Thursday, December 29, 2022

Meet the New Left...

Jeffrey A. Tucker, "How the Left Became What It Once Hated"
In the final scenes of the book and film “The Hunger Games,” Katniss Everdeen has the opportunity finally to kill the hated dictator President Snow, but instead, turns her bow on the leader of the rebellion armies, namely President Coin.

The plot twist is remarkable because it adds an element of realistic complexity to the dynamics of power. Katniss has come to realize that the rebels had gradually become the thing that they hated the most. They had begun to crave the very power that they were trying to overthrow.

Indeed, there was no reason to think that the regime under rebel control would be different than the status quo. The emoluments of power would be newly available to a new group of managers. Coin would replace Snow just as Snow had replaced the person before him. What Katniss really wanted was a completely new system of freedom, not just a new public face to the old tyranny.

Her insight is profound here. When hatred becomes focused, boundless, and obsessive, the hater gradually comes to emulate the very thing it opposes. That’s what happened to the rebel armies and to Coin.

So too, this is what Trump Derangement Syndrome has done to the left in this country. It began in 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency over Hillary Clinton, who was somehow supposed to win. After that, the single-minded focus of opposition became to grind him and his presidency into the ground and oppose everything about him, including his supporters and even the system that brought him to office.

The bitter irony here is that the left has become the very thing that they warned against. They said Trump was an authoritarian and brutal, a financial racketeer who lived off manipulation. They warned that he would use his personality cult to impose a quasi-dictatorship.

And here we are six years later and what do we see of the left in this country? Especially during the COVID crisis, they embraced censorship, authoritarianism, imposition on bodily autonomy, and attacks on the freedom of association. For a time, the word freedom itself became a bad word to them. People who were merely trying to get schools open or the freedom to run a small business became the object of their loathing, even to the point that the left began to label as fascist those who wanted freedom.

Someone coming of age right now would never have any idea that the left once had some central principles that revolved around themes of freedom. They were free speech, bodily autonomy, peace, small business over large, the poor and middle class over the rich, freedom of expression and art, and opposition to ruling-class manipulation of the system on behalf of the privileged instead of the common good. They were deeply suspicious of the national-security state, corporate elites, and arbitrary uses of executive power. They were against corruption in government.

They were once for human rights and against segregation based on medical compliance. Probably today, no one younger than the age of 25 would believe this, but trust me: These used to be central principles of the left.

So far as I can tell, every single one of these principles has been thrown out. In the COVID crisis, all major lefty journals of opinion pushed mask and vaccine mandates, argued for more statist power to muscle people, favored large businesses over small, crushed the working classes and poor, and even threw out their traditional defense of public schools, which they seemed to want to be closed for longer periods of time.

They rallied around the segregation of whole cities by vaccine status, even though doing so meant excluding nearly half the members of minority populations from access to public accommodations such as restaurants, museums, libraries, and theaters. Not a peep of protest among the center-left!
 
They completely disregarded one-time liberal precepts such as a woman’s right to work as millions of married women with kids were thrown out of corporate life to take care of kids. The day cares and schools were closed, so women had no choice about it. The result is that women’s participation in the workforce has been set back 34 years! We’re nowhere near pre-pandemic levels and it’s still falling!
Have you heard even one peep about this problem from the left-wing press? Has The New York Times or Washington Post even covered this? I don’t think so. It’s an absolute scandal and a great measure of just how many principles the left has thrown out in their crazed and maniacal hatred of Trump. They’ve been willing to utterly destroy social and economic life in the single-minded pursuit of killing Trump as the one and only goal. And in pursuit of that goal, they’ve embraced an authoritarian biosecurity state that robs people of personal autonomy.

And let’s not forget the one-time centrality of science in the leftist vision. Since at least the Monkey Trial, American progressives have rallied around science as opposed to religion and faith. But when it came to COVID, they completely threw all science out the window. They would hear nothing as the evidence kept pouring in that COVID was not a threat to kids, that it had an infection fatality ratio that compares to the flu for anyone younger than the age of 75, and that even the overall death rate was 0.2 percent. But instead of dealing with this reality, they screamed panic so that the whole population would fly into fits of rage.

As for the vaccines, even as evidence mounted that they protect against neither infection nor transmission and that the adverse effects are inordinately high even against the target population of the elderly, they still wouldn’t hear it. They’ve pushed these grotesque human rights-destroying mandates and segregations.

Even this wild D.C. obsequious deference to the Ukrainian president from last week has roots in Trump hatred. They spent so long trying to prove that Russia was somehow responsible for Trump’s election in 2016, despite the complete absence of evidence to that effect, that they even came to believe it. So the stupid logic goes this way: Russia equals Trump and therefore anyone who’s against Putin is a friend, no matter the corruption. As a result, even the one-time penchant for favoring peace over war has been tossed out.

So too, the strange lack of interest in the FTX scandal and the targets of this fake company’s “effective altruism” has roots in Trump hatred. The company passed out millions and billions of dollars to nonprofits and candidates that backed the Democrats and various lockdown measures, and all we get now is silence. That’s rooted in the very same corruption: The left has become the very thing they once claimed to hate.

In other words, the left in the United States has adopted all the practices that they once warned that Trump would bring to the United States! I say this too, not as a Trump fan personally at all. I was warning that his presidency would be unhinged as early as 2015 because his ideological impulses departed too far from constitutionalism and Reaganite suspicions of government.

All that said, unhinged hate is a dangerously distorting emotion. The left’s single-minded focus on grinding Trump into the dust has turned the left into the mirror image of their most paranoid worries about him.


At some point, the left in this country is going to have to do a serious self-examination of what it has become. To return to “The Hunger Games,” the pursuit of President Snow has turned the followers of President Coin into what they once claimed to oppose. And this has become so obvious to the public that they’ve even turned against the public, demonizing middle-class values as inherently dangerous and science itself as misinformation worthy of censorship.

Be careful what you hate. Too much focus, too much attention, and too much study will cause the object of your hatred to be the most compelling pedagogue. If you take a close look in the mirror, you won’t recognize yourself anymore. That, in short, is what has become the left in America today.

52 comments:

  1. donald tRump attempted to stay in power via a coup. ALL people, no matter their politics, should hate that.

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  2. Yeah. That is your problem. "All people should". Why? Why Putin and Xi "should"??? Hate it? Why? Why not LIKE!!!! it.

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  3. What is the best synonym for a gun-less coup?

    COS Play.

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  4. The next one won't be attempted by unarmed Viking Shaimans.

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  5. Everyone who loves democracy should hate it when coups to overthrow a legitimately elected government occur. Minus and Qtard are democracy haters. As well as Putin and Xi. Duh.

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  6. Legitimately? Says who? The "certificationers ordered to sign or be arrested?"

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  7. The judges who threw out the dotard campaign lawsuits. Quote "After the 2020 United States presidential election, the campaign for incumbent President Donald Trump and others filed and lost at least 63 lawsuits contesting election processes..."

    Some of these judges were appointed by donald tRump. Nobody threatened to arrest them. Others appointed by donald tRump said the election was legitimate. Including his FBI director (Christopher Wray) and his AG (Bill Barr). Who threatened to arrest them?

    Who says the election was illegitimate? The sore losers who were beaten. Remember the mocking of HRC supporters that took place following her lose in 2016? That's you times 1000. donald tRump did a shitty job presidenting and The People (the sane ones) turned out bigly to get rid of him. There was no voter fraud on a massive scale that Joe Biden got away with.

    I'm looking forward to massive judgements in the Dominion lawsuits. Will Mike Lindell be driven by despair to smoke crack again after he loses his fortune? Will Rudy Giuliani drink himself to death?

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  8. \\Everyone who loves democracy should hate it when coups to overthrow a legitimately elected government occur. Minus and Qtard are democracy haters. As well as Putin and Xi. Duh.

    Was Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine in 2014 "coup to overthrow a legitimately elected government" which your 6 Jan "coupers" seems like cosplaing... because DEMOCRATIC party and media was venerating and hailing to it... as well to all and any such attempt all around the World???

    Can you answer something cogent to this question? Ah, Dervy?
    Because that answer.
    Or your INABILITY to give it.
    Is the central point of the problem.
    Which will continue to give more and more "gapes of wrath".


    \\The next one won't be attempted by unarmed Viking Shaimans.

    That's for granted.
    And that is lesson Dervy are insufferable to learn.

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  9. It's always good to get rid of a Putin puppet, Qtard. Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine or donald tRump in the US. FYI, Qtard, armed insurrectionists will be shot dead if they try to install dotard donald in 2024. The lesson HAS been learned. Rightturds are willing to use violence to steal elections.

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  10. Hesiod, "Works and Days"

    [212] But you, Perses, listen to right and do not foster violence; for violence is bad for a poor man. Even the prosperous cannot easily bear its burden, but is weighed down under it when he has fallen into delusion. The better path is to go by on the other side towards justice; for Justice beats Outrage when she comes at length to the end of the race. But only when he has suffered does the fool learn this. For Oath keeps pace with wrong judgements. There is a noise when Justice is being dragged in the way where those who devour bribes and give sentence with crooked judgements, take her. And she, wrapped in mist, follows to the city and haunts of the people, weeping, and bringing mischief to men, even to such as have driven her forth in that they did not deal straightly with her.

    [225] But they who give straight judgements to strangers and to the men of the land, and go not aside from what is just, their city flourishes, and the people prosper in it: Peace, the nurse of children, is abroad in their land, and all-seeing Zeus never decrees cruel war against them. Neither famine nor disaster ever haunt men who do true justice; but light-heartedly they tend the fields which are all their care. The earth bears them victual in plenty, and on the mountains the oak bears acorns upon the top and bees in the midst. Their woolly sheep are laden with fleeces; their women bear children like their parents. They flourish continually with good things, and do not travel on ships, for the grain-giving earth bears them fruit.

    [238] But for those who practise violence and cruel deeds far-seeing Zeus, the son of Cronos, ordains a punishment. Often even a whole city suffers for a bad man who sins and devises presumptuous deeds, and the son of Cronos lays great trouble upon the people, famine and plague together, so that the men perish away, and their women do not bear children, and their houses become few, through the contriving of Olympian Zeus. And again, at another time, the son of Cronos either destroys their wide army, or their walls, or else makes an end of their ships on the sea.

    [248] You princes, mark well this punishment you also; for the deathless gods are near among men and mark all those who oppress their fellows with crooked judgements, and reck not the anger of the gods. For upon the bounteous earth Zeus has thrice ten thousand spirits, watchers of mortal men, and these keep watch on judgements and deeds of wrong as they roam, clothed in mist, all over the earth. And there is virgin Justice, the daughter of Zeus, who is honoured and reverenced among the gods who dwell on Olympus, and whenever anyone hurts her with lying slander, she sits beside her father, Zeus the son of Cronos, and tells him of men's wicked heart, until the people pay for the mad folly of their princes who, evilly minded, pervert judgement and give sentence crookedly. Keep watch against this, you princes, and make straight your judgements, you who devour bribes; put crooked judgements altogether from your thoughts.

    [265] He does mischief to himself who does mischief to another, and evil planned harms the plotter most.

    (cont)

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  11. [267] The eye of Zeus, seeing all and understanding all, beholds these things too, if so he will, and fails not to mark what sort of justice is this that the city keeps within it. Now, therefore, may neither I myself be righteous among men, nor my son -- for then it is a bad thing to be righteous -- if indeed the unrighteous shall have the greater right. But I think that all-wise Zeus will not yet bring that to pass.

    [274] But you, Perses, lay up these things within you heart and listen now to right, ceasing altogether to think of violence. For the son of Cronos has ordained this law for men, that fishes and beasts and winged fowls should devour one another, for right is not in them; but to mankind he gave right which proves far the best. For whoever knows the right and is ready to speak it, far-seeing Zeus gives him prosperity; but whoever deliberately lies in his witness and forswears himself, and so hurts Justice and sins beyond repair, that man's generation is left obscure thereafter. But the generation of the man who swears truly is better thenceforward.

    [286] To you, foolish Perses, I will speak good sense. Badness can be got easily and in shoals: the road to her is smooth, and she lives very near us. But between us and Goodness the gods have placed the sweat of our brows: long and steep is the path that leads to her, and it is rough at the first; but when a man has reached the top, then is she easy to reach, though before that she was hard.

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  12. The ancient Greeks all would have loved tRump?

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  13. \\It's always good to get rid of a Putin puppet, Qtard.

    Only... he (Putin) much more eager and free to get rid of "Western Puppets".

    Do you really wanna compete with him in that discipline?


    \\Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine or donald tRump in the US.

    Yanuk -- yes. He fled in RFia's helicopters for god sake.
    But even then, there is somepeople who do not believe it.

    Trump? Ehm???
    And what is the evidances in his case???
    And what about Presumption of Innocence?


    \\FYI, Qtard, armed insurrectionists will be shot dead if they try to install dotard donald in 2024.

    Or... that'll be nasty contr-revolutioners.
    It can play both way in History.
    Or... you have that religious belief that YOU EXACTLY, ALWAYS will be only on the *right*(pun intended) side of the History. ;-P


    \\The lesson HAS been learned. Rightturds are willing to use violence to steal elections.

    "Generals always preparing for a past battles" (c)


    \\for violence is bad for a poor man. Even the prosperous cannot

    Bad. But much easier. And more benefitial. ;-P
    Did you ever heard about Revolution of Rich???

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  14. Did you ever heard about Revolution of Rich???

    Aristocrats versus a King? All the time. That's why the king must always be in a position to rally the peasants... why he throws gold coins from his carriage.

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  15. Even today, he who's name must not be spoken (MacBeth), is not spoken by the players.

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  16. The next one won't be attempted by unarmed Viking Shaimans.

    I wish a bitch would fuck around and find out. All these mumble- mouth Trump supporters talking about a civil war like Lindsey Graham is going to sashay them to victory. Sit down, faggot.

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  17. \\Aristocrats versus a King? All the time.

    Hmmm... I need to think 'bout it.


    \\fyi, Qtard, that dotard donald is a Putin puppet has been confirmed. Over and over. Including by tRump himself.

    Dervy.
    You do not understand ONE IMPORTANT... no, ONLY IMPORTANT thing here.

    WHY he not punished YET, then???

    Crime unpunished... becomes New Normal, and very soon.

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  18. I wish a bitch would fuck around and find out

    See ya Nov 2024.

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  19. See ya Nov 2024.

    I was anti-Trump before it was cool.

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  20. Ever watch prison interviews with Charles Manson? How they would cart him out to rage against his punishment for ratings then put him back in a cage for a few years?

    Trumpio delenda est.

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  21. WHY he not punished YET, then???

    If you listen to Trump or his dwindling redoubt of sycophants, the man is being crucified and pop riveted to the inside of a tree mulcher. The whining about how "unfairly" Trump is being treated is often insufferable, you'd think homosexuals were being banned from attending Taylor Swift concerts. Until Trump, this is why America avoided making far left liberal pussies into Presidents
    Their skin is way too thin.

    The justice system in America seeks to make doubt unreasonable. That takes time in a country where a solid third of the people were retarded enough to vote for Trump in the first place.

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  22. ... in other words, "We got nothin' on him." :)

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  23. so bad even his lawyers go to jail. Lol

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  24. ...or get fired for performing their due diligence too seriously.

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  25. Your link has nothing to do with the tRump lawyers who contested election results (and failed).

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  26. \\WHY he not punished YET, then???

    This is question to you personally, Dervy.

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  27. My link shows that the IC/ Deep State actors can get anyone "cancelled" who move against their interests. Even infamous paedophiles are being protected. Pizzagate was no conspiracy theory. It was the Epstein operation, exposed.

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  28. Qtard: This is question to you personally, Dervy.

    I personally have nothing to do with the decision to prosecute tRump. For anything. Jack Smith is looking into it. Ask him.

    Minus: Pizzagate was no conspiracy theory. It was the Epstein operation, exposed.

    Your tinfoil hat is exposed.

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  29. Wikipedia: The [Pizzagate] conspiracy theory has been widely discredited and debunked. It has been judged to be false after detailed investigation by the fact-checking website Snopes and The New York Times. ... No alleged victims have come forward and no physical evidence has been found.

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  30. ...and yet anyone who gets close to the Epstein truth dies or gets fired. Hmmmmmm.

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  31. That is rock solid evidence you have. Joe Biden acted to protect donald tRump from being exposed as an active participant in the Epstein operation to groom and rape young girls. But why would Joe Biden act to protect donald tRump?

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  32. \\I personally have nothing to do with the decision to prosecute tRump. For anything. Jack Smith is looking into it. Ask him.

    Ha-ha-ha. :-))))))

    All benefits... and no responsiblity.

    You are so libtard, Dervy. ;-P



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  33. Qtard identified why donald tRump isn't being prosecuted for his crimes. It's all my fault. That Putin invaded Ukraine, that's my fault too... Right, Qtard?

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  34. Just try to imagine it to yourself.
    Let's see... to chose something to not corelate with your stance.

    Some activists shouting in your faces about some... hummning birds dieing in far-far-away lands.
    And when level of annoyances going past that certain treshold, you naturally start arguing: "Why you'd not go and fix it yourself... if you are so agitated???!!!".
    To hear response like yours "That's... not my business".
    Your reaction?
    True one. ;-P

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  35. Minus does not like it that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. Yet he does nothing but complain. Did he at least travel to DC and participate in the insurrection? I doubt it. Given that he couldn't be posting on this blog if he were in prison. Which he would definitely be, given that he'd have brought his gun.

    All benefits... and no responsiblity. Minus is such a republiturd, huh Qtard?

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  36. I work just outside the DC beltway, Dervy, and I've been travelling there daily for nigh on 30 years. I've been to so many protests in DC, I no longer waste my time attending them. The Press avoids covering them like the plague, cuz they don't fit their preferred narrative.

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  37. \\All benefits... and no responsiblity. Minus is such a republiturd, huh Qtard?

    Aha...
    ONLY.

    If you'd press Cntrl-F on your keyboard and type in "trump" -- EVEN on this page you'd see lots of "trump-trump-trump"s -- 25 of em.
    And only 4 "biden"... but, they all from you too. ;-P

    So... who IS agitated here?

    So... who screaming people in a face?

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  38. No answer from Derpy HERE too. :-)))

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  39. Nobody is "screaming people in a face", Qtard. Derpy has never (and will never) answer.

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  40. I am agitated over the fact that Joe Biden stole the election with the help of the deep state, that the deep state protects the uniparty corrupt rich and powerful, that the Left wants drag queens to groom kids, that Democrats are operating pedophile rings with impunity, that Mr Potato Head and Dr. Suess were cancelled, that our southern border is open, that the Democrats are funding Ukraine's defense, that a closeted gay Black Kenyan unconstitutionally occupied the White House, that my tax money goes to keep poors on the dole (and voting for Democrats), etc.

    The list of things that agitate me goes on and on... Oh no, wait. Aren't those things that bigly agitate you, Minus?

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  41. Agitate me? How can I be agitated when the Trump Insurrectionists are still running free and not locked up... and may vote AGAIN in 2024?

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  42. ^^definitely agitated^^

    Every post on this blog concerns how agitated Minus is.

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  43. What does every one of your comments signify?

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