Ben Sasse is dying of pancreatic cancer, which leaves him no longer sensing the need for anyone’s approval. Let me correct that. If one followed Sasse’s career, I’m not sure he ever acted on the basis of external approval.
He recently offered an unsparing diagnosis of our politics. “We have gazillions of people screaming all the time on the internet,” he told Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge podcast, “and we pretend they’re representative. They’re not at all representative. The loudest people have the most ridiculously outsized voice in American life.”
He is right. And the observation applies in every direction—including both the political right and the left.
A good deal of online right-wing discourse now runs like a ratchet wrench that just adds constant torque. Each provocation tightens the mechanism one further notch. The reward for throwing out the “based” “take” is a license to be even more based tomorrow, and the single move the ratchet forbids is the move backward—toward calm, toward qualification, toward reasonableness. There is no clicking back. The situation only gets tighter until the threads strip and all limits are gone.
My friend Joe Rigney has described a posture he calls the “progressive gaze”—the little progressive perched on the evangelical’s shoulder, auditing every sentence before it is spoken, whispering what may and may not be said if one hopes to stay in the good graces of respectable (often elite, progressive) opinion. For the status-conscious evangelical, it is servility dressed up as prudence, and Rigney is right to criticize it.
But the gaze has a mirror image. Call it the right-wing gaze. Here, the commissar on the shoulder is not a progressive but a pseudonymous X account with a Roman-statue avatar, questioning whether your take is sufficiently based or, for example, whether you are beholden to the “post-war consensus.” Or, it is some right-wing podcaster or YouTuber who talks unflinchingly—even daringly—of repealing the Nineteenth Amendment, rewriting the First Amendment, or who “just asks questions” around Hitler’s legacy (yes, that’s actually happening).
The man who calibrates every utterance to satisfy the online right is no freer than the man who calibrates it to satisfy the New York Times editorial board. He has merely swapped one audience of self-appointed authorities for another, and the new one is angrier and considerably harder to navigate because it comes, ostensibly, from one’s own side. And many people on the right are uncomfortable being outflanked on their right because they are always seeking to burnish their conservative credentials, so they cede terrain to voices that grow ever more desperate and shrill, giving the impression to critics of the right that their suspicions were confirmed all along.
The stated justification is always the Overton window. We are told that the provocateur, by saying the unsayable, heroically moves the limits of acceptable discourse rightward, doing the hard work the cowards or “the establishment” will not. Perhaps. But as election results indicate, moving the window within a group chat is not the same as moving it at the ballot box, and confusing the two will reduce the coalitions needed to win elections and affect real change. To be sure, much of what passes as normal in modern America does need to be drastically reconsidered, but with means fit to the context in which we live.
There is a reason for the gap between online and real life. Much of what plays as bravely and brazenly transgressive online is simply unpopular. There is virtually zero political support, for example, for gutting the First Amendment or repealing the Nineteenth. No credible historian offers a defense of Hitler. Sasse made a similar point on a recent podcast with Michael Horton and Will Inboden when asked whether certain views could ever gain real electoral traction. He openly doubted that they could or would.
Musing about the suspension of women’s suffrage may earn “reply-guy” applause, but it does not move the electorate. It moves people the other way. Why? Because the vast majority of the so-called “normies” can pick up on weirdness or extremity at first blush. They smell the grift, however sincere (or not). The window these voices imagine they are dragging to the right is nowhere near where actual majorities are. Far from knowing “what time it is,” these figures are doing the precise opposite of what the biblical adage calls for (1 Chronicles 12:32)—applying prudence, in measure, to obtain desirable outcomes.
This is the ratchet stripping its threads. A purity spiral cannot build a coalition; it only shrinks one. Each post demands a fresh loyalty test, and each post excommunicates whoever fails the new “based” standards, until the movement is a shrinking remnant, congratulating itself on its ideological hygiene with the myopic satisfaction that they—and only they—really know what is going on—while everyone else not terminally online strolls past with awkward glances. Ordinary people—the majority, Sasse insists, not represented by online edgelords—do not enlist in movements populated by brash voices masquerading as courage. They are not won by cruelty performed for an algorithm. Normal people want normal things, and they can smell an online purity cult from a long way off.
Christians, of all people, should be immune to this game, because we are bound to a higher loyalty that outranks every faction. We are beholden to the truth—without fear or favor, without unbending party alliance, without regard for whether the truth is currently trending as “based” or “beta.” “Let your reasonableness be known to everyone,” Paul writes to the Philippians, and he affixes no exception clause to that. Scripture ought to fasten us to reality: to speak the truth to our neighbor, to refuse being “tossed to and fro” (Ephesians 4:14) by every wind of doctrinal fashion or right-wing purity test, to test everything and hold fast to what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Reasonableness is not cowardice. It is the fruit of the Spirit tethering us to the world as God actually made it, and that does not bend to whoever happens to be loudest.
The provocateur believes he is being brave. Usually, he is being conformed to a different crowd by a different fear. The genuinely countercultural act is to say something true and reasonable and garner no recognition for it.
So put the ratchet down before it snaps. Christians should need that reminder least of all. Our assignment was never to be based. It was to be faithful, to take courage, to tell the truth, to do good, and to leave the results with God.
This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on July 17, 2026.
