Builders vs Dismantlers: Why I Broke Up With Feminism and the Modern Left

I used to be the kind of person who wouldn’t even consider voting Republican. What a dirty word! I was steeped in progressive values from the start. California-born, women’s studies major (yes, really), raised on NPR, anti-war protests, and the assumption that the Left was the side of the builders—the progressives, the intellectuals, the solution-makers. Voting Democrat wasn’t just a political choice; it was a cultural identity. It was the default. And feminism wasn’t just an academic interest; it was a moral compass, a lens I applied to everything. For a long time, I never imagined I’d vote for anyone but a Democrat. And for twenty years, I didn’t.

But over time, the cracks started to show. Not all at once, not in some dramatic awakening, but in small, almost imperceptible moments of discomfort. A growing sense that something no longer added up. I now see it was death by a thousand cuts.

The shift began in earnest during the MeToo era. I believed women. I supported accountability. I wanted justice. But then I started seeing something else… something harder to name. A kind of glee in destruction. Men getting canceled not because they were predators, but because they were awkward on dates. Careers nuked off Twitter threads. No due process. No conversation. No proportionality. No path back.

What began as a movement for safety and empowerment became a demolition squad. And if you even asked questions? Well, you were next. MeToo taught me that the Left no longer values nuance.

That’s when I started to see the dismantlers clearly. Because if you questioned anything about how the movement operated—if you suggested that maybe not every accusation was automatically true, or that reputational death should require at least some evidence—you were branded a traitor.

It didn’t matter how much you supported women’s rights or how deeply you cared about consent and safety. The only acceptable posture was blind loyalty. And that’s not justice. That’s religion.

That was the beginning of the foundation cracking. Not because I stopped believing in equality, but because I realized the movement I had trusted was no longer interested in truth. It was interested in power. And power, when it’s unearned and self-righteous, becomes destructive fast.

The first real fracture came from an absurdly simple observation: the men I admired—many of them, anyway—were builders. They created things. They invented, scaled, and led. They were flawed, of course, but they were generative. They built companies, movements, systems, empires. And when I looked to women for the same energy, I found far fewer examples.

This wasn’t something I could admit publicly on the Left. To even say it out loud—to say that men were showing up as the builders, and that I admired them for it—risked being labeled a “bad feminist.” You’re not supposed to notice patterns like that. And you’re definitely not supposed to respect them. God forbid you say that many feminist spaces feel more invested in dismantling than in building, which is the conclusion I was quickly approaching.

It took years to fully admit that the Left had lost me. Even longer to realize that I wasn’t the one who changed, but they had.

What started as unease with feminism’s dismantling energy quickly became something bigger. I started noticing the same pattern bleeding out into the broader Left. The same allergy to nuance. The same instinct to flatten everything into oppressor vs oppressed. The same performance of compassion that quickly turned to cruelty if you asked the wrong question.

Then 2020 hit and everything broke wide open.

COVID was the accelerant. What should’ve been a public health challenge became a moral sorting hat. Suddenly, everything was political: masks, school closures, vaccines, even being outdoors. The same people who once screamed “my body, my choice” were now shaming mothers for letting their kids play on a jungle gym.

I watched the institutions I once trusted implode in real-time. Science twisted into political theater. Lockdowns enforced with smug superiority. Basic questions treated like conspiracy. It didn’t feel like science, it felt like ritual. Like submission disguised as solidarity.

And then came George Floyd.

The summer of 2020 turned into a nationwide exorcism, and not in a good way. Overnight, everyone was posting black squares. White friends were publicly confessing their privilege. Corporations were pledging millions to vague DEI initiatives. And if you didn’t post, or didn’t post fast enough, you were assumed guilty. The phrase “silence is violence” echoed everywhere, and somehow no one thought to ask how insane that actually was.

BLM, as a brand, became untouchable. You couldn’t question it—even as businesses were looted, cities burned, and entire neighborhoods descended into chaos. We were told it was necessary. That destruction was part of the healing. That criticizing any of it was proof of internalized racism or white fragility. But underneath the slogans, it all felt deeply incoherent.

How could a movement supposedly rooted in justice be so uninterested in outcomes?

How could a party that claimed to believe in science be so hostile to questions?

How could the people who called themselves progressives be so addicted to tearing everything down?

By the end of that year, I wasn’t just skeptical of feminism, I was questioning the entire ideological infrastructure I had grown up with. The Left no longer felt like the side of complexity, or compassion, or reason. It felt like the side of submission. The side of collective punishment. The side of performance over progress.

I started to see it everywhere. The energy wasn’t “Let’s fix this.” It was “Let’s control it. Let’s moralize it. Let’s burn it down.”

And for the first time, I started thinking thoughts I never imagined I’d entertain: What if the Right actually isn’t the problem? What if the real threat is coming from the people who claim to be saving us?

And it’s not just feminism. Not anymore. It’s everything the progressive movement touches. It dismantles institutions, reputations, language, and shared reality itself. I came to realize something that ended up changing me more than anything else: it never builds. It never replaces the things it destroys. It just moves on to the next target.

And then it hit me again: the people I admire—the ones shaping the world, the ones improving life for everyone—aren’t the critics. They’re the builders.

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Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

Every political flashpoint that followed confirmed the same thing: the modern Left had become obsessed with tearing things down. Systems, statues, reputations, language—it was all up for demolition. There was no vision for what came next. Just endless deconstruction, as if destruction itself was a moral good.

Meanwhile, the people I was taught to fear—the “selfish capitalists,” the “dangerous libertarians,” the “evil billionaires”—were the ones actually solving problems. Building rockets. Curing diseases. Creating jobs. Innovating in energy, transportation, communication. Improving infrastructure, not just metaphorically but literally. They were the ones betting on the future while everyone else was arguing about which words were problematic on Twitter.

I started asking myself: who’s actually moving the world forward?

It wasn’t the academic panels dissecting gender pronouns. It wasn’t the media pundits inventing new ways to pathologize masculinity. It wasn’t the professional activists whose main skillset seemed to be writing thinkpieces and demanding resignations.

It was the builders.

The people who launch. Ship. Scale. Solve.

And once I realized that, my entire frame of reference shifted. I stopped asking “What does this side stand for?” and started asking “What does this side produce?”

Because belief is cheap. Rhetoric is easy. Dismantling is performative. But building is hard. Building is sacred.

And that’s when it all really clicked for me: we are not in a culture war between Left and Right. We’re in a civilizational divide between builders and dismantlers.

the energy of builders—

You can feel it when you see it.

It’s not partisan. It’s not loud. It’s not obsessed with being right or being liked.

It’s obsessed with working. With launching. With shipping. With building. With putting something into the world that didn’t exist before. Something that makes people’s lives meaningfully better.

This is the energy of Elon Musk. Of Peter Thiel. Of Palmer Luckey. Of people like Charlie Kirk—whether or not you agree with their worldview—who understand how to architect something from scratch and endure the backlash.

It’s the opposite of woke. It’s not obsessed with identity. It doesn’t keep a moral scoreboard. It doesn’t mistake feelings for facts. It builds things that last.

Dismantlers, on the other hand, don’t need to be coherent. They don’t need to offer solutions. All they need is a target. A villain. A structure to tear down. And in a world where attention is currency, outrage is scalable. You don’t have to fix anything, you just have to be loud enough while pointing at what’s allegedly broken.

And apologies if this makes me reductive, but I believe the woke left is built on a simple premise: things are broken. Systems are broken. People are broken. History is broken. Language is broken. Truth is broken. So everything must be dismantled.

And on some level, they’re right. Injustice exists. Power corrupts. Institutions rot.

But the problem is, they don’t want to fix the rot. They want to torch the entire foundation. They want to extract moral points from the ashes.

They don’t build new systems. They weaponize the brokenness of the old ones. They make grievance into a profession. They manufacture narratives that collapse under scrutiny but survive because they feel good. And they call this progress.

That’s the fundamental difference: builders are accountable to reality. If something doesn’t work, it breaks. If you over-promise, you fail. Builders can’t just gesture at ideas, they have to ship. They have to deal with physics, capital, logistics, constraints. Dismantlers can live in abstraction forever. They can chant slogans, write open letters, demand resignations—and feel morally righteous while doing none of the hard work.

And worse, they’ve managed to frame this laziness as virtue.

Destruction is framed as justice. Deconstruction is framed as intelligence. Victimhood is framed as moral high ground. And the people building—sometimes imperfectly, sometimes awkwardly—are cast as villains simply for having power or audacity or success.

But here’s the thing no one on the Left wants to admit: sometimes the powerful earned it. Sometimes success isn’t oppression—it’s proof of discipline, vision, risk, sacrifice. And yes, sometimes it’s luck or privilege too. But tearing it down just because it exists isn’t justice. It’s resentment.

And I just couldn’t stomach the resentment anymore. Dismantling as a worldview simply does not make sense.

That was the final shift for me—realizing just how much of modern leftism is animated by resentment. It doesn’t want excellence; it wants equality of outcome, even if that outcome is mediocrity. It doesn’t want meritocracy; it wants equity theater. It doesn’t want to build a better world; it wants to punish the people who already have one.

And this ideology doesn’t stay confined to protest chants or college campuses—it seeps into everything. Art becomes activism. Science becomes narrative control. Language becomes a battleground where definitions shift week to week depending on who needs power. “Woman” doesn’t mean woman anymore. “Silence is violence.” “Speech is harm.” Words get twisted, flattened, redefined—until communication itself starts to erode.

The dismantlers don’t just tear down systems—they tear down meaning.

And that’s what scared me most. Not just the slogans or the hypocrisy. Not even the mob mentality. What scared me was watching an entire side of the political spectrum become fundamentally anti-reality. Anti-language. Anti-truth. Obsessed with optics, allergic to consequence.

There’s no end goal. No model for what comes after the destruction—because they don’t know how to build.

This is not some fringe phenomenon. It’s mainstream. It’s in universities, HR departments, Hollywood, media, public health, and even grade schools. The same patterns. The same talking points. The same smug moralism backed by no coherent endpoint.

When I really started to unpack all of this, the scariest part wasn’t that the dismantlers existed. It was how many smart, decent people went along with them. I watched friends—brilliant, capable, kind-hearted friends—start parroting scripts they didn’t even believe. They shared articles they hadn’t read, reposted infographics they hadn’t fact-checked, and nodded along in Zoom meetings while someone cried about microaggressions that hadn’t happened.

They weren’t lying maliciously. I guess you could say they were surviving. Keeping their jobs. Protecting their reputations. Doing what they had to do in a culture that punishes honesty. The lie wasn’t in what they said. The lie was in what they couldn’t say.

No one needs to burn books when everyone’s too afraid to write them in the first place.

Once you learn to live with that kind of self-betrayal, your internal compass starts to rot. You stop trusting your own instincts. You outsource your morality to the algorithm. And eventually, you forget what it feels like to mean something.

I didn’t want to become that person, so I started writing again. I started thinking in public. Saying the thing I wasn’t supposed to say. And it cost me things—it cost me some friendships I’m still deeply sad about today. But it gave me myself back.

It took me years to realize the war wasn’t just political—it was psychological.

You weren’t allowed to trust your own senses anymore. What you saw wasn’t real. What you felt was offensive. What you knew had to be run through five filters before it was safe to say. Language itself became a minefield. People said “birthing person” with a straight face. They apologized for being white. They confessed to crimes they never committed and traumas they never endured.

It wasn’t about truth, it was about ritualized guilt. The new Left didn’t want equality. It wanted penance. It didn’t want progress. It wanted power. It didn’t want discourse. It wanted deference.

And for people like me—thoughtful, independent, allergic to dogma—it became impossible to stay. This wasn’t liberalism anymore. It had become something else entirely. Something I didn’t recognize, even when I tried so, so hard.

But walking away from it all didn’t mean blindly walking into the arms of the Right. At least, it didn’t for me. It just meant walking toward clarity. Toward reality. And once I stepped outside the dogma, I started noticing things I never would’ve allowed myself to see before. I stopped asking, “What am I supposed to think about this?” and started asking, “What’s actually true?” And the answers surprised me. Because the people I’d been taught to hate—the ones the media framed as villains or far-right lunatics—weren’t always wrong. In fact, sometimes they were the only ones making any sense at all.

Stephen Miller said some clarifying things yesterday at Charlie Kirk’s memorial when he referenced the modern Left:

“You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build.”

After years of grappling with this builders vs dismantlers dichotomy, I felt this in my bones.

Because the nihilism that killed Charlie is the same nihilism that fuels the entire dismantling machine. It’s the logical endpoint of a movement that confuses speech with violence. You can’t disagree. You can’t even opt out. And if you build something that threatens their narrative, you’re dangerous by default. Because builders don’t ask for permission. They don’t wait for consensus. They don’t apologize for momentum. They create systems that replace the old ones, which is the real threat. Not hate or fascism. Competence. Creation. Self-determination.

And if you follow that thread to its natural conclusion, you start to see the deeper betrayal. The same people who posture as “progressive” aren’t just attacking speech—they’re attacking the very engine of progress itself. They loathe the very system that makes progress possible.

Capitalism—real capitalism—is the single most powerful force for human uplift ever created. For all its flaws, it’s the only system that has ever scaled abundance, innovation, and human flourishing. But instead of evolving it, the modern Left wants to replace it with empty slogans, central planning, and “community-owned” delusions that crumble under basic arithmetic. It’s no coincidence that the people screaming “eat the rich” on Instagram are the same ones hyping an unqualified mayoral candidate in New York who wants the state to run grocery stores.

This is what happens when ideology replaces contact with reality. When you’ve never built anything. Never run payroll. Never had to scale. Never had to meet demand. Never had to optimize for throughput, quality, or customer satisfaction. It’s fantasy. Infantilized fantasy.

And yet these people are gaining ground. Not because they’re right, but because they sound empathetic. Because they’ve learned to weaponize shame. Because they know how to market guilt to well-meaning people who are afraid of being called selfish.

But the truth is: there is nothing selfish about building. There is nothing more generous than creating something of value, putting your name on it, and saying: here. Use this. Improve it. Build on top of it.

When you strip away all the poetry and pathos, you’re left with this: capitalism works. Not because it’s perfect, but because it rewards reality. It rewards competence. It builds. Innovation doesn’t care about your identity. It rewards good ideas. It rewards risk. It rewards the people willing to fail in public and keep going anyway.

Every alternative the Left offers collapses under its own contradictions. “Free” goods still cost labor. “Shared ownership” still needs management. “Equity” still requires hierarchy. Their utopias always smuggle capitalism back in through the side door—just without the freedom, the incentive, or the upside that makes everyone’s lives better.

The iPhone didn’t come out of a DEI panel. It came out of obsession. The internet wasn’t built by activists. It was built by visionaries. AGI won’t be invented by people trying to make sure everyone feels safe. It will be built by people who ship. That’s what capitalism actually is. It’s not about greed. It’s about generativity.

Builders improve life for everyone.

That’s it. That’s the whole thesis.

This is why AI is so important to me. I see it as so much more than just a tool. It’s a fork in the road. Because AI exposes who the builders are, and who the cowards are.

It doesn’t care what group you belong to. It doesn’t care what degree you have. It doesn’t care how you feel. It rewards intentionality, clarity, experimentation, rigor. It punishes vagueness. It highlights intellectual laziness like nothing else.

You prompt well, or you don’t. You build with it, or you hide from it. You use it to accelerate your ideas, or you cling to your ideology and pray that regulation saves you from irrelevance.

And the people who are terrified of it? Most of them are not trying to protect society. They’re trying to protect themselves from being exposed.

Because AI is a meritocracy. And that’s what they hate most of all.

This isn’t about politics anymore. Not really.

It’s about architecture. Direction. Will. Vision. It’s about whether we want to live in a culture that builds or one that dismantles. It’s about whether we value excellence or envy. Contribution or control. Results or resentment.

It’s about whether we want a world where people are rewarded for making things work—or punished for making things better.

It’s about whether we believe the future should be earned or equalized.

Because one side is trying to make sure no one wins—while the other side is trying to build something worth winning.

I don’t know about you, but I want to live in a world where value creation—not victimhood—is the currency of worth.

I talk a lot about mental models—first principles, systems thinking, map vs territory. These are tools I’ve used for years to make sense of complexity and to see what’s real underneath the noise. And when I apply those same tools to the modern Left and whatever wave of feminism we’re currently in, something breaks. The logic collapses. The equations don’t balance. The stories don’t hold.

So I stepped away.

I refuse to betray my mind to stay loyal to a tribe.

Stay sovereign. x

—S

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