False Flag explains the radical, evil goals of queer politics

Remember when gay activists told us that they just wanted tolerance—and that their agenda wouldn’t affect the rest of us?

They lied.

What was sold as tolerance for a small minority of Americans who just wanted to quietly live their lives has become a new, mandatory civil religion. The Pride flags fly over us like the banners of a conquering army, and we are supposed to shut up and do as we are told: bake the cake, use the pronouns, repeat the creeds (e.g. “trans women are women”), allow men into women’s space, and—especially—allow them to catechize and claim our children.

Their real goal was never just tolerance, it was always to reshape every aspect of American life to reflect and affirm their own “queerness.” They have succeeded in many ways, but the battle is not yet over. And so Joy Pullmann’s new book, False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America aims to explain what has happened, why it has happened, and how it can be resisted. Pullmann is the executive editor at the Federalist (full disclosure: I frequently write for the Federalist and am cited several times in this book) and she has provided an accessible account of how America is being remade in the cause of queerness.

Her thesis is that “Western society is being erased by the purposeful destabilization of the institution that creates society: the natural family…the less Americans seek and display the virtues required to sustain families, the less capable they make themselves and the next generation of self-government.” In contrast to the virtues needed to sustain families and therefore America, the “Pride flag stands for the Cultural Marxism seeking to destroy America. According to its own philosophers, Pride isn’t about private bedroom behavior. It’s about regime change.” Indeed. As she documents, rainbow activists didn’t want the government out of what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms; they want to bring what they do in their bedrooms into the government, with everything from public schools to foreign policy partaking in Pride.

Pullmann provides extensive examples of this as she develops her argument, which begins by describing queerness as cultural Marxism. She is right about this, insofar as current queer theory and politics have a Marxist intellectual pedigree, but it is a clunky label that doesn’t quite capture what we are up against. However, there is no settled term that encapsulates current cultural, and especially sexual, Leftist ideas and politics. Whatever we call it—wokeness, identity politics, intersectionality, sexual liberalism—it is conquering and destroying our culture. And it is being imposed upon Americans by judges and bureaucrats who believe that constitutional rights must give way before queer demands.

Yet these demands are based on the most absurd lies, especially their attempted denial (though they can never really fully stick to it) of the sexual dimorphism of the human race. As Pullmann bluntly puts it, “You simply cannot substitute a naked man for a naked woman in the sex act and call it the same. It isn’t, because men’s and women’s bodies are different.” This simple truth explodes the lies on which the queer agenda, from same-sex marriage to transgenderism, is based. The realities of human embodiment make it impossible to really substitute a man for a women (or vice versa) in sex, marriage or parenting. Nor can a man ever really become a woman or a woman become a man—at most gender-transition procedures can make a person into a somewhat passable facsimile of the other sex.

Nonetheless, the cultural, economic and political powers of our nation increasingly seek to compel us to bend the knee to these lies. This is a rainbow regime change, in which rights to free speech, association, and the free exercise of religion are discarded whenever they conflict with Pride. And this is often, because the American constitutional order is incompatible with an administrative regime that has made the powers used to break segregation into a permanent and still-expanding feature of American life, one which now governs everything from the classroom to the boardroom to the locker room in the name of “LGBT rights.”

Yet this new regime is intrinsically unstable. Not only is its hierarchy of privilege and oppression liable to change, the sexual identities that are incorporated into it are not innate. Sexual desire and “gender identity” can change over time; there is no “gay gene,” let alone a “trans gene.” And so Pullmann appeals to those who identity as LGBT to accept limits in order to preserve our constitutional order. If they want to maintain the West, they need to accept the natural law limits that the West was built on, especially the indispensable place of the natural family in society.

Unfortunately, as Pullman’s exploration of the queering of the military demonstrates, this appeal is likely to fall on deaf ears. The rainbow revolution in the armed forces has been marked by lying and lawbreaking as Pride has taken precedence over military discipline and competence. As Pullmann notes, making a nonmilitary, trans-identified man such as Rachel Levine a nominal four-star admiral is “a clear signal that the Pride regime rewards sexual decadence above competence, dedication, sacrifice, honor and truth-telling.” It is unlikely that a movement that is willing to sacrifice national security in exchange for affirming lies will have any sense of self-regulation.

Indeed, this lack of self-control is intrinsic to a movement that glories in indulgence while weakening the relationships and institutions that instill virtue. The Pride agenda feeds on and encourages dysfunction in families, communities and the nation. Its educational program consists of sexualizing and instilling gender confusion in children while separating them from their parents.

Pullmann does not shy away from diagnosing the self-worshipping, idolatrous roots of this evil. Observing the many recent examples of pop cultural satanism, she writes that “these LGBT-identified artists are openly stating that if they have to choose between God and the Devil, they’ll take the Devil. They want Satan’s sexual activities, not God’s, and they know exactly which belongs to whom.”

This is also why the devotees of Pride are uninterested in using the vast power they have for the ordinary business of competent government. If they appear uninterested in the actual work of governing well, it’s because they are uninterested in the actual work of governing well. Pullman argues that for the cultural Left, identity politics (and perhaps especially rainbow identity politics), “is not a distraction from government; it’s the highest purpose of government.” They care more about protecting Pride flags painted on roads than they do fixing potholes. In their view, keeping a road in good repair is mundane and optional, but keeping the holy symbols of Pride inviolate is essential.

Thus, though Pride seems to have carried all before it, its destructiveness provides many opportunities for those who would still resist. Pullmann’s suggestions range across politics and culture with varying utility, but she is certainly right that because “just about everything in our country is a freaking dumpster fire, that means the opportunities for social entrepreneurship are wide open.” We will, as she warns, face opposition, difficulty and even suffering, but the enemy produces only incompetence, misery and a refuse-choked cultural wasteland. Thus, there is hope for those who can build, preserve or grow anything beautiful, useful or nourishing amidst the desolation.

This reclamation will require telling some hard truths. For instance, Pullmann does not pull her punches when discussing LGBT-identified personalities such as Bari Weiss, Guy Benson and Dave Rubin who claim to be conservative (or at least anti-Left) but who order up motherless or fatherless children so they can play house with their same-sex partners. Stiffening spines on such matters is essential to provide a real alternative to the sexual and relational chaos and confusion surrounding us.

Beyond cataloguing the sins of Pride, Pullmann attempts to provide a theoretical framework for understanding it that will be accessible to the ordinary American. This is an ambitious task, but she generally succeeds in making her case clearly, though this also risks new difficulties and disagreements. For example, I found myself shaking my head at much of her Straussian (West Coast variety by way of Hillsdale) approach to American political theory. Nonetheless, Pullmann’s efforts to ground her arguments intellectually should be applauded, despite the inevitability of disagreement.

And, of course, there is much we agree on. Pullmann is absolutely right about the destructive, enslaving nature of unrestrained sexual desire. Those on the Left who claim to want social justice will never come close to it so long as they glory in sexual sin. Those on the Right who claim to want limited, constitutional government will never attain it without a return to sexual virtue and the priority of the natural family.

The grotesqueries of Pride, from chemically and surgically transitioning children to the sudden push for polygamy (rebranded as polyamory), are just the latest poisoned fruit of the sexual revolution. Thus, though the rainbow activists have taken things furthest, resisting them requires that we turn away from the sexual sins that tempt us as well. The radical evils of Pride reveal the need for all of us to repent, and seek to live in holiness through God’s grace.

False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America
By Joy Pullman
Regnery, 2024
Hardcover, 336 pages