{"id":2651216,"date":"2026-08-28T14:25:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T18:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignleftists-will-never-self-reflect-and-they-will-never-apologize-for-the-horrors-they-inflict\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T15:15:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T19:15:58","slug":"utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignleftists-will-never-self-reflect-and-they-will-never-apologize-for-the-horrors-they-inflict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignleftists-will-never-self-reflect-and-they-will-never-apologize-for-the-horrors-they-inflict\/","title":{"rendered":"Leftists Will Never Self-Reflect, And They Will Never Apologize"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Futm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaignleftists-will-never-self-reflect-and-they-will-never-apologize-for-the-horrors-they-inflict%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2651216&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Michael Shellenberger criticizes the left&#8217;s inability to acknowledge the harms caused by its policies, asserting that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/student-suspended-from-education-program-for-saying-a-man-is-a-man-a-woman-is-a-woman\/\" title=\"Student Suspended From Education Program For Saying, \u2018A Man Is A Man, A Woman Is A Woman\u2019\">left-wing ideology<\/a> is inherently resistant to remorse or self-criticism. He argues that leftists employ tactics such as downplaying past abuses, gaslighting, and rewriting history to avoid accountability, and that their perceived atrocities are seen as necesary for achieving a utopian society. Drawing parallels with the Soviet Union, he suggests that leftists only oppose their own ideology when it personally affects them or becomes too inconvenient, not out of genuine reflection. Shellenberger contends that many leftists are motivated by power, self-interest, and the rewards of their influence, making it unlikely they will change or admit fault. He concludes that leftism is a destructive disease that must be rejected and marginalized from public life.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Michael Shellenberger, who to his complete and total credit has published damning takedowns of the left\u2019s inherent hypocrisy and corruption in works such as <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.harpercollins.com\/products\/san-fransicko-michael-shellenberger?variant=33063782055970\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">San Fransicko<\/a><\/em>, published <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/shellenberger\/status\/2092627338534219996\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">an article on Wednesday titled<\/a> \u201cProgressives Will Be Horrified When They Wake Up To What They\u2019ve Done.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The subheadline of that piece said, \u201cThe sterilization of children, the killing of mentally ill addicts, the decimation of education, and more, will haunt the Left.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Many conservatives think this way, that our poor, misguided leftist friends, who may or may not have endorsed the aforementioned barbarities with the best of intentions, merely require the right revelation, the right sequence of carefully constructed arguments and cold, hard facts, to abandon the false god of leftism. These conservatives cling to the idea that even hardcore leftists can be reasoned with, that the marketplace of ideas merely has to work its magic to convert these wayward sheep back to the old civility of yore.<\/p>\n<p>The thing is, the left won\u2019t wake up. There will be no mass conversion event when all the trans activists, corrupt bureaucrats, and Antifa thugs suddenly snap out of it and rejoin the more sane ranks of American society.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s not how pathological leftism works, and to believe that it does is a dangerous fantasy. Concepts like remorse and atonement do not exist in the leftist mindset. For themselves, at least. Remorse and atonement are instead reserved for the <em>real<\/em> oppressors, namely straight white men and the capitalist system they propagate.<\/p>\n<p>In reality, leftists possess an entire toolbox of methods to avoid any sort of reckoning. They<a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\" >\u2019ll aggressively downplay previous abuses<\/a> and assure the public that, though previous iterations of wokeness may have gotten a bit out of hand, they merely want \u201chealth care\u201d and spout some version of \u201creal socialism has never been tried.\u201d This is already the favorite tactic of the likes of <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/Acyn\/status\/2086472575631380936\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>They\u2019ll conveniently forget any of it ever happened, and they\u2019ll aggressively gaslight Americans into believing that it never happened, too. Through their control over institutions like the media and academia, they can memory-hole practically whatever they want, just as they\u2019ve already done with scandals like Russiagate and with the worst excesses of the Covid era.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, they\u2019ll convince themselves that rather than a string of necessary evils required to defeat the reviled conservative oppressors, their atrocities were a positive good \u2014 finally liberating America and ushering in an age of left-wing utopia.<\/p>\n<p>The citizens of the former Soviet Union didn\u2019t \u201cwake up\u201d to all the horrors of their regime. They still deny the Holodomor, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/features\/2023\/11\/28\/russia-limits-womens-access-to-abortion-citing-demographic-changes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">abortion rate<\/a> remains extremely high, and the government has offered little in the way of an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hoover.org\/research\/gulag-lest-we-forget\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">acknowledgment<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.codastory.com\/rewriting-history\/russia-rewrites-history-gulags\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">apology<\/a> for the brutal gulag system. The Soviet Union didn\u2019t fall because the Soviet citizenry woke up one day and suddenly regretted all the terrible things that had been committed in the name of the communist regime. They finally turned against the Soviet system once its intrusiveness and incompetence became too inconvenient in daily life, but there was no grand self-reflection. You can look at every communist, socialist, or \u201cdemocratic socialist\u201d regime of the last century, and you\u2019ll see this exact same pattern.<\/p>\n<p>Like the Soviets, some (emphasis on some) of the leftists of today will only begin to turn against leftism (if at all) once it starts to negatively affect them personally, but they\u2019ll never grapple with the historic horrors wrought by their movement. Because the horror is the point.<\/p>\n<p>All of the pain and misery inflicted by leftists, to them, is righteous punishment for a decadent and corrupt capitalist system, and any collateral damage inflicted on normal people is either a) excusable on the grounds that it was necessary to bring down the system as a whole or b) actually the fault of the capitalist system that they\u2019re trying to bring down. Junkies aren\u2019t becoming ever more addicted to drugs because they loosen drug laws and hand out free needles; it\u2019s because the oppressive capitalist hierarchy causes such psychological trauma on the proletariat that they <em>have<\/em> to turn to hard drugs just to cope. Once the leftist utopia is achieved, people will only use hard drugs for fun, and responsibly.<\/p>\n<p>Many more leftists can\u2019t, or won\u2019t, turn their backs on their twisted ideology. It brings far too many rewards. It allows them to inflict their own neuroses on others, or it <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2026\/08\/26\/america-is-becoming-an-empire-of-fraud-and-shameless-crony-grifting\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">fills their bank accounts<\/a> far too effectively to just abandon. In short, it gives them what they\u2019ve always wanted and feel that they deserve: power over others.<\/p>\n<p>If you think AOC, Gavin Newsom, Anthony Fauci, or any of the millions of deranged followers who habitually call for the death or imprisonment of their political enemies will ever sit in a congressional hearing or on TV and sincerely recant their previously held dogmas, then their lies work all too well on you.<\/p>\n<p>It may well haunt them at the ballot box for the next few election cycles, but if you\u2019ve been paying attention for more than a few seconds, you\u2019ll well know that in politics memories run short as a rule. Especially when one party is filling the country with foreigners who don\u2019t know or care about that side\u2019s previous crimes and when that party utilizes the ever-bloated largesse of the government to hand out money and favors to its supporters. The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.realclearpolling.com\/polls\/state-of-the-union\/generic-congressional-vote\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">current polling<\/a> on the midterms seems to indicate that large portions of the electorate have not woken up to the left\u2019s misdeeds, so why should we expect the true believers to wake up?<\/p>\n<p>The hard truth is that many leftists are too far gone. They\u2019ll never awake from the madness that has possessed them. They\u2019ll lie, equivocate, and simply ignore all the relevant facts rather than own up to their own disastrous mistakes. They have to be crushed and driven out of public life, and their poisonous ideology must be quarantined from the general populace. Because leftism is a disease, of the mind and the heart.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Hayden Daniel is a staff editor at The Federalist. He previously worked as an editor at The Daily Wire and as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/pride-madness-wont-stop-until-conservatives-use-govt-force\/\" title=\"&#039;Pride&#039; Madness Won&#039;t Stop Until ... Use Govt. Force\">deputy editor\/opinion editor<\/a> at The Daily Caller. He received his B.A. in European History from Washington and Lee University with minors in Philosophy and Classics. Follow him on Twitter at @HaydenWDaniel<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shellenberger warns left won&#8217;t wake up to their harms<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1548,"featured_media":2651217,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-231.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546,33651],"tags":[17488,5965,35629,5894,57091],"class_list":["post-2651216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist","category-the-western-journal","tag-apologies","tag-leftists","tag-political-discourse","tag-politics","tag-self-reflection"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-231.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2651216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1548"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2651216"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2651216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2651256,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2651216\/revisions\/2651256"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2651217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2651216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2651216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2651216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}