March 27, 2023
Like many of us, I have an otherwise intelligent friend, who is an incurable leftist. In this essay, I try to win him over by reason and also suggestion, showing that a number of liberal influencers — Matt Taibbi, Alan Dershowitz, David Mamet, Bill Maher — have either completed or begun a transformation away from the woke left and toward a more classically liberal position.
Dear Alan,
As a riposte to my sending you James Howard Kunstler's article chronicling the numerous ways the currently woke left Democrat party is an engine of chaos — of what he colorfully refers to as anti-truth "mind ****ery" — you send me a Politico article by Michael Kruse that levels the same charge but with the protagonists reversed — i.e., the Republicans are the anti-truth party.
What is your side's evidence for this? Aha, there is actually no evidence, but rather the pseudo-evidence of the sleight-of-hand tautological "meme": Trump is beholden to the world of wrestling; the world of wrestling is fake; ergo, Trump is fake and anti-truth.
On the other hand, Kunstler makes substantive charges about the delusional nature of the left. To wit:
1. It is totally beholden to and promotes the insane cult of transgenderism, which posits that somebody born with some 37 trillion cells that are all coded either male or female can magically click his heels and declare biologic reality null and void and simply change his gender by an act of imagination and cosmetic surgery, and impose this anti-reality mind ****ery on the populace by force of law.
Who has the more rational and winning argument here? Do you believe that Rachel — AKA Richard — Levine — someone who lived for over 60 years as a man — is now a woman? Do you advocate for cutting off the breasts and penises of children and young teens, forcing them to take puberty-blocking hormones for life that have been shown to cause irreparable damage? Do you believe that Supreme Court nominee and now justice Kentaji Brown Jackson really is not able to define what a woman is, yet she is celebrated as being the first black woman to sit on the Supreme Court? Do you believe that gyrating, sexually provocative Drag Queen Story Hours featuring a Hell's kitchen of grotesque sexual deviants are suitable education and entertainment for five-year-old children and that parents should have no say in whether their children are subject to such indoctrination?
2. Do you believe in the mind ****ery of the 1619 Project, which devilishly inverts the founding of America as something that was systemically evil and irreparably racist? That only America and the West are guilty of the practice of slavery, when the evidence clearly indicates that slavery was universally practiced, and that it was the maligned West that actually put an end the practice — not perfectly, mind you, as it is still exists in parts of Africa and the Middle East? I sent you the video of black Africans being put in cages right as we speak in Libya and sold as slaves. Again, who has the better argument here?
I could go on and on: about COVID vaccines, climate change, modern monetary theory, ad infinitum. In every instance, the woke left has inverted truth and upended the laws of both God and nature. As a former NPR correspondent and waking Democrat, Chris Hedges recently put it this way: "we now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals and bankers destroy the economy." Every instance cited is the handiwork of the left's Gramscian "long march through the institutions." The inimitable Orange Julius cum Trump nailed it: everything woke turns to shit." Truer words were never spoken. And that's precisely why the woke left — triggered by Trump's Jack Nicholson's major telling them, "You can't handle the truth" — has been out to get him.
In closing, let me say there is no argument that the left is guilty of precisely the charges of "anti-truth" that it levels at Trump and the MAGA right. This is a classic case of Freudian projection — one literally espoused by the Luciferian godfather of the woke left, Saul Alinsky, in his magnum opus, Rules for Radicals: "accuse your opponent of what you yourself are doing, to create confusion and inculcate voters against the evidence of your own guilt." There it is — the smoking gun, right from their patron saint.
To point this out, however, is fruitless, because the woke left is not interested in reason. For it is in the clutches of a demonic, anti-rational, cult-like religious fervor. Indeed, all of Marxist and neo-Marxist ideologues were animated by and in the throes of this bad religion — one without pity, beauty, transcendence, truth, or redemption. As they continue to conquer more ground, the world itself more and more resembles a Hell on earth, as the historic record in Mao's China; Stalin's Russia; and yes, America itself today attests.
But as Ben Stein's dad Herb once famously said, "if something can't go on forever, it won't." So as the wheels of history grind inexorably to their next crisis point nexus, and the shit in America really starts to hit the fan — with crime spiraling out of control, the economy about to drop into a serious crisis, and China and Russia more and more ready to supplant us on the world stage — thoughtful people on the left — Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Naomi Wolfe, Alan Dershowitz, Michael Shellenberger, David Mamet, Bill Maher — are starting to wake up to the mass mind ****ing of their former confreres. As they awake from their mind-numbing slumber and realize they've been played — shades of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon? — let us hope the rest of us reasonable folks can count them as allies as we build a formidable alliance that will expose, defang, and overthrow this vile nomenklatura once and for all, restoring us to the faith, liberty, and reason that are our glory and birthright.
The game is on.
Lenny
Letter to a leftist friend
By Leonard BakkerLike many of us, I have an otherwise intelligent friend, who is an incurable leftist. In this essay, I try to win him over by reason and also suggestion, showing that a number of liberal influencers — Matt Taibbi, Alan Dershowitz, David Mamet, Bill Maher — have either completed or begun a transformation away from the woke left and toward a more classically liberal position.
Dear Alan,
As a riposte to my sending you James Howard Kunstler's article chronicling the numerous ways the currently woke left Democrat party is an engine of chaos — of what he colorfully refers to as anti-truth "mind ****ery" — you send me a Politico article by Michael Kruse that levels the same charge but with the protagonists reversed — i.e., the Republicans are the anti-truth party.
On the other hand, Kunstler makes substantive charges about the delusional nature of the left. To wit:
1. It is totally beholden to and promotes the insane cult of transgenderism, which posits that somebody born with some 37 trillion cells that are all coded either male or female can magically click his heels and declare biologic reality null and void and simply change his gender by an act of imagination and cosmetic surgery, and impose this anti-reality mind ****ery on the populace by force of law.
Who has the more rational and winning argument here? Do you believe that Rachel — AKA Richard — Levine — someone who lived for over 60 years as a man — is now a woman? Do you advocate for cutting off the breasts and penises of children and young teens, forcing them to take puberty-blocking hormones for life that have been shown to cause irreparable damage? Do you believe that Supreme Court nominee and now justice Kentaji Brown Jackson really is not able to define what a woman is, yet she is celebrated as being the first black woman to sit on the Supreme Court? Do you believe that gyrating, sexually provocative Drag Queen Story Hours featuring a Hell's kitchen of grotesque sexual deviants are suitable education and entertainment for five-year-old children and that parents should have no say in whether their children are subject to such indoctrination?
2. Do you believe in the mind ****ery of the 1619 Project, which devilishly inverts the founding of America as something that was systemically evil and irreparably racist? That only America and the West are guilty of the practice of slavery, when the evidence clearly indicates that slavery was universally practiced, and that it was the maligned West that actually put an end the practice — not perfectly, mind you, as it is still exists in parts of Africa and the Middle East? I sent you the video of black Africans being put in cages right as we speak in Libya and sold as slaves. Again, who has the better argument here?
I could go on and on: about COVID vaccines, climate change, modern monetary theory, ad infinitum. In every instance, the woke left has inverted truth and upended the laws of both God and nature. As a former NPR correspondent and waking Democrat, Chris Hedges recently put it this way: "we now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals and bankers destroy the economy." Every instance cited is the handiwork of the left's Gramscian "long march through the institutions." The inimitable Orange Julius cum Trump nailed it: everything woke turns to shit." Truer words were never spoken. And that's precisely why the woke left — triggered by Trump's Jack Nicholson's major telling them, "You can't handle the truth" — has been out to get him.
In closing, let me say there is no argument that the left is guilty of precisely the charges of "anti-truth" that it levels at Trump and the MAGA right. This is a classic case of Freudian projection — one literally espoused by the Luciferian godfather of the woke left, Saul Alinsky, in his magnum opus, Rules for Radicals: "accuse your opponent of what you yourself are doing, to create confusion and inculcate voters against the evidence of your own guilt." There it is — the smoking gun, right from their patron saint.
To point this out, however, is fruitless, because the woke left is not interested in reason. For it is in the clutches of a demonic, anti-rational, cult-like religious fervor. Indeed, all of Marxist and neo-Marxist ideologues were animated by and in the throes of this bad religion — one without pity, beauty, transcendence, truth, or redemption. As they continue to conquer more ground, the world itself more and more resembles a Hell on earth, as the historic record in Mao's China; Stalin's Russia; and yes, America itself today attests.
But as Ben Stein's dad Herb once famously said, "if something can't go on forever, it won't." So as the wheels of history grind inexorably to their next crisis point nexus, and the shit in America really starts to hit the fan — with crime spiraling out of control, the economy about to drop into a serious crisis, and China and Russia more and more ready to supplant us on the world stage — thoughtful people on the left — Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Naomi Wolfe, Alan Dershowitz, Michael Shellenberger, David Mamet, Bill Maher — are starting to wake up to the mass mind ****ing of their former confreres. As they awake from their mind-numbing slumber and realize they've been played — shades of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon? — let us hope the rest of us reasonable folks can count them as allies as we build a formidable alliance that will expose, defang, and overthrow this vile nomenklatura once and for all, restoring us to the faith, liberty, and reason that are our glory and birthright.
The game is on.
Lenny
