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I used to be a leftist. Slowly, over the course of many years, I stopped being a leftist. One of the bigger turning points occurred almost twenty years ago. I knew the name “David Horowitz” like I knew the name “Beelzebub.” Mention of Horowitz invoked sparks, the stench of sulfur, and the wailing of the damned. Horowitz used to be one of us – he was a Marxist! Then – horror of horrors! – he abandoned the shining ranks of the righteous and defected to the dark side.
Anticipating fire and brimstone, I attended a talk by David Horowitz on a college campus in New Jersey. I agreed with a surprising amount of what he said. I thought about other things he said for years afterward. That lecture, and other events, slowly but surely, shoved me out of the shining ranks of the Left.
My Front Page pieces have been written with potential leftist readers in mind. Leftists emphasize compassion and tolerance. I adduce facts when a given leftist stance is neither compassionate nor tolerant. I write about the agony of young people who were manipulated by health care professionals practicing “gender affirming care.” These kids underwent double mastectomies or castration. They now face lifetimes of unfathomable regret. I write about how Black Lives Matter ideology actually hurts, not helps, real, live, black people. I write about gender apartheid and courageous heroines like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Yasmine Mohammed. I write about what it’s like to be poor, and why a poor person might vote in a way that leftists arrogantly insist on labeling as “voting against your own self interest.” I mention that turning a violent criminal like Jordan Neely into a Christ figure, and a Good Samaritan like Daniel Penny into a KKK vigilante, is not helpful to poor people who are the most likely to be victimized by violent criminals. I write about being a former “unwanted fetus” and how that identity shapes my thoughts about abortion. I say that real respect for women must entail awe at women’s unique role as nurturers of human life, and must also entail respect for the lives women create and carry.
What I’m trying to say, over and over, is this: “My leftist friend. You say you value tolerance and compassion. Please see why it is tolerant and compassionate to consider these facts you have not considered. Please consider how some of your arguments and your philosophies can hurt innocent and relatively powerless victims, sometimes the very people you claim to be tolerant of and to feel compassion for, for example, poor people, black people, Muslim women, in fact all women, and so-called ‘trans kids.'”
I post these essays on social media. And then I wait, and I hope. I hope that the leftists I know might read them, and, if not actually change their minds, they might actually publicly acknowledge that there is a point of view, based in facts, not in ignorance or prejudice, sadism or superstition, that is not their own point of view, but that is equally worthy as their own. I want them to consider that perhaps persons with whom they disagree are worthy of simple human respect, and not knee-jerk contempt, and misrepresentation in hateful straw-man stereotypes. This has not happened.
The other day, my Facebook friend Merlin insisted that only racism, hypocrisy, and stupidity would cause anyone not to embrace The Little Mermaid 2023. I had just posted an essay addressing the multiple reasons why Mermaid 23 has been irritating to many people; none of those reasons had anything to do with white supremacy, stupidity or hypocrisy. I asked Merlin if he had read the essay. He said no, it did not interest him. Is it fair, is it really “liberal,” to denounce those you disagree with as stupid, hypocritical racists and then to refuse even to listen to what those you disagree with have to say?
My leftist friends’ posts conjure into a being an imaginary enemy. They are convinced that they know this enemy. Leftists’ posts describing their imaginary enemy remind me of the Scandinavian folklore I studied in grad school. Every Norwegian or Swede knew exactly what trolls looked like, how they behaved, and what magical powers they possessed. A good percentage of contemporary Scandinavians still believe in elves and trolls. If you can form a tight enough group that tells enough authoritative accounts of a shared, imaginary enemy, eventually group members believe in that imaginary enemy even more than they credit objective facts.
The enemy leftists imagine is white. The enemy is Christian. The enemy is stupid. The enemy is a hypocrite. The enemy lives in godforsaken places. Think Alabama, Ohio, Nebraska. I remember Bill Maher once saying that Pennsylvania, between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, “is Alabama.” If you don’t live in a Democratic city in a coastal state you live in East Bumf–k.
We, the enemy, are white supremacists. We are transphobic, Islamophobic … gosh, have I covered all the words they’ve invented to insult us? We are just plain “phobic.” We are heartless and mean. We are “fearful of difference.” We are “intolerant.” We lack “compassion.” Yeah, that’s us in a nutshell. In contrast, of course, the leftists using these terms in a ritual so predictable they could recite the litany in their sleep, are intelligent, enlightened, tolerant, and, above all, compassionate.
An interesting factoid about my tolerant, compassionate, leftist social media contacts. I’ve been having this same conversation with leftists on social media for the past twenty years. They always tell me how “fearful” I am and how “tolerant of difference” they are. I have never seen a black friend in any of their online photos. Never. Not a single one. In twenty years.
I Google the name of the town in which my leftist interlocutor lives. I investigate the demographics of the town on Wikipedia. One such person, Mark Shea, a Catholic author, lives in a town with a two percent black population. His entire state is about three percent black. Bashing whites and championing blacks is a big part of Mark’s social media output. I’m all for championing blacks. I don’t like Mark’s bashing whites. Wouldn’t having actual contact with actual black people increase Mark’s ability to champion blacks? Yes, yes it would.
The white leftist savior of black people, the white leftist teacher who will educate the white masses living their ignorant lives, typically chooses to live in neighborhoods, counties, and sometimes entire states with negligible black populations. Their personal photos often reveal extensive properties with gardens, trees, and even plots of woods. Their yards are not ground zero for the next Black Lives Matter riot, arson, or looting spree. These white leftist saviors live cushioned from the consequences of their philosophies. Me? I own no property. I open my door and I am immediately confronted with the results of decisions they made. What’s that like? Here’s a hint: as I turn the doorknob, I pray that God will protect me.
Unlike my leftist contacts, I have never lived in an all-white neighborhood. When I was a child, our next-door neighbors were black. They were lovely people and I played happily with the little daughter. My first job after graduating college was teaching in one of the poorest countries in Africa. I lived, alone, in a house without electricity, running water, and no phone. I say I lived alone, but of course there were giant cockroaches, rats, and hundreds of bats in the attic; their urine trickled down the walls and their droppings scattered on the floor. What protected me from the turbulence in a country without a government? What separated me from the bush rampant with predators, including crocodiles, hippos, and venomous puff adders? That protection was a bicycle lock holding my latticed French doors together. I lived among and relied on Africans for food, transport, conversation. I once hitched a ride, over night, through rain forest, with a caravan of Sudanese smugglers who spoke no English; I did not speak Arabic. For the past twenty years, I have lived in a majority-minority American city. Oh, but I’m fearful and intolerant. And the folks with the big, big yards, the blooming gardens, the expansive lawns, the pools, the backyard deer, these are the people who invite in the world. Okay!
Recently leftists have been circulating on social media a meme captioned “I’m with the banned.” The meme claims that Americans are banning books. I immediately noted two facts about this meme. First, it lies. Americans are not banning books. A given library decides not to purchase a book; a given school decides not to use a book in its curriculum. There are billions of books in existence. No one can use them all. To select some and not others is not to ban a book. Every book the meme references is, of course, available for purchase, and buying, reading, talking about and sharing these books will not result in legal penalty. It is illegal for adults to share porn with children, but that’s another matter.
Why then are the folks sharing this meme disseminating a charge that they know to be false? Because it helps them to buttress their shared, imaginary enemy, and, in contrast, their own elevated identity. Merlin blamed the imaginary banning of books on “Catholics” and “Protestants.” SV, another Facebook friend, blamed “morons” who read “their Bible.” Merlin and SV’s posts were followed by communal support. Yes, yes, others insisted. It’s those bad, bad white, Christian Americans once again, doing bad, bad things. It’s the trolls!
Notice that leftists do not implicate Muslims or Jews. In fact, just a short eight months ago, Muslim parents in Dearborn, Michigan, made international headlines when they vehemently protested the inclusion of LGBT material in their children’s schoolbooks. Jews have also been vocal in expressing concerns about what is taught in schools; for example, see the battle over California’s ethnic studies curriculum. Muslim parents care about what their children are taught. This is a fact. Jewish parents care about what their children are taught. This is a fact. My leftist friends ignore these facts, and communally erect and then burn their chosen straw man: the “moron” Christian.
My Facebook friend J is an important poet. I’ve posted positive reviews of his books. J does not reciprocate my positive regard. Recently J has been posting reprimands on my page.
J reprimanded me for pointing out that there are no banned books in America. J reprimanded me for mentioning that it is the Left that exerts pressure to suppress books, ideas, and freedom of conscience. To support this assertion, I did not resort to insult words for people unlike myself. I didn’t call anyone a “moron” or denigrate anyone’s religion. Rather, I adduced facts. I mentioned the many teachers who have lost jobs because they used accurate pronouns. In New York City, one can be fined $250,000 for using accurate pronouns. In Canada, Robert Hoagland was arrested and jailed for referring to his daughter as a “girl” and using the pronoun “she.”
I mentioned the leftist suppression of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Chase Strangio, a woman who identifies as a man, and an ACLU Deputy Director, tweeted, “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” UC Berkeley Professor Grace Lavery tweeted “I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre.” Target stopped selling Irreversible Damage. Amazon forbade advertisements for Irreversible Damage.
In response to these objective facts and others, J posted, “You make all leftists sound evil.” In fact, I do not. I regularly both praise and criticize people on both the left and the right. Other than falsely accusing me, J had no response to the facts themselves.
J also disagreed with my take on the murder of Lawrence Herr, and the subsequent lack of media coverage of that murder. Herr was a 66-year-old handyman. He was shot in the back. His alleged killers were two black men who “wanted to kill a white person.” Subsequently, according to Matt Walsh, no major media outlet touched the story. I mentioned on social media that it is far more likely for a white person to be a victim of a violent crime committed by a black person than vice versa. I mentioned that media drills into us names like Michael Brown, who never said “Hands up; don’t shoot,” and who was a strong-arm criminal, not a “gentle giant.” But the media memory holes the names of Lawrence Herr, Ee Lee, Justine Ruszczyk, Christine Englehardt, Christina Spicuzza, and too many others.
And then there are the forgotten black victims of violent crime, including, horribly, Tyre Nichols, who was beaten to death on camera. It was Nichols’ misfortune to have been beaten to death by black cops, so his story received a fraction of the attention it would have received had his killers been white.
Here’s the larger point – it is compassionate to care about these victims. It is not compassionate to support the media shoving their names, inconvenient to a leftist master narrative, down the memory hole. It is compassionate to black people to help black people utterly to reject a culture that breeds violent criminality and steadily increases the number of innocent crime victims. It is compassionate to black people to militate for a culture that will encourage more young black men to become proud, content, successful, contributing members of society, rather than imprisoned criminals. America’s refusal to confront a violent criminal subculture, that results in, for example, young black men in some age groups to be twenty-two times more likely to be murdered than young white men, is not compassionate. It is a failure that destroys lives every day and will continue to do so until we reject the leftist narrative that insists that whites cannot state difficult truths about this black subculture.
J rejected this argument, and insisted that the real enemy of young black men are white police officers.
J reprimanded me for mentioning that Jordan Neely plead guilty after attempting to kidnap a seven-year-old girl, that he punched a random elderly woman in the face, breaking her bones, that he had a lengthy criminal record, and that he had been offered a kid-glove “alternative to incarceration” program, a program that he never completed. J accused me of “lynching Neely.” Of course I never “lynched” Neely. I was responding to leftist calls for violence and hate against Good Samaritan Daniel Penny, and misrepresentations of Neely as a “beloved street performer” whom Daniel Penny killed for no other reason than he was a white man predisposed to killing a black man.
Daniel Penny, J wrote, “killed a man. He should be punished.” I note that when a white Marine is accused of killing a black criminal, the Left abandons its stance on restorative justice and suddenly supports punishment, a position it rejects when the accused is black.
J objected to my posts about trans extremism. In fact he questioned whether or not trans extremism exists. I pointed J to this and this. He did not respond. J objected to my using the word “Woke.” If I remember correctly, he asked me for a definition of the word. I offered a definition. Again, J did not respond.
J reprimanded me for posting about Antifa. I do not post about Antifa. This complaint is telling. As someone who critiques the Left, I am the enemy. The enemy is all alike. The enemy is obsessed with Antifa. Even though I don’t post about Antifa, J was convinced that I do.
Given that J has repeatedly reprimanded me recently, I did wonder if I was at least part of the inspiration of a poem J posted on June 5. J’s poem described “some friends on Facebook” who “deny the reality I know,” but who believe that “that God is as real as Coca-Cola.” In the poem, J describes himself as being “open to people who are different.” In contrast, the God believers who deny reality regard “openness to people who are different” as “a lie.” J describes himself as a dreamer, and those who disagree with him as “rude” people who want to flush his dreams “into the sewers.”
Comments below J’s poem were a communal “Amen” choir from other enlightened beings, so much better than I, so much more tolerant and loving and so highly intelligent that they would only mock the idea of God, a God who “filters up from swamps,” who is “rotting your teeth.”
One reader responded, “the masses are asses,” and “Don’t pay attention to these people, they aren’t worth your time.” One said, “The older I get the more I get angry at traditional religion people [sic]. It took me a lifetime of study to shed the pernicious claws, yet I expect everyone to have arrived at the same place as I.”
Well, golly. Maybe after a “lifetime of study” I can “arrive at the same” exalted place as someone who can’t differentiate between “religion” and “religious.”
I realized that in attempting to communicate with leftists, at least with Merlin, J, and SV, I’ve been wasting my time. These people hate me – even though I am, in their minds, nothing but a figment of their imaginations. They create their boogeyman version of us, and they erect that fantasy as a straw man, and they, as a group, clap each other on the back for how enlightened and superior they are, and then they burn the straw man they have erected. And that is the only reason we exist for them. I thought about that word “compassion.” The Left’s emphasis on “compassion” always attracted me.
As of ten years ago, two of my five siblings had already died young. Well, I had nine siblings, if you include the three pregnancies my immigrant mother lost to malnutrition. She and my father were poor, living in a cold water flat in Newark, and she was subsisting on “black coffee and cigarettes,” not exactly conducive to maternal good health. Ten years ago, I got word that my sister had a glioblastoma, a brain tumor known as “the terminator.” She had months to live. I don’t have words to conveys what it was like to watch my brilliant, older sister, the pretty one, the smart one, the one in charge of the world, succumb to a brain tumor.
On Facebook, I posted about loving my sister as much as I’ve ever loved anyone. I posted about changing her diaper. I posted about rubbing the soles of her feet as she breathed her last breath. I posted about our final visit to the Corrado’s produce store. We had selected pomegranates, an expensive treat I indulge in once a year, in autumn, if that, depending on harvest and prices. I posted about approaching the cashier, pomegranates in hand, and my sister coming up behind me, and grabbing the fruit out of my hands, and pushing ahead of me, and paying for my treat. She always did that. She always muscled her way between me and cashiers. At that moment, I realized that my sister would never buy me pomegranates again. Later, when I was home alone, I cried more after that realization than when I first Googled the word “glioblastoma” and the internet crushed any hope before I could even click on a link. I posted about all of that on Facebook. Just three years later, my eldest brother also died of cancer. I had regular nightmares for months. And I posted on Facebook.
I post about moments of joy, as well. When I was invited to speak about my book Bieganski at Georgetown University, and also in Poland. When I saw my first snowy owl. When I visited the spectacular Presby Memorial Iris Gardens, and shared my clunky amateur iris photos taken with a not-great phone camera. Facebook friends responded. They cried with me. They laughed with me. They ooo-ed and aaa-ed with me. And they did more.
Karen – and her name really is Karen and she really is a white woman – sent me one of the most poignant gifts I have ever received. She sent me a box of pomegranates. Katie, a big-time Trump supporter, sent me one of the most sentimental gifts I have ever received. It was a package bursting with little odds and ends she went out and purchased that spoke, to her, of my relationship with my sister. My sister and I both loved music; Katie filled the package with metallic confetti in the shape of musical notes. We loved to laugh in bed; she sent me photos of young girls laughing in bed.
Karen and Katie are both conservatives. We do not agree on everything. We had knock-down, drag-out disagreements. But in the gifts they sent, they acknowledged that they saw me as a full human being. I wasn’t someone they imagined to fit a self-flattering narrative. I was three dimensional. I was more than my political positions. Karen and Katie extended compassion to me. “Compassion” wasn’t just a word on a screen.
The other day, a leftist I have been Facebook friends with for over a decade posted on my page for the very first time. She protested my posts about trans extremism. This person had said nothing to me when I was sloppily spilling my guts in public over the deaths of my siblings. This person said nothing to me when I was bathed in floral beauty. For ten years, this person said nothing to me. This person spoke to me only to object to my resistance to trans extremism.
I recently griped on social media about my twenty-three-year-old car, bought ten years ago after my sister got her diagnosis. I knew, after a lifetime of car-less-ness, that I would need a car to take care of her. Once I, terrified and ignorant, hit the used car lot, my Facebook friend Scott, who used to be a car salesman, counseled me via telephone. Scott told me which used car to buy, and how much to pay. Without Scott, I would have paid twelve percent more than I did. Scott is far to the right of me. Conservative Scott’s behavior was compassion in action, rather than a word on a screen.
I don’t know anything about cars and I discovered the other day that I’ve been driving around without brakes, necessitating expensive repairs. I had an emergency medical appointment and the state ride service never showed up. In fact this taxpayer-funded ride service is notoriously lousy. Without my knowing it, four Facebook friends, all political conservatives, took up a collection and covered the brake repair. I don’t feel comfortable accepting charity but they conspired secretly, leaving with me a fait accompli, in the form of a fistful of cash that I couldn’t easily reject. And every one of these four friends is someone I’ve disagreed with passionately about important matters, for example for whom to vote in a presidential election. I debate fiercely and tenaciously and we really went to the mats. When I was desperate, they exercised compassion. Not a word on a screen. An action.
I’m not claiming that there is no compassion or tolerance on the left or that all conservatives are good people. No, no, no. I’m just reporting, here, anecdotes of my own experience. Needless to say, only a major study could provide clues as to whether these anecdotes are representational of wider trends. A 2021 study reports, “Our meta-analysis results suggest that political conservatives are significantly more charitable than liberals at an overall level.” Philanthropy Roundtable reports, “People with a religious affiliation give away several times as much every year as other Americans.” People who mock God and mock believers with Coca-Cola metaphors don’t give much to charity, we can conclude.
I’m going to continue to address leftists who reprimand me. I’m not going to do that because I think I can change their minds, because I’ve come to realize that they don’t hear me. It is more important to them to cling to their stereotypical straw man than to hear anything I say, because their straw man version of who I am proves their superiority. “The masses are asses,” as J’s friend said in response to his poem that may have been inspired by me. If the masses are asses, J is so much better.
No. I won’t continue to respond because I think I can change their minds. I will respond because responding helps me to challenge and improve my own position. It keeps me honest.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
As an Objectivist and a promoter of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism I’ve received plenty of vile insults, intolerance, lies, distortions, misrepresentations, banning from websites, and hatred from atheist Leftists and Judeo-Christian conservatives.
Ayn Rand and her philosophy are despised by both camps.
And Ms. Goska, stop using the term “pagan”, it’s Christian bigotry. Aristotle was a pagan and it is Aristotle not Jesus Christ who is the philosophical and moral father of America.
“The highest tribute to Ayn Rand, is that her critics must distort everything she stood for in order to attack her. She advocated reason, not force; the individual’s rights to freedom of action, speech, and association; self-responsibility, NOT self-indulgence; and a live-and-let-live society in which each individual is treated as an END, not the MEANS of others’ ends. How many critics would dare honestly state these ideas and say, ” . . .and that’s what I reject”? – Barbara Branden
“Aristotle was a pagan and it is Aristotle not Jesus Christ who is the philosophical and moral father of America.”
Only in your mind. Your need to bend the facts is to support your adoration of Ayn Rand’s philosophical bent.
Christianity is the direct cause of the Middle Ages, the direct cause of Christian stagnation and serfdom. It is because the Christians of the Middle Ages took Christianity in its comprehensive totality seriously and literally that the West abandoned the pursuit of happiness on Earth. Today’s modern Christians are Cafeteria Christians, unseriously picking and choosing what aspects of Christianity they will believe in or practice and how they will, unseriously, interpret Holy Scripture.
“What — or who — ended the Middle Ages? My answer is: Thomas Aquinas, who introduced Aristotle, and thereby reason, into medieval culture. In the thirteenth century, for the first time in a millennium, Aquinas reasserted in the West the basic pagan approach. Reason, he said in opposition to Augustine, does not rest on faith; it is a self-contained, natural faculty, which works on sense experience. Its essential task is not to clarify revelation, but rather, as Aristotle had said, to gain knowledge of this world. Men, Aquinas declared forthrightly, must use and obey reason; whatever one can prove by reason and logic, he said, is true. Aquinas himself thought he could prove the existence of God, and he thought that faith is valuable as a supplement to reason. But this did not alter the nature of his revolution. His was the charter of liberty, the moral and philosophical sanction, which the West had desperately needed. His message to mankind, after the long ordeal of faith, was in effect: “It’s all right. You don’t have to stifle your mind anymore. You can think.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America
Historical illiteracy flashes from your shop like a honky-tonk neon “Home Cooking” sign.
Have you read the book I recommended, “Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited” by Emmett Scott? Have you looked at Henri Pirenne’s “Mohammed and Charlemagne”? No? Then shut up about the “Christian Middle Ages”, which exist only in your imagination. You know nothing of history. You know nothing at all. Use the internet to educate yourself rather than to spread the ideas of one author that can be grasped in a few hours’ reading.
“I do not think, however, that I have even yet brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement. I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this instinctive conviction, vividly poised before the imagination, which is the motive power of research:—that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted on the European mind?
When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilisations when left to themselves, there seems but one source for its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality. Remember that I am not talking of the explicit beliefs of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the European mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries. By this I mean the instinctive tone of thought and not a mere creed of words.
In Asia, the conceptions of God were of a being who was either too arbitrary or too impersonal for such ideas to have much effect on instinctive habits of mind. Any definite occurrence might be due to the fiat of an irrational despot, or might issue from some impersonal, inscrutable origin of things. There was not the same confidence as in the intelligible rationality of a personal being. I am not arguing that the European trust in the scrutability of nature was logically justified even by its own theology. My only point is to understand how it arose. My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.”
-Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), in his Science and the Modern World (1926, pp 15–16)
It is practically impossible to snuff out every single iota and instance of some degree, even if ever so primitive, of rudimentary reasoning. Even the Aztecs and the Incas had to use some rudimentary reasoning to build their temples.
The explicit discovery of philosophy, reason, and the explicit rules of logic and science are a whole other, revolutionary and paradigm shift, matter. In the whole history of mankind, the Ancient Greeks are the only people to have accomplished this revolutionary achievement. They took the unconscious and made it conscious, they made it explicit.
“It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher.”
The above sentence gives it all away. The rationality does not come from religion but from the Greek Philosopher Aristotle. The mixture of Christianity and Greek reason was always there from the very beginning of the Christian invasion of the West. But for the medieval Christian reason was the mere handmaiden of faith, he used reason and logic to try and confirm or prove the irrational claims of Christianity, but if the conclusions of reason conflicted with faith, reason was rejected, silenced, and proscribed,
It was only when Aquinas separated faith from reason, separated philosophy and theology, gave philosophy its domain and theology its separate domain, that the Renaissance (the rebirth of reason as its own legitimate domain) that serious Christianity, medieval Christianity, began to lose its stranglehold on the Western mind.
Non-sacrificial charity and rational compassion are wonderful things Ms. Goska but they are MINOR virtues, not primary and major virtues.
Man’s greatest virtues are reason and productiveness. Without reason and productiveness there can be no charity or compassion. Before you can feed a hungry person you must have first produced enough bread to feed yourself and then an extra loaf to feed the hungry person. But more than that, much, much, more, man must first discover what wheat is, how to grow it, harvest it, bake it into bread, etc. A very long process of reasoning, discovery, innovation, work, and production must happen before a man can even think of or practice charity and compassion.
We are all kept alive by the work of man’s reasoning mind, the individual minds that still retain the autonomy necessary to think and to judge and to produce. In the most fundamental and the most crucial sense we are all kept alive not by the Mother Teresas of the world but by the Thomas Edisons of the world.
“Thank God We’re Not All Mother Teresa” – Michael J. Hurd
In such a dispassionate model you end up in a Nazi Germany or Soviet authoritarian society.
Religious conservatives do sometimes claim that Nazism, communism, and the French Terror are the results of reason but that claim requires either confusion and ignorance of what reason is or outright obfuscation, distortion, and dishonesty.
Anthony Fauci also claims that he represents science and therefore reason and logic, but any honest person will realize that he’s just a power lusting charlatan talking evil unreason.
“Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the secularism or the scientific spirit of the modern world. This evades the fact that the Germans at the time, especially in Prussia, were one of the most religious peoples in Western Europe; that the Weimar Republic was a hotbed of mystic cults, of which Nazism was one; and that Germany’s largest and most devout religious group, the Lutherans, counted themselves among Hitler’s staunchest followers….
There was also Martin Luther, regarded by the Nazis as a major hero, who was the greatest single power in the development of German religion and, through this means, an influence on the philosophies of both Kant and Hegel. Luther is anti-reason (“Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason”), intensely pro-German, and crudely anti-semitic (“Fie on you wherever you be, you damned Jews, who dare to clasp this earnest, glorious, consoling Word of God to your maggoty, mortal, miserly belly, and are not ashamed to display your greed so openly”). He formally enlists God on the side of the state. Unconditional obedience to the government’s edicts, he holds, is a Christian virtue. “In like manner we must endure the authority of the prince. If he misuse or abuse his authority, we are not to entertain a grudge, seek revenge or punishment. Obedience is to be rendered for God’s sake, for the ruler is God’s representative. However they may tax or exact, we must obey and endure patiently.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom In America”
But, seriously, THX, was Martin Luther a Christian? Was he advocating Christian teaching?
For example, you quote his words about Jews. What does Christianity teach about how we should speak to and of others?
For example, where “the world” will tell us that: “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurts me”, God’s word tells us that one wrong word can do as much harm as the tiny spark that sets a forest fire.
And 1 Peter 3:15 tells us this: “But sanctify the Christ as Lord in your hearts, always ready to make a defense before everyone who demands of you a reason for the hope you have, but doing so with a mild temper+and deep respect.”
Always with a mild temper and deep respect. Is that what Martin Luther had been taught? Is that what he was teaching others?
Dear Sue, we are all living now in America and the West AFTER the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment which means that we live in a culture where reason is (at least for now) in the ascendancy, where reason is dominant over faith. Where Judaism and Christianity are firmly leashed and diluted by reason. Unlike the Muslim world and the Muslim culture which never went through the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment.
You are a modern post-Renaissance, post-Age of Enlightenment, Christian, you’re not a medieval Christian. Which means (even if you’re not consciously aware of it) that you are highly secularized, very much open to the influence and demands of reason where your Holy Scripture conflicts with reason. You being a modern Christian will almost always choose the conclusions of reason when they conflict with faith, you will find some way to compromise or reconcile your mind with any conflict between reason and faith. Even if it doesn’t really make sense.
This would not be the case with a medieval Christian, as it is not the case with a Jihadist Muslim today. To a medieval Christian as to a Jihadist, reason is only the mere handmaiden of faith, reason is the lowly servant of faith. If the conclusions of reason contradict his faith the medieval Christian, like today’s Jihadist, would reject reason and blindly obey faith.
Hello THX – and thanks for your response below – we are indeed shaped by “the world” sadly, but pIease would you consider two things. If the Bible is what it claims, the inspired words of our Creator, the very Source of wisdom and reason, then it stands to reason, and always has done.
And secondly, Jesus himself warned that few would become his followers. Famously, he said: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” – Matthew 7:13,14
So would there ever be such a thing as “a Christian nation”?
But Jesus also said that there would be a big ingathering of those who are to “inherit the earth” just before God brings the present wicked system of things to its end. If you are interested, there is a quote from sir Isaac Newton – a man who clearly knew his Bible – in this blogpost:
https://sueknight2000.blogspot.com/2021/02/o-snowdrop.html
Unfortunately for you, Fauci didn’t say he was science. He said he was seen as the personification of science by bats**t crazy conspiracy theorists. He was right about that, as he was right about most things.
Fauci said, “I am the science,” on March 24, 2020 on television.
The time for trying to reason with leftists is over. It is time to start s h ooting.
“ The enemy leftists imagine is white. The enemy is Christian. The enemy is stupid.”
Not only leftist elites, there’s also some objective academics who consider the same group as enemies.
The objective, philosophical, fact is Christianity is based on faith, on unreason, based on the unreal, the unprovable, the indemonstrable.
How can you prove that the supernatural mythology and miracles of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are based on reality? How do you prove Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with a talking snake or 72 virgins in paradise? You can’t. By definition the mythology and miracles of religion violate the laws of reality. They are beyond reality and therefore beyond reason.
Freedom and liberty are based on reason and reality. Why are we free? Because of our REAL human natures. By the grace of the Law of Identity, the law of reality, the reality that man has free will and a reasoning mind, mankind is free. That’s provable and demonstrable, the supernatural claims of religion are not.
“Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three philosophical fundamentals in the Western mind, in metaphysics the worship of the supernatural, in epistemology the reliance on faith, and in ethics the reverence for self-sacrifice.” – Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff
These three fundamentals lead to the politics of totalitarianism. Modern totalitarianism comes from religion, it is a fish out of religious waters, that’s why you’re seeing such a strong affinity and partnership between communism and Islam and the Roman Catholic Church (which is the most philosophical and therefore intellectually serious branch of Christianity).
Christianity prepared the ground for communism but without the supernatural metaphysics communism cannot last more than 75 years or a century. In order to last indefinitely totalitarianism requires the metaphysics of a supernatural reward of a Heaven or Paradise after we die. It’s the only way that anyone would endure the misery, poverty, and mass death that totalitarianism produces.
“Modern totalitarianism comes from religion, it is a fish out of religious waters, that’s why you’re seeing such a strong affinity and partnership between communism and Islam and the Roman Catholic Church (which is the most philosophical and therefore intellectually serious branch of Christianity).”
This is an odd statement. Absolutely wrong. Where do you get the idea that religion lead to totalitarianism? Please enlighten the world to Ayn’s wonderous vision.
Where do you get the idea that Christianity leads to freedom, liberty, individualism, and capitalism? That it leads to the personal pursuit of happiness on Earth? It does not. Not when it is taken seriously and literally in its comprehensive totality.
“The early Christians did contribute some good ideas to the world, ideas that proved important to the cause of future freedom. I must, so to speak, give the angels their due. In particular, the idea that man has a value as an individual — that the individual soul is precious — is essentially a Christian legacy to the West; its first appearance was in the form of the idea that every man, despite Original Sin, is made in the image of God (as against the pre-Christian notion that a certain group or nation has a monopoly on human value, while the rest of mankind are properly slaves or mere barbarians). But notice a crucial point: this Christian idea, by itself, was historically impotent. It did nothing to unshackle the serfs or stay the Inquisition or turn the Puritan elders into Thomas Jeffersons. Only when the religious approach lost its power — only when the idea of individual value was able to break free from its Christian context and become integrated into a rational, secular philosophy — only then did this kind of idea bear practical fruit.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America”
Fact: I am unsure if there is a God
Fact: you and Rand failed miserably to convince me that there’s no God.
The supernatural is not the focus of Objectivism. I’m not here to convince anyone to become an atheist, I’m here to make people think about what freedom, liberty, and capitalism really depend on, it is not the supernatural. How can one defend capitalism on a reason, logic, and demonstrable facts of reality basis?
90% of philosophers and professors at the universities are atheist and socialist, how can these atheists be persuaded that capitalism is the ideal, noble, moral, and practical system?
How can the socialist Jews and socialist Christians on the Left, and there are many of them, be rationally persuaded too, that capitalism is the ideal and moral system?
If what truly matters to a religious conservative on the Right is how to fight for freedom, liberty, and capitalism then you can’t do it rationally with altruism and religion. How are you going to defend your liberty and capitalism to an atheist-socialist when they don’t believe in the supernatural? How are you going to defend capitalism to a socialist Jew or a socialist Christian? You need to offer them a reality-based, evidence-based, demonstrable defense. Nothing less will do.
Therein lies the problem, professors and academics who think.
None of them have ever done a day’s work in their lives.
Your comments seem, to me, to constantly criticise anyone who believes in god as irrational idiots, if you want to persuade people to change their minds about socialism et al you need to stop attacking their beliefs.
There are many Jews and Christians that believe in and fight for socialism or the welfare programs of the welfare state because they believe it is the moral thing to do. So obviously a belief in God or a lack of belief in God won’t stop anyone from believing in socialism and fighting against capitalism.
The issue is more than just monotheism versus atheism.
They say the enemy is stupid even though their side includes Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Maxine Waters and Hank Johnson, and they believe in pregnant and menstruating men and women with penises. They also think the world will end inless than 12 years unless everyone buys an electric car with a battery full of cobalt mined by children in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is also priced out of the range of most consumers. And recharged from a coal burning power plant (no nuclear energy!).
And some of those objective academics are as white as a carload of chalk and were raised in a faith. Go figure.
Socialism and collectivism are based of faith, on unreason, on the unreal, on magical thinking. So Judaism and Christianity prepare the mind for magical thinking. There, I figured it out for you.
Far too many who call themselves denizens of the left recite narratives and mantras and have zero regard for facts and traditional moral values Debate is important but like David Horowitz they need one intellectual mugging in their lives to realize that they are conservatives
Slavery, misogyny, divine monarchy, tribalism, racism, are traditional, historical, ancient, “values”. Does how old some cultural practice is make it a value? No, not all, not by a rational standard.
What makes a value, valuable? Why call something a value or a vice in the first place, by what standard, for what purpose? A rational value is something or someone that helps you to achieve happiness and maintain life. Life is the ultimate standard of judging what is a value and what is a vice.
“What are values? Why does man need them?
“Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible….
The “neo-conservatives” are now trying to tell us that America was the product of “faith in revealed truths” and of uncritical respect for the traditions of the past (!).
It is certainly irrational to use the “new” as a standard of value, to believe that an idea or a policy is good merely because it is new. But it is much more preposterously irrational to use the “old” as a standard of value, to claim that an idea or a policy is good merely because it is ancient.” – Ayn Rand
Sadly Mr. Horowitz’s mugging was far from intellectual. He began to question his leftist worldview after the Black Panther Party murdered his friend Betty Van Patter. Let’s hope that most folks on the left don’t require such a jarring and painful experience before they begin to explore conservative ideas.
Sadly Adam sometimes even millions of deaths don’t seem to wake people up. So perhaps Mr. Horowitz has not done too badly. I am thinking of the way the Movers and Shakers (as a group, with some honourable exceptions) seemed to idolise Stalin, even though hadn’t he killed millions in the service of his mad “ism” before WW2 even began?
I am not taking sides here by the way. I believe in the truth of the warning in the Hebrew Scriptures that “it does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step”.
When our first parents made that terrible decision to cut themselves – and us, their unborn children – off from their Creator, their Source of life, they found they could not even keep themselves alive, let alone run this beautiful and complex planet.
We are still living in the tragedy that decision created. How can we put it right? How can any human government put it right?
Yes, that was a key in Horowitz having “second thoughts.” Also, he noticed that he was not killed by the “establishment,” as expected. It was his side that was murderous and vengeful about any independent idea.
You are absolutely correct. You simply cannot have a productive conversation with Leftists. We do not share even most basic concept of reality with them. Post-modernism has heavily infected the Left. Post-modernism rejects the existence of objective truth, facts, logic and reason. Everything to them is simply a narrative. How do you have a productive conversation with someone who rejects fact but thinks that if they have a story to explain anything it is “their truth” and, as such, may not be questioned or disproved? It is an impossibility. Also, besides, or maybe because of this, they cannot discuss anything on its merits but, instead, must resort to ad hominem attack at the earliest opportunity. As wannabe totalitarians they don’t want to discuss or debate issues in any case. They just want you to shut up. Productive conversation with such people is impossible.
You don’t need them, Danusha, you are already honest.
Another thought-provoking essay, this time on conceptualizing the enemy and on the nature of compassion.
“Charity is perfectly fine. But don’t kid yourself that charity lifts millions out of poverty and disease. Only economic progress does that. And progress arises not from a Mother Teresa-like compulsion to sacrifice. It arises from the best within us: Our desire to live for our own sakes, most of all.” – Michael J. Hurd, “Thank God We’re Not All Mother Teresa”
What precisely is the nature of “compassion”? There can be rational compassion and irrational compassion. If you were to help Ted Bundy escape the death penalty some might call that “compassion”.
A few years ago, Chance the Rapper, donated 1 million dollars to the Chicago Public School System, some would call that compassion, a thinking person would call it throwing money down the drain. If Chance had really wanted to practice rational compassion and rational charity, he would have done his homework and figured out that government schools are the problem, not the solution. He would have searched for deserving and worthy poor, black, eager and hungry for a real education, and used those million dollars to fund their tuition at good, private, schools.
Even Oprah knew better than to waste her time, energy, and money with most black kids in American public schools. She had to go to South Africa to find black children eager and hungry for a real education. Compassion and charity to be effective virtues, and not destructive vices, require reason. They require a dispassionate, thinking mind, not blind virtue signaling.
Leftists don’t communicate, they dictate, the manipulate and they hate whoever doesn’t fall for their dictated terms or manipulations.
The leftist ideology is not based on compassion at all. Compassion is just the tool they use to manipulate others.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson any semi-intelligent person should learn in life is a quick study of psychopaths. Psychopaths don’t feel love, guilt or shame. They are control freaks, and they hate nothing more than whoever they can’t control, because their true nature is revealed to their intended victims.
Leftism is an ideology created by psychopaths, and very appealing to other psychopaths. So is islamism, communism, nazism and many other lesser known isms. The founders of those ideologies were so evil, that they still have control over their followers/victims long after they’re dead.
Psychopaths operate by appealing to “normal” human’s emotions. Psychopaths victims are manipulated into “feeling” they are doing the right thing.
Lucky are the intended victims/subjects who wake up and break away from the grasp of evil masters. But most people will never understand how they’ve been mental slaves to evil masters.
” Is it fair, is it really “liberal,” to denounce those you disagree with as stupid, hypocritical racists and then to refuse even to listen to what those you disagree with have to say?”
By today’s standards it is entirely fair to do that. Today’s leftists embrace what is more a religion than a political ideology, wherein disagreement is not just another opinion but heresy, and heresy need not be countered, it only needs to be identified and denounced.
Leftists are insular…I have met a few who have heard of Friedman and Hayek but fewer who have read them, and most don’t even know the names of people like Jaffa and Scruton. They generally work with people like themselves and socialize only with people of similar opinions, so the idea that disagreement can only be for reasons of stupidity, cupidity, or malice is entirely sincere.
Leftist insularity in particularly infuriating when one stops to consider that these are the folks that are constantly prattling about diversity.
Leftist culture (including wokeism and transgenderism ) is fundamentally narcissistic. And narcissists’ empathy and compassion is only performative. As suggested above, empathy and compassion are indeed useful tools for manipulation, which is a skill at which most narcissists excel. Manipulation serves to facilitate control, which the earnestly left believes it should have. They know, after all, that they are the smartest adults in the room…
A study of narcissism will reveal that there is a clear predilection to violence (c.f. the Nashville manifesto). And since narcissists have the best understanding of reality (c.f. The Arc of History, etc. etc.) their world is full of demons and unicorns, and you better believe it. Or else.
Good thought-provoking essay. once again. It confounds me how people process inputs and end up running away in dogmatic fervor thinking “more” is better. There always have been and always be differences of vision and opinion but we’re in another slot of time where the gap between the factions is widening.. The solution is to have discussions like this and better communication. Fewer dogma whistles!
The THX station sucks, I’m changing the channel.
It’s kind of sad, because I think there can, at the very least be fruitful dialogue between Objectivists and religiously minded supporters of capitalism (the recent conversation between Dennis Prager and Craig Biddle would be a case in point).
He does dominate the conversation, doesn’t he?
The discussion would be boring without me. And the more comments and traffic Ms. Goska gets the more likely more of her terrific essays will keep coming.
It’s a win-win situation.
Thank you for another beautifully written essay. Your efforts to see and to understand others are admirable.
And to THX, I’m an objectivist, have been for many years (40, maybe?). You’re flogging it too hard. Occasional posts are convincing; spam of the kind that you engage in turns people off.
Dear Lucy, Objectivism turns religious conservatives and Leftist atheists off no matter how you present the philosophy to them.
I know this from my own personal experience. From the very beginning I reacted to Ayn Rand and her philosophy in a love/hate manner. Love, admiration, horror, fear, and loathing were all mixed together in my reaction.
When I encountered Ayn Rand I was not an active and practicing Christian, But I was at least very comfortably, complacently, unquestioningly, and peacefully a believer in God and an eternal after-life. Objectivism destroyed that complacent happiness and I despised Rand for having demolished the pillars of my existence, even as I admired and was enthralled by her ideas and novels, I happily abandoned her and her philosophy after reading Barbara Branden’s “The Passion of Ayn Rand. I did not go back to her philosophy for decades.
But after Obama’s election I saw that everything Rand predicted in her philosophy and in “Atlas Shrugged” was coming true as predicted. So here I am knowing full well that no matter how one presents Rand’s philosophy, gently or forthrightly, to religious conservatives or atheist socialists, once they hear the words “atheism” and “rational selfishness” both camps will almost always react with horror, fear, and loathing. I certainly did and you know what? Sometimes, deep down, I wish I had never heard of Ayn Rand and I could return to my pre-Objectivism, complacent, unquestioning, simple, mystical happiness.
Like the title of one of Barabara Branden’s favorite writers, Thomas Wolfe says, you can’t go back home again.
It’s kind of interesting that you positively reference Barbara Branden. The Ayn Rand Institute in general and Leonard Peikoff in particular have nothing but contempt for Ms. Branden and her former husband Nathaniel. I would have expected more from a hard line objectivist.
Objectivism taught me to observe and discover the facts of reality and the facts of a given situation, and context, and connect the dots as best I can, and come to my own conclusion about things and people. I don’t follow Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, or anyone.
I follow the facts of reality by using reason and logic.
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
― Buddha Siddhartha Guatama Shakyamuni
My opinion is the affair happened just as the Brandens said it did. They all became stupid, foolish, and irrational, Rand most of all.
But that doesn’t destroy her philosophy, it confirms it. Rationality and morality are volitional at every moment of every person’s life. Free will means a man or woman can always choose to become rational or irrational, good or evil.
So, you are an objectivist who believes that both Rand and the Brandens “became stupid, foolish, and irrational” later in life. That position may not be entirely incorrect, but it must be awfully lonely. I take it you would be persona non grata at any meetups of the Ayn Rand Institute or the Atlas Society.
Dear Adam, the issue of the Rand-Branden affair is irrelevant to the issue of how do we defend freedom, liberty, and capitalism. Rand never wanted to have an official Objectivist movement it’s unfortunate that Nathaniel Branden persuaded her to endorse one.
There was never an official Kantian, Hegelian, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche movement, they published their ideas and they spread and took over the West.
I am not involved in any official way with any Objectivist organization and most of my friends are not Objectivists, they’re not even philosophical or political. I rarely bring up the topic of philosophy or politics unless the situation and the context are appropriate. This is a website dedicated to the discussion of ideas, it’s the appropriate and proper place for it.
Thanks, Professor Goska, for your examination of Leftist intolerance and for reminding us to seek nevertheless to engage those we disagree with.
Also, thank you for rescuing the memory of LAWRENCE HERR, Ee LEE, JUSTINE RUSZCZYK, CHRISTINE ENGELHARDT, AND CHRISTINA SPICUZZA.
I want to respond directly to the author (not the tired back & forth above that’s almost troll stuff-talk about trolls!). First, I mostly avoid leftists now with exception of family especially if there are young people or those in need. And I avoid political topics. It is not ideal but a compromise.
I feel exactly as you do in my past interactions with leftists. Like yours, my interactions were all hurtful toward me. For me, it was 9/11/01 right there close to ground zero and the terrorist event that began to tip me off. The only friend who bothered to find out if I survived was a patriotic friend. I tried writing to others and received no concern and no response on topic. When I asked directly, they said “ America got what it deserved.” And such. So, with friends like these, as they say. – who didn’t care or even have curiosity to find out if I lived or died, – who needs enemies! They’re not capable of friendship. I understand you’re trying to be in some community of writers but they may not want you or care if you’re there, sad to say.
Additionally, I’d like to correct you on your assumption that the left does not target Jews. 1. The squad 2. They hate Israel on every college campus & Jewish students are scared 3. CRT DEI paints Jewish human beings as white race oppressors. I have WWII Yizkor books that prove otherwise and…. not all Jews have white skin. . I know they more frequently malign Christian’s in America because there are more Christian’s. And I believe they hesitate to closely parrot Hitler’s rhetoric for the simple heartless reason that it might backfire on them.. We have all seen too many WWII movies and TV shows to bond with historical Nazis.
IMHO, they’d love to have Jews as their target and really go for it! But they hesitate.
(The question of why some Jews like some Christian’s lean left is beyond my already long comment).
I feel for you and support you in what you wrote. I hope my words provide you with some support. & Thanks for writing!
And I read all of your long comment and I don’t consider you a troll and thanks for your comment.
Just finished Danusha’s article. Looking at all the anti-Christian mental masturbation in the comments.
What I keep pointing out to people is what happened when we took God, Religion and Prayer out of our schools and replaced them with the Communism, Marxism and Sick “Wokism” we have today that has paved the way for Sick Freaks openly preying on children, normalizing pedophilia and child grooming in schools and Sexual Mutilation (See Islamic “FGM”) and Butchering of Boys and Girls in Children’s Hospitals. This is a Nazi concentration camp experimentation on Jewish children level of atrocity.
Number One Target of these child abusers, groomers posing as teachers, Child predators and Drag Queen pedophiles and “minor attracted people”;
CHILDREN! Out of their own mouth:
“We are guided by the following question: what might Drag Queen Story Hour offer educators as a way of bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children?”
“Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood” by Harper Keen and Lil Miss Hot Mess. (A “professor” and a drag queen) About as sick a document as I’ve ever read. Basically a manifesto, guide and How-To on how to prey on children in schools.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03626784.2020.1864621
I was a long-haired hippie in the 70s. Never in my wildest hippy days did I imagine the pure evil, moral degeneracy and corruption I’m seeing today.
“I realized that in attempting to communicate with leftists, at least with Merlin, J, and SV, I’ve been wasting my time. These people hate me…”
No worries, Danusha, I think you could out-argue those people with half your brain tied behind your back.
Yes she could, but why should she waste her time on them? Life is too short!
I dont know any leftists anymore, so I dont have anyone to convince.
The Left is not trying to “communicate” anything to conservatives other than……..submit or be destroyed.
The days of communicating will soon be coming to an end.
A more atavistic and primitive form of persuasion will soon be here(whether anybody likes it or not).
IF you could reason with a Democrat, there would not be any Democrats.
The Israeli secular left is globalist and as woke as its American counterparts. The religious and Sephardic sectors, as in the US are far more conservative and concerned about the woke takeover and advocacy of DEI, , gender fluidity and climate change than the heterodox Jewish movements who falsely equate social justice with Judaism
That was a brilliant essay, Danusha! Thank you for using your gift and for your transparency! By the way, do you already know Naomi Wolf? If not, I believe you two would relish interacting with one another. You are both people with great minds and a talent for articulating reason.
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