In case you missed it, our friends at americanthinker.com had a fantastic column (which won’t load now due to internal server error, but is cached by Google, so I repeat it here) by Dr. Danusha V. Goska in 2014. She was a life-long leftist and wrote that she has abandoned that philosophy. Here, she gives her top ten reasons. It parallels many if the trials and tribulations climate skeptics suffer at the hands of [climate activists]. I highly recommend it, and I recommend sending it to every activist who calls you a “climate denier”. There may be hope yet for those who value spewing hate over rational debate. – Anthony
by Dr. Danusha V. Goska
How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying “Eat the Rich.” To me it wasn’t a metaphor.
I voted Republican in the last presidential election.
Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It’s an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.
10) Huffiness.
In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.
Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors’ meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!
Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said “Yes” or “No.”
Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.
I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. X.” Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.
Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists’ announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.
Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned. His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.
Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can’t climb stairs.
I appreciate Professor X’s desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.
Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others’ pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this — “Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant.” But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one’s history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.
9) Selective Outrage
I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.
A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. “You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture’s rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation.”
When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, “binders full of women.” He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.
Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their “war on women.”
I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I’m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I’m saying I never saw it.
The left’s selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It’s an “I hate” phenomenon, rather than an “I love” phenomenon.
8.) It’s the thought that counts
My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: “Think Globally; Screw up Locally.” In other words, “Love Humanity but Hate People.”
It was past midnight, back in the 1980s, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A group of Peace Corps volunteers were drinking moonshine at the Momo Cave. A pretty girl with long blond hair took out her guitar and sang these lyrics, which I remember by heart from that night:
“If you want your dream to be,
Build it slow and surely.
Small beginnings greater ends.
Heartfelt work grows purely.”
I just googled these lyrics, thirty years later, and discovered that they are Donovan’s San Damiano song, inspired by the life of St. Francis.
Listening to this song that night in the Momo Cave, I thought, that’s what we leftists do wrong. That’s what we’ve got to get right.
We focused so hard on our good intentions. Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and “tolerance,” not for our competence or accomplishments. We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.
Peace Corps did not focus on the “small beginnings” necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. “Only intolerant oppressors judge others’ cultures.”
I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people’s clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, “Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love.” Delousing homeless people’s clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.
Back in 1975, after Hillary Rodham had followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, she helped create the state’s first rape crisis hotline. She had her eye on the big picture. What was Hillary like in her one-on-one encounters?
Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she’d never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.
A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free. In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton “took me through Hell” and “lied like a dog.” “I think she wants to be a role model… but I don’t think she’s a role model at all,” the woman said. “If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys.”
Hillary had her eye on the all-caps resume bullet point: FOUNDS RAPE HOTLINE.
Hillary’s chuckles when reminiscing about her legal victory suggest that, in her assessment, her contribution to the ruination of the life of a rape victim is of relatively negligible import.
7) Leftists hate my people.
I’m a working-class Bohunk. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.
Karl Marx promised the workers’ paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class — think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.
Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan’s 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.
In the end, though, we didn’t show up for the Marxist happily ever after. We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood — “Workers of the world, unite!” But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn’t adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. “Property is theft” is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.
Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. Leftists turned on us. This isn’t just ancient history. In 2004, What’s the Matter with Kansas? spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what’s good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, What’s the Matter with America?
We became the left’s boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we’d been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the “imperialist” war in Vietnam. See films like The Deer Hunter. Watch Archie Bunker on “All in the Family.” Listen to a few of the Polack jokes that elitists pelted me with whenever I introduced myself at UC Berkeley.
Leftists freely label poor whites as “redneck,” “white trash,” “trailer trash,” and “hillbilly.” At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. President Bill Clinton’s advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”
The left’s visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a “major shock” to discover “the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people.” The Reclusive Leftist focuses on Vanity Fair journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists “hate-fuck conservative women” and denounces Palin as a “small town hickoid” who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.
Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit. In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald’s, must accept that he is a recipient of “white privilege” – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.
The left is still looking for its proletariat. It supports mass immigration for this reason. Harvard’s George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called “America’s leading immigration economist.” Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America’s working poor.
It’s more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.
6) I believe in God.
Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a “dead Jew on a stick” or a “zombie” and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented “flying spaghetti monster.” You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.
5 & 4) Straw men and “In order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs.”
It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.
“Truth is that which serves the party.” The capital-R revolution was such a good, it could eliminate all that was bad, that manipulating facts was not even a venial sin; it was a good. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. One of those eggs was objective truth.
Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York’s WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn’t such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, “And yousupport that?”
Well of course THE CALLER did not support that, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent.
On June 16, 2014, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank published a column alleging that a peaceful Muslim was nearly verbally lynched by violent Islamophobes at a Heritage Foundation-hosted panel. What Milbank described was despicable. Unfortunately for Milbank and the Washington Post‘s credibility, someone filmed the event and posted the film on YouTube. Panel discussants, including Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, made important points in a courteous manner. Saba Ahmed, the peaceful Muslim, is a “family friend” of a bombing plotter who expressed a specific desire to murder children. It soon became clear that Milbank was, as one blogger put it, “making stuff up.”
Milbank slanders anyone who might attempt analysis of jihad, a force that is currently cited in the murder of innocents — including Muslims — from Nigeria to the Philippines. The leftist strategy of slandering those who speak uncomfortable facts suppresses discourse and has a devastating impact on confrontations with truth in journalism and on college campuses.
2 & 3) It doesn’t work. Other approaches work better.
I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.
I grew up among “Greatest Generation” Americans who had helped build these cities. One older woman told me, “As soon as I got my weekly paycheck, I rushed to Main Ave in Paterson, and my entire paycheck ended up on my back, in a new outfit.” In the 1950s and 60s, my parents and my friends’ parents fled deadly violence in Newark and Paterson.
Within a few short decades, Paterson, Camden, and Newark devolved into unlivable slums, with shooting deaths, drug deals, and garbage-strewn streets. The pain that New Jerseyans express about these failed cities is our state’s open wound.
I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.
Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. They don’t know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. They don’t realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. I know they don’t know these things because they tell me. One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.
My students do know — because they have been taught this — that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know — because they have been drilled in this — that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.
As Shelby Steele so brilliantly points out in his book White Guilt, the star of the sob story my students tell in exchange for favors is very much not the black aid recipient. The star of this story, still, just as before the Civil Rights Movement that was meant to change who got to take the lead in American productions, was the white man. The generous white liberal still gets top billing.
In Dominque La Pierre’s 1985 novel City of Joy, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, confesses that serving the poor in a slum has changed his mind forever about what might actually improve their lot. “In a slum an exploiter is better than a Santa Claus… An exploiter forces you to react, whereas a Santa Claus demobilizes you.”
That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city.
After I realized that our approaches don’t work, I started reading about other approaches. I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue’s castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is “My God, he’s right.”
1) Hate.
If hate were the only reason, I’d stop being a leftist for this reason alone.
Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.
Before that I’d had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.
In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.
If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you’d quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.
One topic thread was entitled “What do you view as disgusting about modern America?” The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.
Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn’t hold any anti-war rally, because you didn’t hate Obama.
I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances — I had no right-wing friends — expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I’m not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don’t know that they were. I’m speaking here, merely, about language.
In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn’t work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.
A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as “Bushitler.” The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it’s not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.
I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would — car exhaust in the garage. I suddenly realized that my “eat the rich” lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.
In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn’t president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.
I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone — even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health — meant a great deal to me.
Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, “No, I’m not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody.”
“Julie,” I said, “You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don’t. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something — capitalism.”
“Yes, but I’m very nice about it,” she insisted. “I always protest with a smile.”
Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I’m sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don’t know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.
I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I’ve stumbled upon a left-wing website.
Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being “sex positive,” one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like “fag,” so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like “butt hurt.” Leftists taunt right-wingers as “tea baggers.” The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.
Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was “prone.” Carmichael’s misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.
In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement. McCreight quoted a prominent atheist’s reply to a woman critic. “I will make you a rape victim if you don’t fuck off… I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I’m going to rape you with my fist.”
A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC’s Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment’s loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won’t repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir’s comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.
I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I’ll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.
I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.
Another related piece worth reading is by Dr. Tim Ball – A Climate Story That Must Be Told
those that employ the real scientific method cant be on any particular side other than the actual observations or TRUTH…….that isnt a left or right concept that stuff is politics…….and consensus has ZERO to do with scientific method.
Just what I think Bill!
Re: 8 ) It’s Hillary’s casual lying cruelty to her inherited Travel Office employees whose testimony I saw on C-SPAN one day — totally unreported in that night’s news — that made me an activist libertarian .
Ferdinand Kürnberger, tired of America-no uniforms needs the more uniforms :
! We are a people of sovereigns. What we need to know from each other is: how we are politically minded; Therefore we carry the badges of our party. But what we need not to know, and what in good company no one asks about the other, is what he lives from; So we do not wear any badges of our trade – the conductor as little as the President. So it is, sir, it was a pity, if it were otherwise, that is a fact. Travel through the whole Union and you will not find a single officer in any industry that has a badge. It is not by the sign that you recognize him, but of the thing itself, simply by serving and courteously serving you. Besides, he’s a gentleman like you. In truth, my lord, all that is akin to the livery in the hundredth part, we hate with that salutary instinct of equality, which is the indestructible foundation of the republic. A free and enlightened citizen of the Union does not tolerate any badge on his body. All men are equal! We are a nation of Sovereigns. I would be sorry if it were not so. – Does not that sound splendid? Too bad that the beauty has so short a moment! For scarcely had we driven a mile further, than at the next station, a conductor made his patrol through the carriage, and demanded the ticket to Philadelphia. We were amazed. The man did not wear a badge, but his legitimacy, which we asked him, was all right, and so there was nothing left but to pull the exchange a second time
By the way, what’s up with
our friend americanthinker.com
Seems to be okay.
Another wonderful testament is David Horowitz’s “Radical Son” Amazing story. David was a communist originally, with his parents. He edited “Ramparts” — which I remember subscribing to and reading in 1970 at Stanford!
Would Anthony Watts and the “science” debate skeptics just come out and admit the AGW movement was always driven from a global leftist agenda?
I mean as the dominant force in the 40+ year event.
Sorry, I’ve trolled on the point for close to 10 years on Dr. Curry, no capitulation there. The ridiculous “journey” narrative.
Many skeptics remain delusional of the moving parts of the climate debate. There for the great opportunity of the Trump moment may well be lost.
Anthony doesn’t endorse the Lindzen/Delingpole narrative either.
If anyone here believes the effects of “Liberal” Left inspired Multiculturalism and Cultural Relativism, their practitioners and ramifications are bad in the USA, they should go and see what the results have been in some of the European states, in particular France, Germany and Sweden.
On the subject of Islamic immigration, President Trump has the exactly the right idea, just pray that he can take sufficient action before it is too late.
Ending all immigration immediately would be sufficient.
Which parts of Sweden did you visit Catweazle? or France and Germany? I have visited all three extensively over the last 12 months and seem to have missed the issues you are referring to.
“Which parts of Sweden did you visit Catweazle? or France and Germany? I have visited all three extensively over the last 12 months and seem to have missed the issues you are referring to.”
Here you go, Gareth.
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/03/04/fake-news-swedens-integration-minister-admits-lying-bbc-rape-stats/
FAKE NEWS: Sweden’s Integration Minister Admits Lying to BBC About Rape Stats
A Breibart news exclusive of course… If you watch only Breibart News and Fox News you won’t realize how dumb this administration is looking to most of the world about these “Sweden horror fakets” made by both those honorable and completely unbiased media. Come on, wake up. This is not the “right” we want. This is a shame that will make Pyongyang look good.
“A Breibart news exclusive of course… If you watch only Breibart News and Fox News you won’t realize how dumb this administration is looking to most of the world”
It appears to me that people from around the world are starting to get onboard the Trump Train. One has to tune out the Leftwing MSM to get the real picture.
To step into what is becoming a flame war, I think it is useful to read as many sides of an issue as possible. The New York Times or WaPo is useful for Democratic mainstream spin, Daily Kos for Democratic fringe spin, Fox for Republican spin, etc
TA says: ” One has to tune out the Leftwing MSM to get the real picture.” No, tuning either side out warps your view of reality. You have to pay attention to BOTH the leftwing MSM, and the rightwing echo chamber to figure out what is real.
“You have to pay attention to BOTH the leftwing MSM, and the rightwing echo chamber to figure out what is real.”
What of value are you expecting to glean from the leftwing MSM?
I find it interesting how politically polarized the US appears to be (and I believe is). I don’t find this so elsewhere in the world, and I am well-traveled.
I stated out with socialist ideals, although not strong ones. I shifted toward the right as I grew older, wealthier, and my responsibilities increased. I think this is fairly normal.
My big change was during working in a government department. The waste was shocking, as was the sense of entitlement to my tax dollars. Because of how governments run things, I think government departments run at about 10% efficiency, as opposed to about 40% in the private sector large organizations (that may be generous, but I worked in some very good ones). I shifted so far right, I astounded even myself.
Having said that, I still have firm socialist beliefs, and I have no problem mixing them with my strong beliefs in capitalism (an economic model really, not political) and as small a government as is possible.
What I find strange about Americans is the lack of people who are able to hold views of different parts of the political spectrum. To my mind, if the US carries on this way, it will likely tear itself apart into two wildly opposing and increasingly extreme factions.
Ease up, and talk to each other instead of flinging vitriol!
Having said all of that, I think the world is being dragged down the same path, and possibly with similar results as I predict for the US. I have no love for the extreme right, but I can see a very strong socialist, or even communist, movement being disguised as globalism. It’s almost as if all the communists fled the Soviet block and moved into the UN and conservation charities. I hope that’s just paranoia.
“I shifted so far right, I astounded even myself. ”
It’s called “being practical”. 🙂
“What I find strange about Americans is the lack of people who are able to hold views of different parts of the political spectrum. To my mind, if the US carries on this way, it will likely tear itself apart into two wildly opposing and increasingly extreme factions.”
Sorry, but I have to disagree. There is only ONE extreme faction, the one on the Left. They are tearing themselves apart, with their delusional thinking, but the Right is right on track to get the nation back heading in the proper direction. The Loony Left is not deterring Trump from carrying out his agenda. They may be slowing it down a little by holding up his appointees, but even so Trump is carrying on, and this slow walking of his appointees will end soon.
The Right is winning the argument, and if that continues, the radical Left will be seen as the empty suit they are and will lose even more influence which is a very big plus for the United States and the world.
The Left is immersed in delusional thinking, and we don’t want deluded people running our lives. We are on top of this situation now, and we need to stay on top.
There’s nothing wrong with socialism, so long as you are using your own money.
However once you proclaim the right to spend other people’s money to fund your moral instincts you have taken the first step down the totalitarian path.
I strongly belive in free education and healthcare, and protection for the disadvantaged. These are socialist ideals, but do not threaten freedom.
All paths lead toward extremes, all you need to do is recognize that and make sure you don’t go too far. It’s not a reason to block the path entirely.
I wonder if she’ll be able to convince any of her former associates. Probably not, she ‘s more likely to castigated and ostracized. Hopefully in not too painful a manner.
This article mirrors a lot of my experience with liberals. I have found them to be the most judgmental and narrow-minded people that I have ever met. They simply can’t seem to tolerate alternative viewpoints, let alone shades of gray.
… yet “bigot” is their favorite word …
Most recently, I tried to explain why I thought “Black Lives Matter” was divisive because it doesn’t really matter what the color of the person who is killed. More importantly, making it “Black Lives Matter” doesn’t help lead to solutions such as better training or the implementation of non-lethal means of force. Instead it creates an “us” vs. “them” mentality which is all about blame rather than solutions.
The answer that I heard the most often “You just don’t understand because you’re not black.” I thought that was a silly response. What does my color have to do with police violence?
Now the election is past, nothing was done, and nobody cares.
Another thing that I’ve noticed is that most of the time, the person claiming “You just don’t understand because you’re not black.”, isn’t black either.
Another thing that I’ve noticed is that most of the time, the person claiming “You just don’t understand because you’re not black.”, isn’t black either. Such as my college age daughter who screamed at me rather than listen to my perspective — even as I tried to explain that the divisive nature of the discourse and blame mentality will prohibit solutions rather than achieve solutions.
If you’re rich it’s your fault. If you’re poor it’s society’s fault.
If you’re Saint Andreas it’s California’s fault.
I’m speechless.
Here is a rather fascinating angle about liberal women …
The Ugly Truth About The Women’s March
Very well done. Pretty much sums up my opinions of the American left that started developing in the late 1960’s.
There is nothing in this world more extreme than a recovering anything…alcoholic, smoker, liberal…
This comment says it all.
“In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest”
An important post. Dr. Goska is a rarity, exceptionally perceptive and flexible.
My best friend is quite left-wing (in a Guardian way) and we have a lot of friendly disagreements and discussions. I accuse him of not seeking out alternative opinions and he says exactly the same about me. I don’t recognize him as one of the extreme examples illustrated above. It is too easy to assume the worst examples represent something other than a minority (albeit loud) voice. Ultimately we all need this adversarial system in order not to dip into left or right wing totalitarianism. The problem is that nowadays too many journalists are turning from normal debate into puerile name-calling.
However I remember exactly the same attitude from chicken-hawk right-wingers when the left told them the Iraq war would cause far more trouble than it solved. The right-wing then used just the same bag of self-delusions and lies described above. To them being anti-war was to be a Saddam supporter. In reality the ant-war camp simply wanted to know just how many innocent people we detached Westerners would tolerate in order to satisfy the fake news-peddlers, loony neo-cons and oil industry shills. There is no such thing as ideological truth! We all need to check our own biases don’t blur that truth.
“However I remember exactly the same attitude from chicken-hawk right-wingers when the left told them the Iraq war would cause far more trouble than it solved.” JasG
Now remember that Pres DJTrump was opposed to the Iraq war, and has since made an even stronger case that we have spent $7trillion in the ME and it a disaster; meanwhile our own borders and infrastructure are unprotected and in need of repair. So there was some give and take with his nomination.
Besides, the Republicans were going to try to nominate Jeb Bush. Jeb Bush! This election was a huge rejection of the Establishment Republicans by the electorate as well. They had facilitated our enormous debt for the Democrats, and were also fast tracking TTP and TTIP. Those globalist treaties were a shared concern for the left as well as the right.
And the first thing he did in office was withdraw from the TTP. It did not even take him several years! I felt I had more in common with my leftist relatives this time, which was a surprise. Remember, some of them also hate the printing of fiat money.
Agreed. Presumably the reference to Jeb Bush is because he was a co-signatory on the infamous neo-con Project for a New American Century document (along with Cheney, Rumsfeld & Wolfowitz) that the Iraq war was based on. Libertarians were pretty much the only group who predicted the financial crisis.
“However I remember exactly the same attitude from chicken-hawk right-wingers when the left told them the Iraq war would cause far more trouble than it solved.”
Well, we can argue about the costs or the reasons for going into Iraq, but the facts are that Iraq was in good shape at the end of Bush 43’s term, with a bright future ahead, and then Barack Obama took over and turned Iraq and the entire Middle East and Europe into a horror story with his neglecting to protect the peace that had been won.
Instead, Obama turns his back on Iraq and allows the Islamic Terror Army to spring forth without resistance, and we see where that has led.
Now Trump has to go in and try and clean up this mess created by the Left and Obama.
Never listen to the Left when it comes to defense matters, they are completely unfit to make these judgements. They have no clue. They are the kids who give their lunch money up to the bullies on the playground. They are not to be depended on to keep us safe.
You seem to be implying that the US military should have been stationed there ad infinitum as an occupying power whether the Iraqis wanted it or not. The fact is that someone had to pull them out even if just on the basis of cost. It just happened to fall to Obama to do that. Many argue that IS arose due to the Saudis exporting of its Wahhabi & Sufi versions of Islam and the West has been supporting Saudis all this time. It is not a simple Left versus Right issue. My main point was the false facts, credulous media and insults-replacing-debate that occurred then is remarkably similar to now but the shoe was on the other foot then.
We were in both Japan and Germany for 20 or 30 years.
Only the lunatic left was claiming that we needed to be there forever.
We are still in Germany.
“You seem to be implying that the US military should have been stationed there ad infinitum as an occupying power whether the Iraqis wanted it or not.”
No, the U.S. troops just had to stay there until the situation stabilized. We didn’t have to keep a large presence there. The mere fact that U.S. combat troops were there, ready, willing and able, would serve to discourage our enemies and encourage our friends.
As MarkW pointed out, we have been in Japan, Germany, and South Korea for decades and we do so because it is in the interests of the United States. It is also in the interests of the United States to have a friendly ally like Iraq in the Middle East.
Obama’s neglect of Iraq and Afghanistan has definitely harmed U.S. credibility with the Iraqis and others in the area, but they will come around if we treat them fairly, and we should. We need them as allies and friends and to demonstrate that being friends with the U.S. is a benefit, not a burden.
Trump has a big job on his hands fixing all these problems Obama has left for him. But if anyone can fix them, I think Trump can fix them because he has some of the best military planners in the business and they are going to get the job done.
We shouldn’t stay in a country any longer than necessary, but we definitely shouldn’t leave too early. Iraq today is the perfect example of why we should not do that.
We shouldn’t enter into a war if we haven’t planned for the aftermath and the rebuilding, which is just as important, if not more so, as the planning of the war itself. Unless our goal is the utter destruction of our opponent and their entire population. Since we don’t practice genocide, we should plan for the aftermath of our wars.
You can’t strip the leadership away from a country and not expect to have anarchy rein if there isn’t a substitute authority present. In that case, such as in Libya, the society descends into tribal warfare because the tribe or the group is where the authority is found.
George W. Bush gave a State of the Union speech in 2007 that described what would happen in Iraq if the U.S. pulled their troops out too early. Bush’s descriptions of the chaos that would ensue were a perfect description of what actually happened. He foretold it all. Obama and the Democrats were completely oblivious to it, and ignored it, and nearly ruined Iraq, the Middle East and Europe as a consequence of their failure to heed Bush’s warnings. Look up Bush’s speech and read it for yourself. See if he didn’t nail it.
Sometimes wars are the lesser of two evils and must be prosecuted. But we must always remember that most of the people involved are innocent civilians who just want to live their lives in peace, so we cannot ignore them in the war planning and its aftermath.
The problems in Iraq were caused by pulling out to soon. Not by the war itself.
On the other hand, your use of “chicken hawk” does wonders to demonstrate how unbalanced your own opinion is going to be.
Biases can blur truth but it presumes you had some truth to start with. I was in the Navy for Bush 1 and the liberation of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein was a “bad man” in Simple Speak. His murder of large numbers of Kurds to test his chemical weapons seems to be well enough documented. That he intended to wipe out Israel is also well documented. For many years he lacked the technology to actually accomplish it but the diversion of high technology equipment is reasonably well documented.
I went down that way in 1991 if I remember right and was very afraid that nuclear war was imminent. I remember a Defcon 3 in the 7 day war between Egypt and Israel.
When you have people in power that look forward with eager anticipation to their own martyrdom, and have weapons of many destruction if not mass destruction, it is a scary, irrational time for all. I’ve seen the photos, a reservist that I know personally was on the team that entered Saddam Hussein’s house on that fateful day when he was captured. He showed photographs of warehouses filled with various munitions, chemical weapons mostly was his specialty, and they were corroding and falling apart making a potential huge environmental disaster.
I don’t doubt that President Bush went into Iraq with integrity; I also saw intelligence reports, and if they were not honest well there’s not much anyone can do about that I think, you go with what you’ve got. But mostly Bush’s war was humanitarian in nature, the very ideal of what the left sometimes proclaims.
“I don’t doubt that President Bush went into Iraq with integrity; I also saw intelligence reports, and if they were not honest well there’s not much anyone can do about that I think, you go with what you’ve got.”
Well, just about every intelligence agency on Earth thought Saddam was producing WMD. Possibly because that’s what Saddam wanted them to believe, since Saddam kept putting that story out. Many of Saddam’s own generals thought Saddam had WMD (during questioning after the war).
There’s also the argument about enforcing UN Security Council resolutions, of which Saddam had 17 lodged against him. If you don’t enforce a UN Security Council resolution, then what good is having one? Saddam defied the international community for years before his fall, which was long overdue. Bush 41 should have taken Saddam out when he had the chance during the First Gulf War. He could have saved us all a lot of trouble.
One benefit of enforcing UN Security Council resolutions is right after Bush 43 invaded Iraq, Kaddafy of Libya decided it was time to come clean on his WMD programs which included plans for nuclear weapons (the actual weapons plans were written in Chinese), and he contacted American officials and gave them up.
The dictator Kaddafy saw the dictator Saddam Insane go down, and the dictator Kaddafy decided he didn’t want to end up like that (he didn’t figure on Hillary Clinton’s stupidity a few years later).
It was a good thing to remove Saddam. The way Obama handled the aftermath after Saddam was removed is just a trajedy of monumental proportions.
TA, I have to disagree on what every intelligence agency knew. All I can tell you is that Bush senior, who had been CIA chief, stopped the tanks before rolling into Baghdad during the 1st Gulf war. Many people find fault with that, I didn’t. I became a traitor in my own family for saying Sadam didn’t have WMD. I felt really bad for Colin Powell. And outing an agent in the field for political purposes, are/were they out of their minds. I suppose they never read ” The Art of War” and how you treat spies. As if anybody is going to work for the US after that. And anybody associated with that agent, what do you think happened to them ? Unbelievable, they dismantled the government in a state that was more tribal than anything. Never, ever, ever should have went in the 2nd time. The mistakes made in governing after we’re even worse. Total and absolute incompetence. Failure by design.
We only had one war, that was in Afghanistan. No agent in their right mind wanted us there either. Poppy plants grow really well there, golden triangle mean anything. It’s the other place on the Himalayan Mtns., Vietnam . Maybe there is a bigger picture here that I don’t see other than enriching Haliburton, who incidently moved their headquarters to Dui Bai.
Saddam kept up the facade of WMDs not because he wanted to tweak the US (although at the time it seemed that way), but because he was a lot more afraid of Iran than of the US. After the defeat in 91, he did not have the capacity to either wage war or defend against an attack from Iran, so he wanted them to think he would use them if attacked.
Wow. What a great piece of writing. And not only because I agree with the sentiments expressed. Being an immigrant to America at a young age from a public housing project in Europe inoculated me from the self loathing on the Left. Spent the mid to late Sixties around young men in olive drab flying back and forth to Vietnam. One of them was my new Dad.
As he said ” Our family doesn’t protest the country’s wars. We fight them” I followed that course and my children have as well. If you couldn’t see the difference between communism and the West everything else you said was BS. No mattet how well eloquently you expressed it. Despite that I do not hate
those in the other side. I hold them in either
contempt or pity. Evil or plain stupid doesn’t really matter to the result. You’re just as compelled to stop them from mucking things up.
I’ve never been a leftist. I haven’t occupied things that don’t own. I think climate change is exaggerated. This article by someone who has, in my opinion, been wrong about everything in the past is hardly a recommendation to take her seriously now when she seems to have taken an opposite tact on everything she used to believe. Being skeptical about climate matters does not equate to a rigid philosophy about any other issue. One can suggest an aversion to overbaked climate theories without embracing a rigid ideology on one side of the political spectrum.
Pretty impressive you leftist concept… I’ve ever been a leftist, I am an anthropogenic climate change skeptic and I’ve never occupied things that I don’t own either. How impressive isn’t it? You should not be rigid about your political issues too (taken from your own words).
Anthony,
Thank You for posting this most poignant personal journey by Dr. Danusha V. Goska!
It represents your site well…and vice versa.
Welcome Dr Vodka.
I have always wondered why people are left or right.
My main interest here is climate change or the lack of it. NOAA records have been adjusted to show a warming of just 0.8 degrees C since 1880 which is mild and understandable since we are coming out of an ice age. More reliable satellite and balloon records show no change for 18 years. Yet this is cause to destroy our cheap reliable power forcing industry to move to China and other more polluted regions.
There seems no logic in Government!!
As someone of Polish ancestry myself, I can say with some certainty that vodka was Poland’s #1 contribution to the downfall of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe – of course, Pope JP Il (the Great), Lech Walesa and Reagan were well up there too, but not as important as vodka. So – good post.
Sorry Dr Goska. Spell check changed your name to Vodka. Ouch. Or can a mod fix it please?
Wow–Thanks so much for this post–I know it’s not about weather or climate–maybe “whether their crazy” or “climate of hate”, but I have written copious notes from her examples and can’t wait to research them. The parallels we can draw with leftist climate activists techniques, of which were very familiar here, is mind-blowing.
I have a beautiful picture of the Great Falls on my wall. And on that clear summer day the stars and stripes flying to the right. I’ve seen the Roman pool under the Patterson hotel. I’ve been in the tunnels that run through Garrett Mtn. and under the Passaic River. In Newark, I’ve sat in the park behind the Ballentine Museum with huge trees that were planted from the Orient. The wonderful library there in marble. I saw in that library photographs and accounts of the devasting floods in 1910 to 1914.
I was working at a library in Patterson, when a Hispanic man approached me and pointed my attention to a wall across the street. Written in Spanish ” communism is the only solution “. He asked what I thought about that. I said, maybe so, once a month they’ll have a parade and I’ll be one of the working class heroes. The rest of you guys, youeesguzs, will have to show up for work to do something other than hang out all day. If you don’t show up, they’ll come find you. Continued absence will send you to some remote spot in Alaska at a work camp with 75 coats to every 100 guys.
The next day the slogan was black out. He knew that is communism. They don’t kid around when they are in power and there isn’t anybody to complain to.
In the Hindu religion is a builder and destroyer. I think I’m on the builder side. It was wonderful to live in that state. It was the best. I hope I make a difference.
Leftist hate my people. I was born and raised on an actual plantation. Have a doctorate now. But we are as far apart as a slave to master. And now I hate them who would be masters.
Who are your people Pat? Do you hate my people because English is not our first language? Do you really hate us just because we are a small nation? Do you really hate me because I was born in a small mining village ?