The latest issue of New York magazine features a long, bizarre, amazing story by Kera Bolonik about a hapless Harvard Law professor, Bruce Hay, who managed to get duped by two apparent grifters, Maria-Pia Shuman and Mischa Haider, one a lesbian and one a transgender woman, into believing that he had fathered a child with Shuman — a con that they allegedly ran on multiple men at once.

From this paternity-trap beginning, Hay found himself emotionally entangled, ideologically bullied and effectively extorted. At one point, Shuman and Haider somehow tricked him into letting them “house-nap” his Cambridge home, until a court order evicted them. Finally, as the grift ran dry, Haider filed a sexual harassment complaint against Hay that’s still being adjudicated by Harvard.

When this story — far more byzantine even than my summary — dropped into the internet, the second-most-interesting thing, after the wild tale itself, was to watch how it was read by people who lean right versus people who lean left. The leftward-leaners were more likely to focus on Hay as a uniquely gullible or lust-addled individual, and to draw strictly personal lessons from his disastrous arc. (For instance, to quote the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, that “men need meaningful and supportive friendships with people they are not married to, especially into middle age.”)

The rightward-leaners, on the other hand, read the story politically, as a vivid allegory for the relationship between the old liberalism and the new — between a well-meaning liberal establishment that’s desperate to act enlightened and a woke progressivism that ruthlessly exploits the establishment’s ideological subservience. (“Not only did [Hay] trust Shuman,” Bolonik writes, but “he felt it would have been insulting for a heterosexual cisgender man to question a professed lesbian as to whether she’d had sex with other men.”) In this reading the Hay-Shuman-Haider story is a real-life version of a Michel Houellebecq novel, a tale of liberal culture that wears reactionary implications on its sleeve.