Monty Python & the circular firing squad: How the left eats itself in pursuit of purity

Progressive causes are paralyzed by 'You are with us or against us' while the right galvanizes under 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend'

"Are you the Judean People's Front?" asks Stan, Eric Idle's character in the classic 1979 Monty Python film The Life Of Brian.

"Fuck off," responds Reg, John Cleese's character. "Judean People's Front? Wankers... we're the People's Front of Judea. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the Judean People's Front"

The scene from this classic comedy film is, as with so many Monty Python skits, funny in itself but also layered with a satirical jab at a modern culture. Produced in the late 1970s, the scene offers up an apt criticism of the left, a skewering of infighting among progressives, which leads to ineffectual opposition to conservative power structures. 

Just as the four-member People's Front of Judea bicker internally as they bemoan Roman rule, so too did trade unionists and other left-wing groups navel gaze as the "Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher rose to become Prime Minister of the UK in 1979.

The PFJ versus JPF inanity also plays off what was going on in the Middle East as Palestinian groups formed and splintered. There was the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, which broke off from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine as opposed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and on and on.

Michael Palin, Francis in the scene, has said that the various separatist movements were modelled on "modern resistance groups, all with obscure acronyms which they can never remember and their conflicting agendas."

Acronyms or abbreviations and resistance groups aside, the topic illustrates how infighting over insignificant details in progressive movements often leads to impotence, if not destruction.

Illusion of Purity

In his recent book Moral Ambition, Dutch historian an author Rutger Bregman talks about how coalitions of people who didn’t always agree with one another have made progressive strides throughout history. 

Today, particularly in online activism Bregman argues, there is a sad need in some left-wing circles for purity, for agreement on everything all the time with everyone who is included.

“My rule of thumb is, if people agree with you for 80 per cent of the time, then they’re not your enemy, they’re your ally,” Bregman said in a recent interview on the CBC show The Current.

With right-wing activists, on the other hand, Bregman gives the example of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. in 2022. For 50 years, the decision based on the right to privacy made abortion legal. Social conservatives tried to have Roe v. Wade overturned for decades in what Bregman calls a lesson in perseverance.

Right wingers get the long game. They started the movement in the ’90s with a conservative Christian advocacy group called the Alliance Defending Freedom. 

“They built a whole ecosystem of committed clerks and lawyers who launched hundreds of strategic lawsuits, and it all built up to that moment of the Dobbs decision,” he said, referring to the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, which has led to state-by-state abortion regulation.

“At that time, when Roe v. Wade was being repealed by the Supreme Court, what were the main pro-choice groups doing in the United States?” Bregman asks. “They were fighting each other. There was a huge internal battle going on about who was the wokest of all. And it was very sad to see.”

While the doctrine of intersectionality, which suggests that systems of oppression – racism, homophobia, misogyny, class warfare – stack up on one another and should be a reason to build a broader coalition with people fighting for parallel or overlapping goals, some activists don’t want to work with others who don’t agree completely.

“This need for 100 per cent agreement is zero per cent effective,” Bregman says.

Cue the circular firing squad

Monty Python's satirical take on the JPF/PFJ phenomenon that leads to the so-called "circular firing squad" may also exist in right-wing organizations, but it is more common with the left. 

Where progressives, such as some radical 2SLGBTQ+ activists, increasingly tend to abide by the policy of “you’re with us or you’re against us," right-wingers, such as the upstart BC Conservatives, operate under "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

The left coalesces because of a loyalty to a higher cause, be it human rights, wealth redistribution, social justice, but then splinters as people dither in the margins over details, over purity of intention and action. Are you woke enough?

1. Unwavering fealty to the chosen leader

An example taken from personal experience: Most local people will remember the legal case of Chilliwack School Board trustee Carin Bondar. She has a PhD and has had success with her self-confidence in popular science podcasts and talks. She creates videos she posts on YouTube, some of which receive hundreds of thousands of views, more than probably anyone else in Chilliwack. 

When then fellow trustee Barry Neufeld called her a “striptease artist” on a right-wing podcast in 2022, she sued him for defamation, a suit she would win. At the time, she sent me the papers filed with the BC Supreme Court so we could write a story and give her attention. 

The lawsuit, and therefore the story, was about Neufeld’s insulting comments in response to Bondar's science video about procreation satirizing the Miley Cyrus "Wrecking Ball" video where the singer ends up naked. In Bondar’s, she does, too.

Since that was what the story was about, the reporter who wrote it used a screenshot of the video when posting online. Oddly this spurred Bondar's outrage. She demanded the image from her video with 300,000-plus views be removed from our website. I was baffled and since it made no sense, I refused.

"I know sex sells but you are looking like a misogynist by using this photo and example AGAIN,” she said to me via Messenger.

Really? I was a misogynist for allowing a reporter to use an image for a news story that represents what the news story is about? I responded, confused and exasperated, saying in part: "The photo is yours. You did that. So if sharing an image that you shared of yourself publicly is misogyny, well you progressives have me completely fucking confused."

She then created a private Facebook group focused on the daily misogyny she endures, a page launched with a 20-minute selfie video the first five minutes of which were about me. Her devotees applauded her bravery, bemoaned her suffering, and attacked her detractors, which included a few ad hominem attacks on me.

The mistake I made that garnered me a scarlet letter was that I dared to deny a direct order, no matter how ludicrous, from the moment's Queen of the Left. 

2. No True Scotsman

This logical fallacy is about an appeal to purity as a way to dismiss criticism of flaws in an argument. You’re not really one of us if you don’t follow the rules, which parallels Bregman’s argument.

If Angus declares that Scotsmen don't put sugar on porridge, and Lachlan says, "I put sugar on my porridge," Angus might retort: "No true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

I made a sarcastic post about running for Chilliwack school board leading up to the March 2025 byelection. My slogan for the fake campaign, also based on the headline to a column I wrote a couple years ago, was: "Let's make school board boring again."

I got some laughs, a few people took me seriously. Some even messaged me to say they would support me. And then, boy, did I get the what-for from the mother of a prominent local leftie: "Katie Bartel is being endorsed by almost everyone I know who is on the progressive side of education," she told me as part of a stream of angry Facebook comments. "You could have put your support behind her."

Translation? "You are hereby cast out for daring to consider sabotaging the Chosen progressive candidate."

The point of my satirical post was precisely this: To illustrate that one is not pure enough to be considered an "ally" or a "progressive" if one doesn’t do as they are told. The right gets its fair share of criticism, but when one dares to call out certain individuals among certain left-wing decision-makers, they eat their own. 

Incidentally, I did of course, strongly endorse Bartel as I always planned to.

3. Political correctness over truth

We've talked about political correctness for many years but the state of language policing by the left has reached cartoon proportions. I know that a great many progressive-minded folks have become weary of it. 

I heard a politician excoriated on the radio recently for accidentally using the term "handicapped" instead of "people with disabilities,” the preferred nomenclature. And while it is obviously rude also to refer to a person suffering with addiction a "crackhead” or describe anyone in ways they don't want to be described, the ever-changing nuances in permitted word usage is impossible to keep up with. The type language policing is so strict that conversations are highjacked, debates upended, entire points are missed when someone decides they are offended. 

And make no mistake, being offended is a personal decision. As Ricky Gervais says, “Just because you are offended, that doesn’t mean you are right.”

I've written several stories about Clayton Warkentin who brutally killed his mother in her Yarrow home then tried to stage it to look like a suicide. Siblings and other family members were understandably traumatized, and Warkentin was off to jail for life with no chance of parole for 10 years. Kent Institution being no fun at all for a good-looking young man in his early 20s, Warkentin decided he was a she, and Natalie Warkova was born. I happen to know more than I've reported on this case for several reasons, but suffice it to say that the trans claim is extremely upsetting for the family.

I wrote about this most recently because she was given day parole and is living in a female halfway house in Vancouver. When a couple of people in the trans-ally community saw my story, there were glimmers of outrage from some. They ignored matricide and family trauma and justice. They overlooked murder and betrayal and the shocking behaviour of a male inmate who went to lengths to get out of a male prison to live in a cushier female one. Forget all that. I juggled pronouns. Never mind that I did it intentionally in a complicated story timeline where I referred to Clayton as “he” prior to the transition and Natalie “she” after. 

Not good enough. I didn't respect Clayton-turned-Natlie suitably enough for the language police.

Whether it’s a young person or an adult coming to terms with their gender identity, this topic is understandably fraught. But to go this overboard about language in the face of murder and trauma, to side with a killer in defence of the ludicrous implication that no one who declares they are a gender other than the one assigned at birth could be being manipulative is bizarre and simply incorrect.

This was manufactured outrage over one specific case of one person who happens to say she is a trans woman. The outrage comes from the mistaken idea that questioning a personal pronoun decision, even from a murderer looking for an easy ride behind bars, somehow gives ammunition to bigots on the religious far right. 

I get this, particularly because members of the LGBTQ community, trans more than any, have faced lifetimes of difficulties, from rude behaviour to violence and everything in between. But the logic is flawed. It is as if reporting on a corrupt police officer should be banned because anti-police anarchists might incorrectly conclude that all cops are bad. 

Just as commercial airline executives probably dislike plane crash stories no matter how rare they are, some trans advocates were offended that this story was reported in this way because it could be a kink in the armour of a broader cultural battle. 

On the right, the enemy of my enemy is my friend

The right, on the other hand, galvanizes over a common enemy with such passion that activists are willing to overlook minor differences of opinion and approach. 

Think of the mish-mash of anti-vaxxers and unemployed truck drivers and white supremacists who took part in the “freedom convoy” from B.C. to Ottawa. I’m sure many of those folks disagree on a great many number of ideals in the conservative perspective. But put a “F-CK TRUDEAU” sticker on your pickup truck, lean on the horn, and those differences are overlooked.

Think also of the BC Conservative Party and its surprising rise from nothingness to nearly winning the provincial election last fall. The party slowly turned from a few radical right-wing cranks akin to the People's Party of Canada into a mix of ex-BC Liberals who were kicked out or quit, one-issue people with bones to pick, or racist bigots. They run the gamut from Dallas Brodie denying children died in residential schools all the way to A'aliya Warbus, a strong young First Nations woman who is none other than former lieutenant-governor Steven Point's daughter. 

How could Warbus join a party and run in the same city, the adjacent riding, as Heather Maahs, a theocratic anti-LGBTQ conservative? Here’s how: Warbus has reported that she has three relatives who died in the toxic drug crisis, and she blames NDP drug policy. Maahs is a far-right religious radical and despises what she and her ilk call "woke." 

Warbus is clear-eyed and awake. Maahs is blind and asleep. But they shared an enemy, held their noses, stood side-by-side and handily each won seats in the provincial legislature.

Those on the left fighting for progressive causes – anti-poverty, Pride, pro-choice – slowly get on one another's nerves. It's death by a thousand cuts and one by one, the eat their own.

A mob mentality

All this reminds me of the punk rock song I Was a Teenage Anarchist by Against Me!

The third verse of the song:

"The song is about how punk had become just as rigid and stifling as the society in which the counterculture was embedded," wrote one reviewer.

The song was criticized by some in the punk community as being anti-punk, but that’s a mistake. It was a recognition that when you are in a movement fighting for something important, the goal can be forgotten if you require perfect loyalty to the cause or to a supposedly infallible leader. 

This is where Marxism actually intersects with populism. Joseph Stalin and Donald Trump are two peas in a pod.

As we saw in the last provincial election in B.C. and in the surge of federal Conservative popularity after its decade of slumber, the election of a ludicrous and populist American president was made possible by millions of right-wing thinkers who held their noses for the conservative cause.

Those on the right clasp hands awkwardly, look forward, and march toward a goal.

Those on the left face inward and have a thumb war over who gets to go first.

-30-

Want to support independent journalism?
Consider becoming a paid subscriber or make a one-time donation so I can continue this work.

Paul J. Henderson
pauljhenderson@gmail.com
facebook.com/PaulJHendersonJournalist
instagram.com/wordsarehard_pjh
x.com/PeeJayAitch
wordsarehard-pjh.bsky.social