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This essay is not an argument against transgender adults living freely and being treated decently. It is an argument about a specific set of claims—metaphysical, political, and clinical—that tends to generate persistent institutional conflict because it lacks a shared stopping rule. By “stopping rule,” I mean a principled boundary that both sides can recognize as legitimate: a line where accommodation ends and coercion begins, or where uncertainty requires caution. When subjective identity claims are treated as authoritative and dissent is treated as harm, disputes recur across domains—speech norms, public policy, and pediatric medicine—because there is no common adjudicator capable of resolving the underlying disagreement.
1) Thesis and scope: what is being argued, and what is not
The claim here is procedural. Whatever one’s moral intuitions, systems built to enforce contested metaphysics predictably produce friction that neither side can permanently “win.” A pluralist society can enforce civility and prohibit harassment. It cannot, without escalating conflict, require citizens and institutions to treat an internally felt identity as the final authority over publicly legible categories—especially when those categories structure law, safety, and fairness.
2) Metaphysical claim: identity as authoritative reality
The metaphysical claim, stated minimally, is: when sex and self-declared gender conflict, identity is treated as the authoritative reality for how others must speak and for how institutions must categorize. In a liberal society, people routinely request courtesy; the tension begins when courtesy becomes a duty enforced by institutional sanctions, because that converts disagreements about contested concepts into compliance problems.
The mechanism is structural rather than psychological. If a proposition is treated as morally obligatory yet largely unverifiable, enforcement shifts from evidence to norms, and from norms to penalties. This does not require attributing motives; it is a predictable consequence of asking public systems to operationalize contested metaphysics. The cost is an expansion of “speech governance,” where ordinary interpersonal mistakes or dissenting beliefs are treated as policy violations rather than social disputes. The verdict: making subjective identity authoritative at the level of public rulemaking tends to destabilize shared norms, because the principle contains no internal boundary that can settle recurring disputes.
3) Political claim: institutions forced to referee contested categories
The political claim extends the metaphysical one: public institutions must treat identity as authoritative in classification and access. The “no stopping rule” problem becomes concrete when policy must decide eligibility, categories, and competing rights. Sport is not the whole controversy, but it is a clear case study because sex-segregated categories exist to preserve fairness under stable biological differences.
World Athletics’ 2023 regulations excluding transgender women who have experienced male puberty from elite female competition were an explicit attempt to draw a boundary grounded in performance-relevant biology rather than identity.(worldathletics.org) This example does not “prove” the broader thesis; it illustrates the governing dilemma: once identity is treated as determinative, any sex-based boundary becomes contestable on the same logic, and institutions are pulled into continuous adjudication. The cost is not only policy churn but legitimacy loss, as significant segments of the public come to see institutions as enforcing contested beliefs rather than administering neutral rules. The verdict: when institutions are made to referee contested metaphysical claims, policy disputes harden into identity conflicts and become difficult to resolve through ordinary pluralist compromise.
4) Clinical claim: minors, uncertainty, and the need for evidentiary brakes
The clinical claim is narrower and higher-stakes: affirmation-first protocols are often presented as the evidence-based default for minors, despite ongoing disputes about evidence quality, long-term outcomes, and appropriate thresholds for irreversible interventions.
The mechanism is again about stopping rules. In pediatrics, where patients may have limited capacity to grasp lifelong tradeoffs and where interventions can be difficult to reverse, uncertainty normally triggers caution: structured assessment, conservative pathways, and high evidentiary standards. In England, the Cass Review’s recommendations prompted major service redesign, and NHS England’s implementation document outlines steps already taken and planned in response to those recommendations.(england.nhs.uk) The UK government also announced that emergency restrictions on the private sale and supply of puberty blockers would be made indefinite following advice from the Commission on Human Medicines, citing safety concerns; the DHSC explainer situates this within a broader shift toward research frameworks.(gov.uk)
The point is not that UK policy settles the science. The point is procedural: a major public health system treated evidentiary uncertainty as a reason to tighten pathways and emphasize research structures. The cost of overstating certainty is predictable—trust erosion among families, clinicians, and the public when policy appears to run ahead of evidence. The verdict: for minors, uncertainty should operate as a brake; when it does not, clinical decision-making becomes vulnerable to political and ideological pressure.
5) Steelman, with a credibility caveat: what proponents argue, and why WPATH cannot be treated as neutral authority
A fair steelman starts with the humane premise: some young people experience profound distress; social rejection correlates with worse mental health; supportive environments may reduce suffering; and for adults, liberal societies generally presume wide autonomy over body and presentation. Observational research has reported short-term associations between receiving puberty blockers or hormones and lower reported depression or suicidality among transgender and nonbinary youth, while still facing the usual limitations of nonrandomized designs (selection effects, confounding, short follow-up).(jamanetwork.com)
Advocates often cite WPATH’s Standards of Care (SOC8) as a professional consensus reference point. A publishable essay, however, has to include a procedural caveat: SOC8 is now contested as an uncontested authority, particularly for minors, due to public disputes about guideline-development process and evidentiary representation. The “WPATH Files” publication by Environmental Progress alleges internal discussions inconsistent with the public posture of evidentiary confidence.(environmentalprogress.org) Separately, an HHS report alleged that during SOC8 development, WPATH suppressed certain systematic reviews considered potentially undermining to preferred protocols.(opa.hhs.gov) WPATH and USPATH responded by disputing key characterizations and criticizing the HHS report, framing it as misrepresenting evidence, and noting constraints around ongoing litigation and related processes.(wpath.org)
The responsible conclusion is limited but important: SOC8 may still be used to describe the best-case articulation of the pro-affirmation position, but it cannot function as a neutral “settled science” stamp—especially in a pediatric domain where evidentiary confidence must be demonstrable rather than asserted. The verdict: steelman the humane intent and the reported short-term associations; do not outsource epistemic certainty to a guideline whose development and representation are under active public dispute.
6) Synthesis: stopping rules as the governance solution
The practical question is governance, not moral panic: can a pluralistic society accommodate people without compelling metaphysical assent, and can pediatric medicine proceed without overstating certainty? The answer is unglamorous: stopping rules.
In institutions, stopping rules mean enforcing civil treatment and anti-harassment norms while refusing to treat metaphysical agreement as a condition of participation in public life. In medicine, stopping rules mean evidence thresholds, transparent review, and heightened caution for minors where long-term outcomes remain contested. If stopping rules are refused, conflict tends to migrate: from clinics to courts, from policy to punishment, from persuasion to compulsion. The cost is durable polarization and degraded trust in institutions. The verdict: if the goal is social peace and clinical integrity, the burden is on advocates and opponents alike to articulate boundaries that are evidence-responsive, rights-consistent, and enforceable without demanding ideological conformity.
Glossary
Affirmation-first: A clinical approach that treats a person’s stated gender identity as true and prioritizes support for it; critics argue it may reduce exploratory assessment, especially for minors.
Cass Review: Independent review commissioned by NHS England into child and adolescent gender services; its recommendations prompted service redesign and tighter evidence standards.(england.nhs.uk)
Observational study: Research that observes outcomes without random assignment; can show association but generally cannot prove causation.(pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
Puberty blockers (GnRHa): Medications that suppress pubertal development; debated in youth gender medicine due to evidence-quality and risk/benefit uncertainty.(gov.uk)
SOC8: WPATH Standards of Care, version 8 (2022), widely cited in gender medicine; currently disputed as neutral authority in some public controversies.(environmentalprogress.org)
Stopping rule: A principled boundary that can settle recurring disputes (e.g., evidence thresholds for minors; category rules in sport).
WPATH Files: A publication of alleged internal WPATH materials by Environmental Progress; relevant here because it is part of an ongoing credibility dispute about guideline development.(environmentalprogress.org)
References
- NHS England, Implementing the Cass Review recommendations (PDF). https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/PRN01451-implementing-the-cass-review-recommendations.pdf
- NHS England, Children and young people’s gender services: implementing the Cass Review recommendations (long read). https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/children-and-young-peoples-gender-services-implementing-the-cass-review-recommendations/
- UK Department of Health and Social Care, “Ban on puberty blockers to be made indefinite on experts’ advice” (11 Dec 2024). https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ban-on-puberty-blockers-to-be-made-indefinite-on-experts-advice
- DHSC Media Blog, “Puberty blockers: what you need to know.” https://healthmedia.blog.gov.uk/2024/12/11/puberty-blockers-what-you-need-to-know/
- World Athletics press release (Mar 2023) on female eligibility. https://worldathletics.org/news/press-releases/council-meeting-march-2023-russia-belarus-female-eligibility
- World Athletics eligibility regulations PDF. https://worldathletics.org/download/download?filename=c50f2178-3759-4d1c-8fbc-370f6aef4370.pdf&urlslug=C3.5A%20%E2%80%93%20Eligibility%20Regulations%20Transgender%20Athletes%20%E2%80%93%20effective%2031%20March%202023
- Tordoff et al., JAMA Network Open (2022). https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2789423
- Environmental Progress, “The WPATH Files.” https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files
- HHS, Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria (Nov 2025). https://opa.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-11/gender-dysphoria-report.pdf
- WPATH/USPATH response (May 2025). https://wpath.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/WPATH-USPATH-Response-to-HHS-Report-02May2025-3.pdf
Global National ran an “overnight” segment after the Tumbler Ridge massacre under a framing that is, in its own way, a confession: “Anti-trans disinformation circulates after mass shooting.” (Global News)
Not Who died? Not How did this happen? Not What failed? Not What do we change Monday morning?
The story, as packaged, is not forensic. It’s prophylactic. The first institutional instinct is not to look hard at systems and sequences, but to manage reputational spillover: prevent a narrative from becoming “dangerous,” protect a constituency from backlash, and pre-label certain lines of inquiry as moral contamination.
That choice matters, because a town is burying children.
And because when journalism reaches for a firewall before it reaches for an autopsy, it stops being a public service and becomes a public-relations function.
What Actually Happened: Sequence Before Sermon
On February 10, 2026, an 18-year-old, Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed people at home and then attacked Tumbler Ridge Secondary School before dying by suicide. Multiple accounts report that the attack began with the killing of the shooter’s mother and 11-year-old half-brother, followed by the school shooting. (The Wall Street Journal)
The victims include five students (ages 12–13) and a 39-year-old education assistant, with the mother and half-brother killed beforehand. Names and details have been published widely and confirmed in Canadian Press reporting and related coverage. (People.com) The BC RCMP also issued a public confirmation of deceased victims. (RCMP)
That’s the baseline: a chain of events with a clear order—home, then school—ending in a pile of dead kids and a town whose grief will not be solved by better discourse hygiene.
Sequence matters because it points to systems:
- What warnings existed and where?
- What interventions were attempted and by whom?
- How were firearms stored and accessed?
- What did the school know, and when?
- What did police know, and what tools were used (or not used)?
- What gaps exist between “we did a wellness check” and “we prevented a catastrophe”?
Reporting indicates a history of mental-health-related police interactions and investigators reviewing digital footprint and online activity. (The Wall Street Journal)
These are the questions you chase when you treat murder as a real event in the world—not as a pretext for messaging.
What Global Chose to Do Instead
Global’s piece does not begin at the crime scene. It begins in the information ecosystem.
In the related Global coverage and clip description, the emphasis is on how the suspected shooter’s trans identity is “being used to fuel misinformation online,” and the segment elevates advocacy voices concerned about anti-trans sentiment. (Global News)
To be blunt: they treat the massacre as a vector for disinformation, rather than as a symptom of institutional failure.
This isn’t a claim that concerns about backlash are always illegitimate. It’s a claim about priority and timing.
You can caution against scapegoating without making that caution the lead, the thesis, and the moral center—while the basic forensic questions remain unasked in the same breath.
Worse, the frame is fortified by official moral language. BC’s Human Rights Commissioner issued a statement warning against conflating trans identity with violence and calling such conflation “incorrect, irresponsible and frankly dangerous.” (bchumanrights.ca)
Again: that statement may be true as a general principle—identity is not destiny—but it is also rhetorically useful as a solvent. It dissolves scrutiny by implying that scrutiny is the harm.
And in the current media climate, once a question is placed inside the “dangerous” bucket, it stops being investigated and starts being policed.
That is what narrative-commitment looks like: not lying, necessarily—just selecting a reality tunnel and treating alternate tunnels as morally suspicious.
Why This Reads as Out of Touch
Because the public is not asking for a sermon. The public is asking for accountability you can measure.
When parents hear “anti-trans disinformation” as the headline after a school attack, the implied hierarchy is:
- protect the narrative
- protect the vulnerable (as defined by the segment)
- later, perhaps, protect the public
That hierarchy does real damage.
It tells the bereaved: “We have already decided what the real emergency is.”
It tells the skeptical: “Your questions are morally tainted.”
It tells institutions: “If your policies intersect with a protected narrative, you will be insulated from the normal post-disaster autopsy.”
And it tells everyone else to stop trusting the gatekeepers.
Journalism doesn’t lose trust because it has values. It loses trust because it has values that pre-empt facts.
What a Forensic Post-Tumbler Ridge Agenda Looks Like
If you want a serious follow-up—one that serves victims, not narratives—here are the obvious “system” targets. None of this requires scapegoating an identity. It requires the courage to audit failures like adults.
1) A full public timeline, cross-agency
A public accounting that stitches together: school records, police contacts, mental-health interventions, family context, and warning signs—chronologically, with decision points. This is how you find the failure nodes.
2) Firearms access: storage, compliance, and enforcement gaps
Reporting indicates multiple firearms were used and investigators are examining how they were obtained. (The Wall Street Journal)
The question is not “gun control” as a slogan. The question is: What specific mechanisms failed—safe storage, licensing, supervision, enforcement, reporting? Fix the mechanism, not the talking point.
3) Threat assessment and school safety protocols that actually bite
Most institutions are good at paperwork and bad at escalation. Schools need a protocol that converts “concerning behavior” into structured threat assessment, and threat assessment into action—without letting “this might stigmatize” become the veto.
4) Mental-health intervention that doesn’t stop at “wellness checks”
If repeated mental-health-related police visits are part of the story—as reporting suggests—then the system question is: what happens after the tenth check? (NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth)
Communities need a bridge between crisis contact and sustained containment: follow-up, risk management, family support, and clear thresholds for escalation.
5) Media standards: separate “backlash management” from “causal inquiry”
A newsroom can do both—but not in a way that treats one as taboo. Post-massacre coverage should have a simple rule:
- Name the victims.
- Lay out the timeline.
- Identify plausible failure points.
- Present what is known, what is not, and what must be investigated.
- Only then: address secondary narratives (backlash, misinformation, online dynamics).
Right now, too many outlets reverse that order.
The Real Test: Can We Ask the Questions Without Being Moralized Into Silence?
There is a difference between scapegoating and scrutiny.
Scrutiny is what you owe dead children.
If the media class cannot bring itself to treat Tumbler Ridge as a forensic event first—if it must immediately translate it into a morality play about discourse—then it is not merely “out of touch.” It is structurally incapable of learning.
And systems that cannot learn repeat.
Not because people are evil, but because the firewall held—until it didn’t.
On February 10, 2026, Tumbler Ridge, B.C. (population ~2,400) was hit with a catastrophe it will carry for decades. RCMP have confirmed eight victims: five students aged 12–13, one education assistant (39), and—before the school attack—the shooter’s mother (39) and 11-year-old half-brother. The perpetrator, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, then died by suicide.
Name the dead, because that’s the baseline for honest coverage. Abel Mwansa (12). Ezekiel Schofield (13). Kylie Smith (12). Zoey Benoit (12). Ticaria Lampert (12). Shannda Aviugana-Durand (39). Jennifer Jacobs (39). Emmett Jacobs (11). The family tributes are almost unbearable. Ticaria’s mother called her “my Tiki torch… a blazing light in the darkness.” Kylie’s father pleaded with the world to “hold your kids tight.” This is a tight community. The loss isn’t “eight fatalities.” It’s eight holes in a town where most people can point to the exact place those kids used to stand.
Now the media problem: within days, a noticeable slice of Canadian coverage pivoted to managing the public’s reaction to the shooter’s transgender identification. Global News ran a segment framed around “misinformation about trans people” being fueled by the shooting. The Tyee published an opinion piece warning that suffering “should never be weaponized,” focused less on the dead children than on backlash narratives. Even wire coverage foregrounded the shooter’s identity and used female pronouns while naming victims in the same breath—an editorial decision that tells you what frame is being protected.
Let me be precise about the critique, because this is where defenders hide behind a strawman. Nobody reasonable is arguing that “all trans people are responsible” for anything. The question is simpler: why was the instinct—right after slaughtered children—to warn Canadians about transphobia and “disinformation” rather than interrogate the failure chain that got us here? Reporting has already described a history of serious mental health issues and police encounters connected to the shooter, including firearm-related interactions. What interventions happened? What warnings were missed? How did access to weapons occur? Those are the adult questions. “Don’t be mean online” is not an answer to a mass killing.
This is what ideological capture looks like in practice: a hierarchy of empathy enforced by institutions. The victims are mourned, yes—but the “secondary story” rapidly becomes protecting a narrative category from reputational harm. That is not compassion. It’s brand management, and it trains the public to understand tragedy through approved lenses: some facts are treated as volatile, some questions as taboo, and anyone who notices patterns is pre-emptively suspected of malice.
Tumbler Ridge deserves better than that. Journalism’s first duty in a massacre is not to pre-scold the audience. It is to tell the truth, foreground the human cost, and pursue the causal chain without fear or favour. Start with the dead kids. Keep them at the center. And then do the hard work—because if the press won’t, the vacuum gets filled by cynics, activists, and conspiracy merchants. That isn’t “safety.” It’s surrender.
References
- RCMP victim identifications & family statements: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/livestory/active-shooter-alert-tumbler-ridge-secondary-school-bc-live-updates-9.7083740
- CNN victim profiles: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/13/americas/victims-tumbler-ridge-shooting-intl
- Global News on “misinformation”: https://globalnews.ca/news/11667066/tumbler-ridge-shooting-misinformation-trans-people/
- The Tyee op-ed: https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2026/02/12/Suffering-Should-Never-Be-Weaponized-Tumbler-Ridge-Tragedy/
- BBC/RCMP timeline: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e98w35qyjo
Modern North American politics is increasingly conducted as if the other side is not an opponent but a threat. Not “wrong,” but illegitimate. Not “mistaken,” but dangerous. Once that framing takes hold, everything downstream gets harder: legislating, compromising, trusting institutions, even sharing a country.
There’s a name for this move, and it’s older than social media: the friend–enemy distinction associated with the German jurist Carl Schmitt. Use it carefully. Attribute it correctly. Treat it as a warning label, not a blueprint.
The Schmitt paragraph (correct attribution without laundering)
In The Concept of the Political (first as an essay in 1927; expanded as a book in 1932), Carl Schmitt argued that what is distinctively political is not morality, economics, or aesthetics, but the capacity to sort human beings into friends and enemies—public groupings that can reach the highest intensity and, in the extreme case, make violence thinkable. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Schmitt is a morally compromised figure: he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and wrote in support of the regime, which makes him “radioactive” as an authority. (Wikipedia) That’s precisely why the concept should be handled as a diagnostic for a recurring political pattern—not as an endorsement of Schmitt’s politics, and not as a permission slip to treat fellow citizens as foes.
That’s the frame. Now the point: you can reject Schmitt’s politics and still find his definition useful for recognizing when a society is sliding from politics-as-bargaining into politics-as-threat-management.
1) What the friend–enemy distinction is (and isn’t)
Schmitt’s core claim is often quoted badly. The clean version is this:
- It’s public, not personal. “Enemy” is not your private dislike. It’s a public adversary, a category applied at the level of groups. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- It’s about intensity and stakes. The distinction becomes political when disagreement is framed as a contest over a community’s existence or way of life—when coercion becomes not just imaginable but morally narratable. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- It’s not reducible to morality. In Schmitt’s framing, you can judge an enemy morally good and still treat them as an enemy; the political is not the same thing as ethics. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
So the friend–enemy distinction is less a philosophy lesson than a switch. When it flips on, political disagreement stops being about what we should do and becomes about who is allowed to be “us.”
2) The observable move: how to spot it in the wild
You’re watching friend–enemy politics when rhetoric shifts from:
- “Their plan won’t work” → “They cannot be permitted to govern.”
- “We’ll reverse this policy later” → “If they win, the country is finished.”
- “We can bargain on X” → “Any compromise is betrayal.”
- “Institutions are imperfect” → “Institutions are legitimate only when they deliver our outcomes.”
Here’s the part that matters: this is not just “heated language.” It’s a legitimacy test. The argument isn’t “our side has better ideas.” It’s “the other side is outside the moral community.”
What it sounds like now (no special villains required)
Over the last decade, ordinary campaign language has absorbed a new register: catastrophe certainty. You hear it when routine electoral competition is narrated as a point of no return not “we’ll reverse their policy,” but “if they win, the country is over.” You hear it when every institution that fails to deliver your preferred outcome becomes not merely flawed but captured—courts, schools, public health bodies, legacy media, election administration. Once those are recast as enemy infrastructure, the next step is predictable: treating compromise as collaboration.
That’s the Schmittian escalator: it turns normal democratic rivalry into a kind of internal cold war.
3) Why this maps onto polarization in the U.S. (with verifiable anchors)
American public opinion data increasingly fits the emotional profile you would expect in a friend–enemy environment: high frustration, high anger, low confidence, and pervasive negativity toward the opposing party.
Pew Research Center (survey fielded Sept. 22–28, 2025) reports that roughly half of U.S. adults say each party makes them feel angry (Democratic Party 50%, Republican Party 49%), and large majorities say each makes them feel frustrated (Democratic Party 75%, Republican Party 64%). (Pew Research Center) Pew also reports that majorities view both parties as too extreme (GOP 61%, Democrats 57%). (Pew Research Center)
That doesn’t “prove Schmitt.” It shows a climate where it’s easy for elites and activists to plausibly say: “The other side isn’t just wrong; they’re dangerous.”
Political science has a name for the emotional side of this: affective polarization which is the tendency for partisans to dislike and distrust the out-party as a social group. Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes argue that affect increasingly operates through social identity dynamics rather than ideological distance alone. (Political Communication Lab)
Affective polarization supplies the fuel. Friend–enemy rhetoric supplies the spark.
4) Why Canada is not “the same,” but not immune
Canada has its own stresses: regional tensions, institutional distrust, culture-war imports, and an online ecosystem shared with the U.S. but it is still a mistake to claim Canada is simply America north.
A careful comparative point looks like this: research summarized by UBC Magazine reports Canadians show moderate affective polarization and lower levels of deeper hostility (political sectarianism) than Americans; divisions exist, but they are less intense, and fewer people treat the other side as morally beyond the pale. (UBC Alumni Magazine)
A note on insulation (not immunity) 🧯
Canada also has some built-in insulation: parliamentary governance can make politics feel less like a single, winner-take-all presidency; multi-party dynamics can prevent a total two-tribe monopoly; party discipline can concentrate bargaining inside caucuses rather than turning every vote into a public loyalty test. None of that makes Canada immune especially in a shared online ecosystem with American media incentives but it helps explain why Canadian polarization can be real without being identical.
5) Why identity politics dovetails so easily (even when it starts as justice) 🧩
“Identity politics” is a term that gets used as a slur, so define it cleanly. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes identity politics as political activity and theorizing rooted in shared experiences of injustice among members of particular social groups, often aiming to secure political freedom for a marginalized constituency. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
That definition is not inherently friend–enemy. You can organize around group experiences without treating dissenters as enemies.
So why the dovetail?
Because identity politics—left and right—naturally foregrounds group boundaries: who counts, who belongs, who’s harmed, who threatens, who is owed what. Schmitt’s point is that any distinction ethnic, cultural, religious, linguistic, and ideological can become politically decisive if it becomes a marker of collective identity with enough intensity. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Now add moralization. Finkel and colleagues define political sectarianism as “the tendency to adopt a moralized identification with one political group and against another.” (Political Communication Lab) Once politics is moralized at the identity level, compromise starts to look like apostasy: you don’t bargain with evil; you resist it.
Here’s the dovetail in one line:
Identity makes the boundary salient; moralization makes it sacred; friend–enemy logic makes it coercive.
The accelerant: attention economics
The friend–enemy move also fits the modern information economy. Outrage travels; nuance doesn’t. Platforms and partisan media ecosystems reward content that converts complexity into moral clarity so we get villains, victims, emergencies, and betrayal. That incentive structure doesn’t invent the friend–enemy distinction, but it mass-produces it, because existential framing is the most reliable way to keep attention and discipline the in-group.
6) The cost: why friend–enemy politics jams the machinery of governance
When politics is friend–enemy:
- Compromise becomes betrayal.
Not merely “a bad deal,” but disloyalty to the tribe. - Institutions become contested terrain.
Courts, legislatures, bureaucracies, and media are judged not by process but by whether they serve “us.” Legitimacy becomes outcome-dependent. - Policy friction skyrockets.
Even mutually beneficial reforms become hard because the other side’s win is treated as loss of status or existential risk. - Moderation gets punished.
The moderate’s basic civic move—“I’ll grant you partial legitimacy and bargain” gets rebranded as weakness or collaboration.
The social cost (quiet, cumulative, real)
The damage isn’t confined to legislatures. Friend–enemy framing erodes social trust: people self-censor at work, avoid neighbours, and retreat into curated friend-only spaces. Institutions become identity badges your media, your university, your charities, your professional associations until public life resembles a network of gated communities with competing moral jurisdictions.
7) The steelman (and the answer)
Steelman: sometimes the other side really is dangerous. Sometimes a movement is openly anti-democratic, violent, or committed to permanent domination. In those cases, “enemy” language can feel like moral clarity.
Answer: danger exists. But friend–enemy framing is cheap to claim and expensive to live under. The burden of proof has to be high, because once you normalize existential threat talk, you train citizens to treat routine democratic alternation as intolerable. You also incentivize mirroring: nobody wants to be the only player insisting it’s “just politics” while being branded a threat.
Friend–enemy politics is a ratchet. It rarely turns only one way.
8) A short field guide: “know it when you see it”
You’re in friend–enemy territory when you hear:
- “They’re illegitimate.”
- “If they win, the country is over.”
- “Neutrality is complicity.”
- “Compromise is betrayal.”
- “The system is rigged—unless we win.”
- “Your neighbour’s vote is violence / treason / conquest.”
And you’re watching it spread when those claims expand outward to tag neutral institutions and ordinary citizens: not just the party but anyone who isn’t for us is with them.
9) The exit ramp: moderation without naïveté
This is not a call for civility theatre. It’s a call for civic hygiene.
A workable politics of moderation has one core rule:
Treat opponents as lawful rivals unless and until they clearly demonstrate otherwise and even then, be precise.
Practically, that means:
- Argue policy in terms of tradeoffs, constraints, second-order effects (the language of governing, not excommunication).
- Reserve “enemy” language for genuinely exceptional cases, and specify evidence and predictions that could, in principle, be falsified.
- Defend institutional legitimacy as a process, not a scoreboard.
If you can’t do that, you don’t just intensify conflict you corrode the shared premise that makes democratic disagreement possible: that losing an election is not losing the country.
Closing: the consequence if we don’t name it
Schmitt’s concept is dangerous partly because it’s accurate as a description of how politics can harden. Once a society trains itself to see politics as friend versus enemy, it will eventually demand enemy-handling tools: purges, blacklists, emergency powers, legitimacy tests, permanent distrust. The policy state becomes brittle; the civic culture becomes suspicious; moderation becomes a vice.
The friend–enemy distinction is not merely an idea. It’s a habit of mind. And habits, unlike ideologies, don’t require formal assent. They spread by imitation.
The minimum defensive act is to recognize the move when it’s being done to you, and when you’re tempted to do it back. 🧭
Glossary
Affective polarization — Dislike, distrust, and social hostility toward supporters of the opposing party, treated as a group identity rather than merely a set of policy positions. (Political Communication Lab)
Catastrophe register / no-return framing — A rhetorical mode that describes ordinary electoral competition as an existential point of no return (“if they win, the country is over”).
Friend–enemy distinction (Schmitt) — The claim that the political is defined by the capacity to distinguish friend from enemy in a public sense, with sufficient intensity that coercion or violence becomes thinkable in extreme cases. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Identity politics — Political activity and theorizing grounded in shared experiences of injustice among members of particular social groups, typically aimed at securing political freedom for a marginalized constituency. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Legitimacy denial — Treating the opposing side as outside the set of lawful rivals who may govern; shifting from “they’re wrong” to “they must not rule.”
Political sectarianism — “The tendency to adopt a moralized identification with one political group and against another,” borrowing the metaphor of religious sects rather than mere teams. (Political Communication Lab)
Process legitimacy — The idea that institutions are legitimate because procedures are lawful, stable, and fairly applied—not because they produce outcomes you like.
Citations (Sources)
- Carl Schmitt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), overview of Schmitt and the friend–enemy distinction. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Background note on The Concept of the Political and Schmitt’s Nazi Party membership (reference context). (Wikipedia)
- Pew Research Center (Oct 30, 2025), party feelings: anger/frustration measures. (Pew Research Center)
- Pew Research Center (Oct 30, 2025), views of both parties: “too extreme” findings. (Pew Research Center)
- UBC Magazine (Dec 2, 2025), summary of Canadian polarization research and comparative claims. (UBC Alumni Magazine)
- Iyengar, Sood, & Lelkes (2012), “Affect, Not Ideology,” on affective polarization as social identity. (Political Communication Lab)
- Finkel et al. (Science, 2020), “Political sectarianism in America,” definition and framework. (Political Communication Lab)
- Identity Politics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), definition and scope. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The X post is doing something familiar: it takes two ugly sentences, assigns one to “conservatives” and one to “leftists,” and then says, See? The rules are different. It’s a compressed morality play about “two-tier” reality—speech treated as violence on one side, actual violence laundered as “peaceful protest” on the other. The point isn’t subtle. The point is that subtlety is for suckers.
And yes: there is a real intellectual touchstone for the logic the meme is gesturing at—Herbert Marcuse and his essay Repressive Tolerance. Marcuse’s argument, in brief, is not “be nice to everyone equally.” It’s that “tolerance” inside an unjust system can function as a stabilizer for the powerful. If the social order is already rigged, then neutral tolerance becomes complicity. So “tolerance” may need to become selective: intolerance toward movements judged oppressive; preferential latitude toward movements judged emancipatory.
That is a mechanism you can recognize in our current atmosphere even if you reject Marcuse’s conclusions. Once you accept that framework—“neutral rules are a mask for power”—you quickly get to the idea that the formal categories we inherited (free speech, due process, viewpoint neutrality, equal enforcement) are not the point. The point is the moral direction of history. If you think the stakes are existential, then anything that slows “liberation” looks like violence, and anything that advances it starts to look excusable.
That’s the lure. It feels like moral seriousness.
It also tends to produce the exact thing the meme is ridiculing: asymmetric permission structures. On paper: “We oppose violence.” In practice: “We oppose violence when it serves the other tribe.” On paper: “Words have consequences.” In practice: “Words are violence when spoken by the wrong person, and merely ‘context’ when spoken by the right one.” If you want to defend selective enforcement as justice, Marcuse gives you a vocabulary. If you want to mock selective enforcement as hypocrisy, this meme gives you an image.
But the meme cheats in two ways.
First, it packages maximal caricatures as if they are the daily policy of real institutions: “people deserve to be shot,” “running over agents is peaceful,” “terrorizing churches is civil rights.” Those aren’t arguments; they’re adrenaline. They’re useful precisely because they let the reader skip the hard work: which specific cases, which authorities, which jurisdictions, which outcomes, which standards? A meme that can’t name a case doesn’t want to inform you. It wants to recruit you.
Second, it collapses three distinct questions into one hot blob:
- What is the law?
- How is it being enforced?
- Should the law be changed?
You can have a serious conversation about two-tier policing and still be allergic to meme logic. Two-tier policing isn’t a vibe; it’s an empirical claim: similar conduct, different outcomes, explained by ideology rather than facts. That’s testable, at least in principle. Pick comparable cases. Compare charging decisions, bail, sentencing, media framing, institutional statements, internal policies, and (crucially) what evidence was available at the time. If the pattern holds, you’ve found something corrosive.
Neutrality is never clean. Discretion and bias are baked into enforcement. That’s why consistency and transparency aren’t niceties; they’re the only way discretion doesn’t become patronage.
And if the pattern doesn’t hold? Then the meme is just a mood board for resentment.
Here’s the deeper issue: equal application of the law is not a decorative liberal slogan. It’s the only thing that keeps politics from becoming a permanent emergency. The moment your faction decides that formal neutrality is merely “repressive tolerance,” you have granted yourself a standing exemption. The moment the other faction learns that lesson, you get escalation, then retaliation, then institutional rot. The system stops being a referee and becomes a weapon. Everyone notices. Nobody trusts verdicts. Everything becomes a street fight conducted through courts, bureaucracies, and HR policies.
Which is, ironically, a recipe for more repression—just not evenly distributed. 🙂
If you want to critique selective enforcement without becoming a partisan mirror image, try this simple discipline:
- Name the standard (what rule should apply?).
- Name the comparator (what similar case was treated differently?).
- Name the decision point (who chose not to enforce, or enforced aggressively?).
- Say what you’d accept if the tribes were swapped.
Sometimes the double standard is real. The remedy is not revenge; it’s comparison—same conduct, same rule, same consequence, even when it’s your side.
That last one is the lie detector. Most people fail it quickly. That’s not because they’re stupid; it’s because the incentive structure is poisonous. If you’re convinced the other side is not merely wrong but illegitimate, “neutral rules” start to feel like self-harm.
Marcuse understood that temptation and tried to turn it into theory. The meme understands the temptation and turns it into a dunk.
My view is more boring and therefore more useful: a society can survive deep disagreement; it cannot survive the public belief that enforcement is a tribal privilege. If you think we have two-tier policing or two-tier moral accounting, don’t answer with a meme that trains your readers to crave revenge. Answer with receipts, standards, comparators, and the willingness to be constrained by the rule you want applied to your enemies.
Otherwise, you’re not defending fairness. You’re just changing who gets to do the repressing.
If a government’s job is to steward the conditions for ordinary people to build, trade, invest, and plan a life, then our federal leadership has been doing that job badly.
Not because Canadians are lazy. Not because the world is easy. But because the governing reflex is wrong: when something breaks, Ottawa reaches for a new program, a new credit, a new rebate, a new subsidy, a new “strategy.” It treats the economy like a patient that can be stabilized indefinitely with IV drips.
That approach can buy headlines. It cannot buy prosperity.
The best indicator is per-person performance. We can argue about which yardstick matters most, but the story is consistent: Canadians are producing less per person than we should be, relative to peers and especially relative to the United States. When per-capita output stagnates, everything gets harder at once: housing feels unaffordable, healthcare feels strained, wages feel thin, and every problem becomes a fight over slices instead of a discussion about baking more bread.
The policy style matters because it shapes incentives. When governments patch symptoms with cash transfers while leaving the cost structure and the approval structure untouched, they teach the country the wrong lesson: don’t fix the machine; keep bribing the machine not to squeal.
The mechanism: why “more programs” keeps failing
Here’s the basic mechanism, stripped of moral drama:
- High costs and slow approvals choke supply.
Housing, energy, infrastructure, major projects, even small-business expansions: Canada is a country that says “no” and “later” far more often than it says “yes” and “go.” Every delay is a tax. Every duplicated review is a tax. Every veto point is a tax. - Government then tries to “help” people pay the tax it created.
Rebates, credits, subsidies, targeted relief. It’s a strange kind of compassion that insists on first inflating the cost of living and then offering a coupon to survive it. - Those programs don’t increase productivity.
They redistribute purchasing power. Sometimes that’s justified in emergencies. But as a governing model it becomes a treadmill: you need ever-larger transfers to offset the same underlying frictions. - Meanwhile investment goes elsewhere.
Capital avoids uncertainty, delays, and politicized approvals. If the return on effort is higher across the border, it doesn’t matter how many committees we convene about “competitiveness.” The money leaves. So do the high-productivity jobs.
That’s the loop.
Steelman: “But the government is trying to protect people”
Yes. There are real hardships and real shocks: pandemic aftershocks, energy volatility, inflation waves. A modern state can’t pretend none of that exists.
But a serious government distinguishes relief from policy habit.
Relief is temporary and humble. It treats symptoms while it removes the causes.
Policy habit is permanent and proud. It treats symptoms and declares victory.
Canada’s problem is not that government ever helps. It’s that government too often helps in a way that replaces fixing the constraints. Then it wonders why the constraints keep biting.
The verdict
If your economic model is “make life expensive, then subsidize the expense,” you don’t get abundance. You get dependency, resentment, and a widening gap with jurisdictions that still know how to build.
You also get a politics where every election becomes a bidding war over who will mail the bigger cheque, because structural reform has been quietly taken off the table.
That’s not leadership. It’s managed decline with better graphics.
Three solutions that trust Canadians
These aren’t “one weird trick” fixes. They’re principles that put choice back in the hands of households and entrepreneurs rather than bureaucracies.
1) Let people keep more of what they earn, especially on essentials
If Ottawa wants to help with affordability, it should stop pretending price pressures are solved by “targeted” programs. The cleanest help is broad, simple tax relief that lets people choose.
- Cut taxes that hit basics hardest (and stop layering cost-pushers into the production chain).
- Prefer lower rates and fewer carve-outs over boutique credits that require a rulebook and a caseworker to access.
- If a policy goal requires a price signal, keep it simple and transparent, not buried across permits, compliance, and pass-through.
This trusts Canadians because it doesn’t tell them what to buy. It stops taking their money and then re-selling it back to them with a government logo.
2) Slash approval times and regulatory duplication so builders can build
Canada does not have a “housing feelings” problem. It has a permission structure problem.
- Set hard timelines for approvals and treat missed deadlines as automatic escalation or approval, not “we’ll get back to you.”
- Collapse overlapping reviews and require agencies to coordinate rather than serially veto.
- Align incentives so provinces and municipalities that approve homes and infrastructure fast aren’t punished for growth.
This trusts Canadians because it assumes the default answer to a lawful project is “yes,” and it lets builders, trades, and communities respond to demand without waiting years for permission.
3) Open the country internally: real competition, real mobility, real choice
A country shouldn’t feel like 10 small markets with paperwork toll booths between them.
- Remove internal trade barriers so goods, services, and workers can move freely across provinces.
- Make credential recognition faster for skilled trades and professionals so talent isn’t trapped behind provincial gatekeeping.
- Reduce the habit of picking “future sectors” by subsidy and instead create conditions where any sector can win if it serves customers.
This trusts Canadians because it relies on competition and mobility, not bureaucratic selection. It lets consumers choose, lets workers move, and lets businesses scale without needing a lobbyist.
If Ottawa keeps governing by bandage, the next few years will look like the last: higher spending, louder announcements, thinner per-person results, and a country that feels like it’s working harder for less. The gap won’t close by intention. It will close only when we stop confusing “more government activity” with “more national competence.”
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