The Pendulum Swing: How Puritanical Thinking Fuels the Extremes It Claims to Oppose

In today’s culture wars, figures like Matt Walsh present themselves as defenders of tradition, morality, and order. But there’s a deeper pattern at play—one that rarely gets examined. The rigid, moralistic framework he promotes may not be a solution to cultural instability. It may actually be part of the cause.

What we are witnessing is not a battle between order and chaos, but a pendulum swinging between two extremes—each feeding the other.

The Moment It Clicked for Me

I didn’t always see it this way.

My understanding shifted when I encountered the work of Christopher Hitchens. He made an observation that stuck with me: that the suppression of women’s sexuality within rigid, moralistic religious systems didn’t eliminate tension—it built pressure.

And pressure, eventually, explodes.

Hitchens argued that this repression played a role in fueling the rise of feminism—not necessarily the balanced pursuit of equality, but its more reactive and extreme forms. That idea reframed the issue for me.

Like many, I am deeply critical of modern feminist ideology, and I have serious concerns about aspects of what is often called “trans ideology.” But I cannot ignore the role that puritanical systems may have played in creating the very conditions those movements react against.

Hitchens pointed to a historical context that illustrates this dynamic well, recommending the book The Strange Death of Liberal England. It describes a society under........

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