dozens, maybe hundreds of other reactions that expressed the same sentiment, the same disbelief and mockery at Jones’s transparent lie, without featuring a racial slur. The argument he was making, that Jones’s conspiracy was immediately recognized as false, would have landed just as effectively with literally any other example. More effectively, even, because the message wouldn’t be muddied by the question of why he chose to platforming a slur in the first place.
So why did he make that choice? Why select that specific comment, display it uncensored on screen, and then echo a version of that slur in the video title where it would drive clicks and engagement? The answer, as much as it makes me angry to acknowledge, is that controversy generates views. Provocation is profitable. And leveraging a word that carries centuries of violence, trauma, and dehumanization as clickbait works, even when you’re supposedly fighting against the systems that weaponized that word to begin with. Especially then, actually, because the cognitive dissonance allows for plausible deniability. He was just documenting what others said. He censored it when he spoke. He’s one of the good guys calling out the bad guys, so obviously his intentions are pure.
But intentions don’t erase impact. And impact matters more than intentions when we’re talking about systemic oppression and the reinforcement of harmful hierarchies. What Kulinski did, whether consciously or not, was benefit from racism while maintaining the appearance of opposing it. He appropriated language that people of color are actively trying to reclaim from a history of violence and degradation, and he used it for content, for revenue, for his platform’s growth. That’s not allyship. That’s extraction. That’s taking the pain embedded in that word and converting it into engagement metrics and ad revenue.
And let’s be clear about something else: the minimal censorship doesn’t absolve anything. Replacing one letter with an asterisk is performative, a fig leaf that covers nothing. Everyone knows what the word is. The censorship exists purely to provide technical cover, to allow him to say he didn’t technically use the slur while still getting all the benefits of using it. It’s the same logic that allows people to claim they’re not racist because they have Black friends, or they’re not sexist because they support women’s rights in the abstract. It’s the difference between actually doing the work and performing the appearance of doing the work while continuing to benefit from the systems you claim to oppose.
This isn’t Kulinski’s first instance of this kind of behavior either, and that pattern matters. A few months back, he called Erika Kirk, the late Charlie Kirk’s wife, the b-word, uncensored, suggesting she was faking being a widow by being friendly with Vice President JD Vance. Setting aside the absurdity of policing how a widow is supposed to behave or who she’s allowed to talk to, there’s the fundamental issue of using misogynistic slurs under any circumstances. It doesn’t matter who the target is. It doesn’t matter if you think they deserve it. Using language that demeans and dehumanizes women reinforces the systems that oppress all women, and you don’t get a pass on that just because you’re directing it at someone you’ve decided is a political enemy.
What we’re seeing here is a broader phenomenon that I’ve started thinking of in terms of what some people call “dark woke,” though I hate the term because it’s been co-opted by bad faith actors. But the underlying concept points to something real: progressives who have convinced themselves that it’s acceptable to engage in the same harmful behaviors as MAGA, as long as those behaviors are directed at the right targets. The logic goes that since conservatives are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, since they’re the enemy, then using their tactics against them is justified. It’s fighting fire with fire. It’s giving them a taste of their own medicine.
But that’s not how systemic oppression works. That’s not how harm functions in the world. When you use racist language, even against racists, you’re reinforcing the idea that it’s acceptable to deploy that language as a weapon. When you use misogynistic slurs, even against women you’ve decided are complicit in patriarchy, you’re strengthening the cultural permission to dehumanize women. The harm doesn’t stay contained to your intended target. It ripples outward. It normalizes the behavior. It signals to everyone watching that these tools of oppression are available for use, that the question is just about selecting the right targets rather than refusing to use them at all.
And here’s what really gets me, what keeps me up at night thinking about this: if this is how progressives treat their enemies now, what happens when they decide you’re the enemy? What happens when the political landscape shifts, when alliances change, when you find yourself on the wrong side of whoever’s holding the megaphone? Politics is fluid. Power dynamics evolve. The people who are your allies today might see you as an obstacle tomorrow. And if they’ve already established that it’s fine to use oppressive language and tactics against people they’ve deemed worthy of it, what protection do you have when that designation shifts to include you?
This is why we have to be unequivocal in our opposition to harm, regardless of who’s perpetrating it or who it’s directed against. Not because we’re naive about power or conflict, not because we think everyone deserves the same platform or that all positions are equally valid, but precisely because we understand how power works, how it accumulates, how it corrupts. The tools of oppression don’t become righteous just because you’re wielding them against oppressors. They remain tools of oppression, and using them means you’re participating in the same systems you claim to be dismantling.
What Kulinski did with that video reminds me, though in a less direct and therefore more insidious way, of when Vaush used what he called the “tactical n-word” on livestream. That incident was more blatant, more immediately obviously wrong, but the underlying logic is the same. Both instances operate from the premise that the word itself isn’t the problem, that context and intention are what matter, that progressive politics provide sufficient cover for deploying language rooted in oppression. But that premise is wrong. The word is the problem. The history embedded in it is the problem. The way it echoes centuries of violence and dehumanization is the problem. And you don’t get to opt out of that history just because you’ve decided your cause is just.
The thing about systemic oppression is that it’s systemic. It’s built into structures, institutions, cultural norms, and yes, language itself. You can’t dismantle it by selectively deploying its mechanisms against different targets. You dismantle it by refusing to participate in it, by building different structures, by modeling the world you’re trying to create rather than replicating the world you’re trying to escape. When progressives profit from racism, even while claiming to oppose it, they’re telling us something important about their actual commitments. They’re revealing that their opposition to oppression is conditional, that it extends as far as their own interests and no further, that they’re comfortable with the systems in place as long as those systems aren’t targeting them and their team.
And that’s exactly what Kulinski’s choice demonstrates. He’s comfortable calling out conservative racism, and he should be. Conservative racism is real and destructive and deserves to be named and opposed. But when his own platform benefits from racist language, suddenly the calculus changes. Suddenly there are reasons and justifications and contexts that make it different. Suddenly the same standards don’t apply because he’s not like them, he’s on the right side, he’s fighting the good fight. But the people harmed by that language don’t experience it differently based on the politics of the person deploying it. The wound is the same regardless of who’s holding the knife.
This pattern of selective accountability reveals something deeper about how some progressives understand justice and equality. They’ve adopted a framework where harm is relative, where the moral weight of an action depends entirely on who’s doing it and who it’s being done to. That’s not justice. That’s just power dressed up in progressive language. It’s the same hierarchical thinking that underlies the systems we’re supposed to be opposing, just with different people at the top of the hierarchy.
Real opposition to oppression requires consistency. It requires recognizing that certain behaviors and language are wrong not because of who’s using them but because of what they do, the harm they cause, the histories they invoke, the futures they make possible or impossible. It requires understanding that you can’t build an egalitarian world using the tools of hierarchy, that you can’t create justice through injustice, that the means and the ends are inseparable in ways that matter profoundly for what kind of world we’re actually constructing.
When Kulinski put that slur in his video title, when he displayed it uncensored on screen, when he chose that specific comment out of all the possible reactions he could have highlighted, he made a choice about what he values and what he’s willing to do to grow his platform. He chose clicks over principles. He chose engagement over integrity. He chose to benefit from the very systems of oppression he claims to oppose. And that choice tells us everything we need to know about how seriously we should take his progressive politics.
The harsh truth is that opposing oppression when it’s convenient, when it aligns with your interests and targets your enemies, isn’t actually opposing oppression at all. It’s just strategic positioning. It’s just picking sides in a game where the rules stay the same and only the players change. Real opposition requires refusing to play the game at all, requires building something different entirely, requires being willing to sacrifice clicks and engagement and growth when those things come at the cost of reinforcing the hierarchies we claim to be dismantling.
We’re at a moment where the left, where progressive movements, where people who genuinely care about justice and equality, need to have some very uncomfortable conversations about what we’re actually doing and who we’re actually serving. We need to ask ourselves hard questions about whether we’re building the world we claim to want or just repositioning ourselves within the world that already exists. We need to examine whether our opposition to oppression is principled or merely tactical, whether it extends to everyone or just to the people we’ve decided to include in our circle of concern.
And we need to hold each other accountable, not in the performative call-out culture way that’s become its own kind of oppression, but in the deeper sense of actually caring about whether our actions align with our values. That means being willing to criticize people on our own side when they fuck up, when they perpetuate harm, when they benefit from oppression. It means not giving passes to people just because they’re supposedly progressive, just because they’re fighting the same enemies we’re fighting, just because calling them out might benefit the other side.
Because here’s the thing: if we’re not willing to hold ourselves and our allies to the same standards we demand of our opponents, then we don’t actually have standards. We just have teams. And team-based politics, politics where the question is just about who’s winning and losing rather than about what kind of world we’re creating, inevitably recreates the same power dynamics we’re trying to escape. It just shuffles who’s on top and who’s on bottom.
Kulinski had a choice in how to cover Alex Jones’s conspiracy theory. He could have made a video that effectively called out dangerous misinformation without platforming a racial slur. He could have selected any number of reactions that made the same point without causing the same harm. He chose not to. And that choice matters. It matters because it reveals priorities. It matters because it causes real harm. It matters because it shows that even people who position themselves as progressive allies are willing to extract value from oppression when it serves their interests.
We deserve better than this. The movements for justice and equality deserve better than this. The people who are actively harmed by racist and misogynistic language deserve better than this. And honestly, Kulinski’s audience deserves better than this, deserves content that doesn’t require them to wade through slurs to get to the political analysis, deserves someone who takes seriously the responsibility that comes with having a platform and uses it to model the world they want to see rather than replicating the one they claim to oppose.
This isn’t about purity politics or cancel culture or any of the other terms people deploy to shut down criticism. This is about whether we’re serious about building something different or whether we’re just playing the same game with different jerseys. This is about whether our opposition to oppression is real and consistent or whether it’s conditional and strategic. This is about what kind of movements we’re building and what kind of world those movements are capable of creating.
And right now, what I’m seeing from too many progressives is a willingness to compromise on principles when it’s profitable, to deploy oppressive language when it targets the right people, to benefit from the systems they claim to oppose as long as they maintain plausible deniability about their participation in those systems. That’s not good enough. That’s not going to get us where we need to go. That’s just going to recreate the same hierarchies with different people at the top.
We need to be unequivocal in our opposition to harm, full stop. Not harm against our team, not harm against people who don’t deserve it, not harm that violates our strategic interests. Just harm, period. Because once you start making exceptions, once you start carving out categories of people who it’s okay to dehumanize or demean, you’ve already lost the thread. You’ve already accepted the premise that some people are worth less than others, that hierarchy is inevitable and the question is just about who gets to be on top. And that premise is the root of every system of oppression we’re supposedly trying to dismantle.
Secular Talk’s video wasn’t an isolated incident. It’s part of a pattern, both within that specific platform and within progressive media more broadly, of selective accountability and strategic deployment of oppressive language. And until we’re willing to name that pattern, to call it out consistently regardless of who’s doing it, to demand better from ourselves and our allies, we’re going to keep recreating the same dynamics we claim to oppose. We’re going to keep building movements that talk about justice while perpetuating injustice, that speak the language of equality while reinforcing hierarchy, that promise liberation while profiting from oppression.
There’s a throughline connecting what Secular Talk did with that video and an incident from a few years back that still makes my skin crawl when I think about it. Vaush, another progressive commentator, once deployed what he called the “tactical n-word” during a livestream debate with far-right figures. He used the hard-r version, fully uncensored, supposedly to prove some kind of point, to demonstrate something about their logic or to make himself look tough and unflinching in the face of actual racists. The justification was that he was using it strategically, that the context made it different, that his progressive credentials provided sufficient insulation from the harm embedded in that word.
What Kulinski did is similar in its underlying logic, though less blatant, more subtle, and therefore in some ways more insidious precisely because it’s easier to rationalize away. Vaush’s use was direct, impossible to misinterpret or excuse, a moment where the mask slipped completely and revealed someone more interested in performing toughness than in actually opposing oppression. Kulinski’s approach has more layers of plausible deniability built in. He didn’t say the word himself, he just showed someone else saying it. He censored it when reading aloud, he just left it uncensored on screen. He’s just documenting the discourse, just showing what’s out there, just making content about current events.
But strip away those layers and you find the same essential dynamic at work. Both instances involve progressive commentators making calculated decisions to platform a racial slur, to put it in front of their audiences, to benefit from the engagement and controversy that word generates. Both operate from the premise that their political positioning exempts them from the normal rules about not using oppressive language, that their status as people fighting the good fight means they can deploy the tools of oppression without becoming oppressors themselves. Both reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of how systemic harm works, or worse, a complete understanding of it combined with a willingness to perpetuate it anyway when it serves their interests.
The difference in degree matters, absolutely. Vaush saying the word directly in a debate is more immediately shocking, more viscerally wrong, harder to explain away or justify. It’s the kind of moment that should end any pretense of being a progressive voice, though of course it didn’t because our standards for people on our side are depressingly flexible. What Kulinski did is more subtle, more mediated, easier to dismiss as not that big a deal. He has more room to claim he was just being a journalist, just showing what people were saying, just covering the story. The subtlety provides cover that Vaush’s direct usage didn’t have.
But subtlety doesn’t mean the harm is less real. In some ways it might be worse because it’s harder to call out, harder to make people understand why it matters. When someone uses a slur directly you can point to it and say, there, that’s the problem, that’s the line being crossed. When someone builds layers of mediation around it, when they create distance between themselves and the word while still platforming it and profiting from it, the harm becomes more diffuse but not less significant. It’s like the difference between someone punching you in the face and someone creating conditions where you’re likely to get punched. The directness differs but the injury remains.
What both instances share is this idea that you can weaponize oppressive language against the right targets and have it be fine, that the slur becomes acceptable when deployed strategically against people who deserve it. Vaush thought he could use it against far-right debaters to score points, to demonstrate something about their logic, to win the argument. Kulinski thought he could platform it in a video criticizing Alex Jones’s conspiracy theories, that the righteousness of calling out disinformation would somehow neutralize the harm of featuring a racial slur. But that’s not how any of this works. The word carries its history regardless of who’s using it or why. The harm ripples outward beyond the immediate target. The normalization happens whether you intended it or not.
And in both cases, you have to ask the question that keeps coming back to me: why? Why did Vaush think using that word was necessary to make his point in that debate? Why did Kulinski think showing that particular comment was necessary to demonstrate that people recognized Jones’s conspiracy as fake? In both instances, the point they were making could have been made just as effectively, probably more effectively, without invoking a slur at all. So why choose to do it anyway?
The answer, uncomfortable as it is, comes down to the same thing in both cases: because it made them look tougher, more edgy, more willing to go there, more committed to the fight. Because controversy generates engagement and engagement generates growth. Because platforming that word, even while claiming to oppose everything it represents, gives them something that playing it safe doesn’t. It gives them an edge, a willingness to be provocative, a signal that they’re not bound by the same constraints as everyone else. And all of that translates, directly or indirectly, into audience growth and revenue.
This is what I mean when I talk about progressives benefiting from the systems they claim to oppose. Both Vaush and Kulinski positioned themselves as anti-racist voices, as people fighting against the far right and calling out their bigotry and conspiracy theories. And those positions are genuine to some extent, they really do oppose conservative racism in its most obvious forms. But when the opportunity arises to profit from racist language themselves, when using or platforming a slur serves their strategic interests, suddenly all that opposition becomes flexible. Suddenly context matters and intentions count for everything and we need to understand the nuance of the situation.
Except there is no nuance that makes using a racial slur acceptable when you’re not part of the community that’s reclaiming it. There is no context that transforms oppressive language into a tool of liberation when it’s being deployed by people who have never experienced the oppression that word represents. There is no strategic value that outweighs the harm of normalizing that language, of signaling to audiences that it’s available for use as long as you’re using it against the right people.
What makes Kulinski’s version particularly troubling, even though it’s less direct than Vaush’s, is precisely that subtlety, that plausible deniability. Because it’s harder to call out, it’s more likely to be accepted, more likely to be replicated, more likely to become part of how progressive media operates. If Kulinski can platform a slur and defend it by saying he was just showing what others said, then every other progressive commentator has that same justification available. The precedent gets set. The line gets moved. And suddenly we’re in a world where progressive media regularly features racial slurs as long as there’s enough distance and mediation between the commentator and the word itself.
That’s a world where the systems of oppression get reinforced even by people claiming to dismantle them. That’s a world where the language of violence and dehumanization remains in circulation, normalized and available, just redirected at different targets. That’s a world where being progressive means nothing more than choosing different enemies while using the same weapons. And that world is no better than the one we have now, it’s just the same hierarchies with different people trying to climb to the top.
Both Vaush’s tactical slur and Kulinski’s platforming of one reveal the same fundamental problem: a progressive movement that’s more interested in winning arguments and growing platforms than in actually embodying the values it claims to represent. A movement that talks about dismantling oppression while profiting from it, that speaks the language of justice while wielding the tools of injustice, that promises something better while delivering more of the same with better branding.
We have to be able to name this pattern and refuse it, completely and without exception. We have to be willing to say that it doesn’t matter if you’re using a slur tactically or platforming it strategically or any other qualifier you want to add to create distance from the harm. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing it to own the far right or to call out conspiracy theories or to demonstrate your commitment to the fight. It’s still wrong. It still causes harm. It still reinforces the systems we’re supposed to be tearing down. And it still reveals that your opposition to oppression is conditional, strategic, and ultimately hollow.
The fact that Kulinski’s version is less egregious than Vaush’s doesn’t make it acceptable. It just makes it more dangerous because it’s easier to miss, easier to excuse, easier to let slide. And every time we let it slide, every time we make exceptions for people on our side, every time we accept harm because it’s directed at the right targets, we’re building a movement that will inevitably turn that same harm back on us when the targets shift and the alliances change.
This is why consistency matters. This is why we need principles that apply regardless of who’s violating them. This is why we can’t accept this shit from anyone, even and especially from people who claim to be progressive, who claim to be on our side, who claim to be fighting for justice. Because if they’re willing to profit from oppression when it serves them, then they’re not actually fighting for justice at all. They’re just fighting for a better position within the same oppressive systems, and that’s not good enough. That will never be good enough.
We can do better. We have to do better. The stakes are too high and the harm is too real to accept anything less than actual, consistent, principled opposition to all forms of oppression, regardless of who’s perpetrating it or who it’s aimed at. That’s the standard. That’s what justice requires. And anything short of that is just more of the same bullshit wearing a progressive mask.