The left framed its latest crusade as a ‘right-wing culture war.’ We’ve seen this pattern many times.

The Great Gas Stove Rebellion of 2023 probably won’t resonate with future generations of freedom-loving folk the way the Boston Tea Party does. It’s unlikely that the plucky protagonists in the struggle to save our ovens and ranges from the grasping hands of regulatory totalitarianism will one day be celebrated as the Samuel Adamses and Patrick Henrys of the kitchen appliance age.

Still, the little victory secured last week over the forces of progressive technocratic authoritarianism is significant in its way—even if it may prove only provisional and someday in a bleak, electrified future, our Vikings and Kenmores are eventually prised from our cold, dead hands.

The small triumph chalked up for common sense and normality is so rare these days it’s worth celebrating in itself. It’s also a useful reminder that the inexorable march of government mandates, the endless effort by our rulers to enforce their “scientifically” unchallengeable dogma on what they see as a population of ignorant drudges, can be resisted.

More than that, the way the episode played out last week has been an instructive exercise in how modern society advances, how the ascendant left is the locomotive force behind our culture and politics.

As conservatives—and, much of the apolitical public—began to raise their voices against Commissar Richard Trumka Jr.’s diktat declaring war on gas stoves, the media took up the familiar narrative. “How Gas Stoves Became a Right-Wing Cause in the Culture Wars” explained Time Magazine. An unelected official proposes some indefensible new regulation in the name of “science” that materially and adversely affects the lives of tens of millions of Americans—and it is somehow another front opened by the “right wing” in their “culture wars.”

It happens all the time.

It happened with same-sex marriage, the idea that sex is independent of biology, the proposition that all white people are racist, the assertion that the planet is burning. All started out as intellectual hobbyhorses of the left fringe and quickly wound up being examples of the “far right” trying to impose its will.

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