What happened to classic liberalism?
I just realized something very basic that can promote peace and prosperity.
The reason people argue so much passed each other in politics is they are missing the other camp’s complete narrative — the story and data that puts any particular argument into perspective. Specifically, the Left hasn’t been exposed to other, completely told narratives, because they’re not available in mainstream society.
In any given argument, people can’t give their entire narrative via short comments, so it’s hardly ever explained in a cohesive way, but rather in fragmented parts.
First, I would like to say I’m not looking to attack any people with hate. When I say left, far left, radical left, I refer to the ideology, the ideas, of those groups. People can enter and leave ideas. People are not on trial here. Bad ideas are on trial.
Prager says the Left destroys everything it touches. But why is that? Perhaps it’s because the far-Left opposes the building blocks of building itself — structure and category — inescapable phenomena central to construction and understanding. Alt-Left “deconstructionism” philosophy breaks down even language itself to be without meaning or use. https://youtu.be/JXbR3oADwaM
There is much intense hate and vile racism also from the radical Left, like against this young black conservative girl. It’s typical: https://www.facebook.com/LEXITMovement/videos/2031513937141775/
Violent intolerance is also not only from the alt right. Perhaps it’s even much more prevalent in the radical Left, and not just by random participants, but by their leaders. Here’s a professor of ethics in California, smashing the head of a peaceful protester with a bike lock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSjIOHvdlY. Unfortunately, the violent professor has gotten away, nearly with murder, without prison. This is typical in the AntiFa radical Left movement. They are the fascists they think they’re fighting against.
Not all radical Leftists are for, or engage in, direct violence against their opponents. However, there have also been countless examples from celebrities inciting hate and violence in doing “harmless” things like showing pictures of president Trump with his head cut off, or shot with fake guns. Perhaps you can imagine the rightful condemnation if comedians posted similar pictures of Obama or Clinton. This particular comedian, with her ISIS-like beheading photo, feigned a fake apology, which she later retracted. This is typical.
So keep an open mind as you read on:
The first thing that people in California, New York, and other leftists places, like, typically, big cities, need to know, is that they live in some of the most blue and leftist areas in the world. As such, they are, by definition, surrounded by the far left, or radical left, what have you, pretty much everywhere. The media, their friends, and the media through their friends sharing it everywhere. As such, they really do not know other’s complete narratives very well. They don’t fully understand them, because they live in echo chambers. Other camps also have echo chambers, but at least they’re bombarded constantly by the celebrity-media-political complex, with leftists narratives, so they’re well aware. This isn’t the case in the Left. Non left narratives are virtually nowhere to be found or discussed in all but specific media channels.
Just because you’re from the big cities, don’t think people in outskirts can’t know things you don’t. It might be the opposite: you might be more prone to the echo chamber effect in your more densely populated region.
This article attempts to fix some of gap in understanding. Now, then:
I was born in Israel. My family left there were I was 6. I grew up in the far Left Coast of Los Angeles California. I went to the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), where far left ideas tend to be promoted. I learned the narrative, and could argue for it well. My friends were the radical left. Some of them grew on become intellectual leaders in their camps.
Since my days at UCSB, after many life experiences in business and world travel, I came to question the radical/Left, and lost a lot of friends in California and NYC for it. In that camp, you’re a Hitler loving Nazi if you question many a thing. And I’m no Hitler lover. The Nazis killed all but 7 of perhaps over 100 in my grandparents’ families. Almost my entire family tree.
I was in the Left. As such, constant attacks of Israel were all around me. As a grandchild of those escaping Europe to Israel in 1933 before the Holocaust, I felt great gratitude for the USA and Israel’s saving not only my life, but those of the rest of my family, and likely those of my entire people. As an curious person, this led me to question:
Why is the radical Left obsessed against the only Jewish state, and the only democracy in the Middle East? There are many land conflicts all over the world, and many much bloodier ones, with Islamic regimes butchering million across Africa and the Middle East. Why target a nation for being the Homeland of a people? Especially the Jews who were bounced and slaughtered for 2000 years around the world? Why does the left ignore the human shield terrorism and $billions that Hamas leaders like Khaled Meshal generate to prevent any possible peace? Why doesn’t the left have such obsession over the 50+ Muslim states, or over Islamic regimes that burn Christians alive, or over Iran and other regimes that throw gays off rooftops and stone women to death? Why does the UN push 50 times more resolutions against Israel than N Korea, Iran, and Venezuela combined? I traveled over 70 countries and lived in more than 10. I knew Israel didn’t deserve this. You might be asking, though: but what about the dispossessed? More on towards the end, below.
Critiquing Israel isn’t the same as hating Jews, goes the Leftist defense. Perhaps. However, Anti-Zionism, especially the belief that Israel doesn’t have the right to exist, is indistinguishable from Anti-Semitism, because it singles out the only Jewish state with standards that it doesn’t apply to any other nation. It fails the 3D test on anti-Semitism: Delegitimization, Demonization, and Double standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_test_of_antisemitism
The Israel issue happened to be the one that got me to look around more deeply. For everyone it’s different. For example many in LGBT in #walkaway now questioning why it shouldn’t allow celebrating that Israel supports gay rights.
Others being red-pilled see Lesbian Feminists in #LGBT question why biological men that identify as women can break their face in wrestling matches to win the Olympics.
Red-pillers see blacks in #Blexit:
- Wondering why they should be treated as incapable people that require hand downs instead of hand ups?
- Pointing out why Planned Parenthood, which was founded by a known Eugenics racist to “exterminate genetic weeds” — now kills babies after birth in Virginia. I see blacks lamenting that genetic war is being waged against them. That over half their population is being killed before, and now just after, birth
- Wondering why “black lives matter” #BLM doesn’t focus on what kills by far the most black boys — black on black murder in un-policed fatherless ghettos, and not 16 or so police-caused deaths, often involving violent criminals like Michael Brown.
Red-pillers see people learning that the Republican Party was created specifically to end slavery, that Abraham Lincoln was its first president, that 0 Republicans ever owned a slave, that 100% of slaves were owned by Democrats, that Democrat is the party of the KKK, Jim Crow Laws, that Democrats opposed Civil Rights Laws in the 1960s.
Red-pillers see people learning that we’ve been lied to and brainwashed with false narratives, such as the lie that the 2 political parties “switched”, as our teacher told us in high school. One can’t name 5 senators that switched from Democrat to Republican during the Civil Rights era, because it didn’t happen.
Red-pillers see blacks wondering why after decades of Democrat policies, they are left more poor in more of these under-policed fatherless ghettos, where the state incentivizes fatherless single mother homes, instead of giving to all the poor equally.
Red-pillers see the same realization in the Latino #Lexit community.
Red-pillers see a Left that wants to take in as many poor immigrants from the 3rd world as it can, not to help them, but to give them hand down in exchange for votes.
Red-pillers see a left that doesn’t want to end poverty, because it stays in power only so far as poverty exists.
Red-pillers see a left that wants the poor to be angry and divided, looking for the kind of class warfare that created the poor miserable deadly Socialist jail cells from USSR to China, Venezuela, and N Korea, and dozens more, that killed over 50 million of its own citizens in the 20th century.
Mind you, the Nordic countries are not Socialist. They are free market economies, with privatized school vouchers, privatized pension funds, and much higher taxes on the poor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lxD-gikpMs
Speaking of jail: There’s a broken myth that private prisons are evil. Why are prisoners so thankful that they’re in private prisons, with life-changing immersive rehabilitation programs, instead of state run prisons they say kick them out with a few dollars and a bus ticket? Why do private prisons serve only 10% of inmates, mostly illegal aliens, and only 700 US citizens? Watch this documentary: https://youtu.be/Pe5u20JO2sk
Red-pillers see the USA as a force of good, which not only saved the world from the Nazis in WWII, but whose Korean War against the evil spread of communism created South Korea — a model civil country — that would have fallen to North Korea’s communist hell otherwise.
Red-pillers see a Left of identity politics that allows people to speak only on issues and positions that befit their race gender or sexual orientation. If you’re black, you’re not allowed to express libertarian or conservative views. They’ll call you crazy and try to destroy you, as they did Kanye West. They’ll call you a Coon, Uncle Tom, and many worst phrases involving n****, and hardly a soul in the left will call them out for racist attacks against you.
Red-pillers see a Left that judges people by the color of their skin and not the content of their character. This is the opposite of Dr Martin Luther King’s dream.
Red-pillers see a Left that fuels racism to divide and conquer us. It divides people into factions that it can take under its tribalist wings.
Red-pillers see a Left that wants to spend $100s trillions on ineffectual programs from Paris to the “Green New Deal” that would barely affect the climate, but that would sure help destroy the USA’s economy, and help China’s economy.
The climate crises is real, but it is China that pollutes more greenhouse gases than the US and EU combined: https://medium.com/@gary_bernstein/climate-crises-is-real-and-china-pollutes-more-greenhouse-gases-than-the-us-and-eu-combined-1-72f7efeea03?postPublishedType=initial
They see the hypocritical left from actors in Hollywood to AOC in NYC, preaching reducing our carbon footprint while choosing to fly from NYC to Jersey instead of taking the 1 hour train. For these leftist leaders it’s always “do as I say, not as I do”.
Red-pillers see a left always looking for huge state run programs to grow and centralize its power over the individual.
Red-pillers see a left want the state to all but control large industries via expansive regulations and bureaucracies.
Red-pillers see the left flirt ever more with bankrupting socialist policies that would cost more money than exists, even if they tax the richest at 100%.
Red-pillers see an ignorant and hypocritical left that uses the fruits of free market capitalism like iPhones and Starbucks and Twitter while tweeting about the evils of free market capitalism.
Red-pillers see a left ignorant of the difference between free market capitalism, which is great, and crony capitalism, which is terrible, where govt and big businesses collude in monopolies protected from competition by licensing and other regulations.
Free market capitalism is not only the best economic system, but also the most moral system, where 2 participants freely decide to trade with one another, if it’s in their mutual best interests. Otherwise, the trade wouldn’t happen.
Socialism isn’t only deadly, it’s immoral. People are forced to pay taxes against their will, to give to the government — a 3rd party provider — to overlord and decide in what ways to spend that on yet another 3rd party. It’s very inefficient, as the 3rd party government never cares as much about being frugal or innovative as the people who’ve earned the money. The enormous waste and corruption from govt projects and methods has killed millions around the world in the 20th century alone.
Red-pillers see a Left that wrongly believes that free market capitalism is a zero sum game, where for there to be winners, like the US, it must mean that there are losers. But that’s not economics. iPhones are created from sand, essentially. People trade time for goods, and create things where essentially nothing existed before. Human effort and ingenuity creates wealth out of essentially nothing. It need not be confiscated.
Red-pillers see the left want to end the prosperity that free market capitalism provided over the last few centuries that brought more people out of abject poverty than any other system. Even the poor in Africa and India can now read articles such as this one, on smart phone devices.
Red-pillers see a left ignorant of the great progress made in child mortality rates plummeting in 30 years from 10,000 children per day in Africa and India from starvation malaria and diarrhea to almost none.
Red-pillers see a left ignorant of free market capitalism bringing life saving and life improving technology, at ever lower prices, to every corner of the world.
Red-pillers see a left that ignores that the middle class in the USA today, and even much of the poor, live better in objective terms than kings just 200 years ago, with heating, cooling, refrigeration, cars, trains, planes, can afford meat, 80 years of life and not 35, computers, internet, mobile phones, etc etc.
Red-pillers see a left that misattributes the cause of problems. Healthcare in the USA is expensive because of a lack free-market capitalism. No prices are listed for services, like in any other store or industry. How could you buy anything intelligently without prices? How can competition work? Prices are obscured by insurance. This fix is to abolish forced insurance — Medicare tax. Wages could even go up by that 6.2% as money in pocket instead. In any case, healthcare costs would plummet.
Red-pillers see a left that’s blind to basic moral principles:
Some see taxation by force as theft.
Red-pillers see a left ignorant for why small government should tax only enough for the minimal functionality of the state: to protect
1) Life 2) Liberty 3) Private Property
Without private property, we see the poverty and violence that ensures in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. No one cares to improve anything. Because they won’t keep the fruits of their labor.
They’re not opposed to the ultra rich paying higher marginal tax rates, but it never turns out that way. It seems their *effective* rates, or the total revenue from all taxes wasn’t ever much higher than now. Total USA tax revenue:
Before 1940, before FDR, they were once much lower. And before 1913–1920, almost non existent. About 3–8x lower than today. And life went on. Imagine that.
Effective capital gains (eg when Jeff Bezoz sells his Amazon stocks) is now also about the same as it has even been, in effective terms.
Again, before 1913–1918, there were hardly any taxes at all in the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States
Effective taxes, now with Social Security, are up fairly high already. But they’re never high enough for the Left.
“What exactly is your fair share to what someone else has earned?” — Thomas Sowell
Red-pillers see the Left’s desire to constantly reduce the rights of individuals in favor of authoritarian, centralized state control, from barring free speech of campuses to owning AR15 rifles, which kills fewer than 0.01% of people compared to abortion or drugs pouring in from the Mexican border does.
Red-pillers see an illogical left that says “walls don’t work” when we see anywhere from El Paso to Israel that they do.
Red-pillers see an illogical left that concludes that because Mexican drugs are caught in the ports of entry, where there’s effective monitoring, then that’s where the majority must come in.
Red-pillers see an illogical left that condemns separating children or putting them in “cages” when they’re trafficked in. Where should these children instead be put while their traffickers are being processed?
Red-pillers see a hypocritical left that didn’t care about these same children when the Obama policy was the same.
Red-pillers see a hypocritical left that says it cares about women and human rights but incentivizes trafficking young girls, 30% of which report getting raped or sexually assaulted, in the dangerous journey to break down the border of our country.
Red-pillers see hypocritical celebrities in the left denounce walls as immoral while living in large walled-off gated communities, where they don’t need to deal with the poverty they’re promoting.
They see a lying left, that claims it cares about the cost of the wall, when they don’t care about the cost of anything.
Red-pillers see an inhumane left that doesn’t care about the 72,000 American deaths in 2018, higher than guns or car crashes or the entire Vietnam War! The drug epidemic is largely from opioid based drugs like Fentanyl, pouring in from the southern Mexican border.
Red-pillers see AntiFa “anti fascists” act exactly as the violent fascists they seek to destroy. They don’t talk or ask questions. They break heads with bike locks at free speech rallies. Of course there are racists everywhere like in Charlottesville rally. But the radical Left is all about anti-fascism, supposedly, yet they are fascists.
Black conservatives like Candace Owens routinely getting abused by the new white clansmen — white leftist AntiFa members, shouting white supremacist at her. How sadly ironic.
The Left thinks it’s tolerant. How sadly ironic. The Left is intolerant of anyone with libertarian or, especially, conservative views. And that’s not because conservatives are “literally Hitler”. The left accepts much worse cultures in the Middle East, as noted, because they’re indigenous, or the enemy of their enemy.
Red-pillers see that the agenda, the end game, of the radical left, is towards utopian societal ideals reminiscent and often explicitly in praise of Marxism, or beyond, where payments would be made even to those “unwilling to work”.
Red-pillers see the radical Left as an ideology that has few principles in the face of attaining more power, because power structures per se, are their #1 concern. They’re less concerned with principles, and more so with which race happens to be most present in what positions. The Left is concerned with color of skin, not the content of character. Nothing means anything, except power and its “fair" distribution, in their post-modern view, with few if any other solid principles or ethics.
Red-pillers see a growing radical Left that hates and wants to destroy the foundational nature of the USA. This growing radical left agenda has made itself mainstream in the primary candidates we see today.
Red-pillers see a Left that is ethnocentric. It denies that not all cultures are compatible and morally equal to theirs — except conservatives — those are truly evil people for the Left, worse than ISIS, the actual Nazis, any anyone else.
When Israel left Gaza in the southern border, and removed every last Jew from there, as demanded by Hamas calls for such racial cleaning, even dead Jews were pulled from their graves there.
Gaza was supposed to turn into the Singapore in the Middle East. Instead Hamas started firing rockets from hospitals, and the present situation ensued. No nation would choose to then repeat this failure along its another border, the longer eastern border in the “west bank” (Judea and Samaria) all of 8km from its business center, in this case, Tel Aviv.
This is all also terrible for the Palestinian people. Their leaders create false narratives (and even false movies — see “Pallywood”). Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, who gained $2.5 billion from the blood and conflict he helps perpetuate, hides in Qatar and incites terrorism. Methods used center around human shields made of women and children, to purposely kill his own civilians for the public relations image it creates. The Left is happy to ignore this as much as possible. It doesn’t fit their narrative of victimology, and that the downtrodden are always that way from no bad leadership of their own.
When I got off the Left’s Kool-aid, I started hearing more of the other narratives. When I did, it was as if I had taken the Red Pill in The Matrix. While I don’t disagree with all Left positions, so many myths that had been dogmatically installed in my brain since 1st grade were revealed as Leftist state propaganda.
People beginning any political discussion should first know these complete narratives
Maybe at some point I’ll make a fair blog about both. However, most of my friends know the story of the Left. There was no reason to write it. I’d like them to balance our the left’s narratives and data. But actually, the right already knows the Left’s narrative fairly well, as it is the mainstream view pushed on us from every direction especially in the big cities.. and the news, celebrities, schools, colleges, FB, Twitter, and YouTube, with their selective algorithms that ban opposition under the guise of hate speech, while allowing e.g. anti-Semitic hate speech from the likes of Louis Farrakhan, who calls Jews demonic termites, ISIS and other violent terrorist hate groups.
The world is very divided, but in the end, we all want similar things. That is not to say that all societies and religions are morally equally good. For example, if you like the freedom and progressivism in the developed world, perhaps you should be acquainted with the the barbarism and slavery that exists in much of the rest of it. We should not let ignorance divide us, or delude us.
If we learn to understand where the other comes from, at least we’d not have to argue basic narratives over and over again. They’d see we’re trying, and perhaps start to understand us, as well, and we’d all learn something.
Light is the cure for darkness. Those still living in the dark ages can start to see the light. Sometimes it’s us in the dark ages. You there — have a look at yourself. With mutual understanding, we can work towards a world of greater peace and prosperity.
If you are in the Left, I challenge you to take the Red Pill for 1 month. Watch only Fox News, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin Report, follow Candace Owens in Twitter, and so on.
Do not watch anything at all from CNN, MSNBC, ABC, Wired, Gawker, BuzzFeed, Late night leftist comedy shows like Trevor, Colbert, etc etc. Basically anything at all that you probably know has an anti-Trump slant, which is probably everything in your social media wardrobe.
Remove your camp’s group think spokesmen completely from your life, and listen to other voices, ideas, and people for 1 month.
Let us know how it goes.
Kudos for taking this challenge for a better world!