Post-Truth Liberals Are the New Maoists … And Just as Dangerous

Democrats, by and large, have become the party of the insane.

Liberals, much as they believed in Big Government and the power of the fed to solve all the problems of the people, used to by and large at least believe in the greatness of America — used to believe, like John F. Kennedy, that this country was worthy of preserving.

Nowadays?

The left has become a tool of destruction.

Here they are in Portland in 2016, burning the American flag:

Here they are a year later, in November of 2017, after Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump:

Here they are in 2017 again, at Berkeley, burning and smashing and screaming:

Today’s liberals destroy everything they touch — including truth.

From Breitbart:

Liberals are the new Maoists.

If in doubt, do listen to my podcast this week with Toby Young. In it Young recounts the truly shocking story of how a vengeful mob of impeccably liberal “progressive” types sought completely to destroy his life and career.

Young’s crime? To have made the occasional joke, mildly edgy observation, or slightly tasteless remark in the course of his long career as a writer, commentator, and user of social media.

The Social Justice Warrior twitchfork mob went through every word he ever wrote since his 80s undergraduate days, line by line, in old magazine articles, on Twitter, in his blogs, in an exercise known as “offence archeology.”

Did they find anything sufficiently offensive to damn him? Of course they did! In a world where everyone is a Witchfinder General, nobody is ever innocent.

We needn’t rehearse the details here. Young gives the background in this essay for Quillette.

I’m more interested in the bigger picture: how it came to be that what used to be known as “style journalism”, “laddish banter” and “being a completely normal middle-aged male” suddenly became a crime punishable by loss of livelihood, ritual humiliation, mass censure; and also, how we’re going to nip this nonsense in the bud before the whole lot of us get sent to the SJW gulag.

Luckily, the writer/philosopher John Gray has come up with at least half an answer in an excellent essay for Unherd called “The Rise of Post-Truth Liberalism” Liberals, he argues, have become the thing that in the 60s they used to accuse right-wing people of being: paranoid, authoritarian, conspiracy-theorising thugs.

He noticed it visiting New York in the aftermath of Trump’s election:

I found myself immersed in a mass psychosis. The city’s intelligentsia was possessed by visions of conspiracy. No one showed any interest in the reasons Trump supporters may have had for voting as they did. Quite a few cited the low intelligence, poor education and retrograde values of the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for him. What was most striking was how many of those with whom I talked flatly rejected the result. The election, they were convinced, had been engineered by a hostile power. It was this malignant influence, not any default of American society, that had upended the political order.

Liberals couldn’t understand then – and they still can’t understand now – that Donald Trump is almost entirely a problem of their own making. They are the reason he won. Not the Russians…

For those who embrace it, a paranoid style of liberalism has some advantages. Relieved from any responsibility for the debacles they have presided over, the liberal elites that have been in power in many western countries for much of the past 30 years can enjoy the sensation of being victims of forces beyond their control. Conspiracy theory implies there is nothing fundamentally wrong with liberal societies, and places the causes of their disorder outside them. No one can reasonably doubt that the Russian state has been intervening in western politics. Yet only minds unhinged from reality can imagine that the decline of liberalism is being masterminded by Vladimir Putin. The principal causes of disorder in liberal societies are in those societies themselves.

But while we can laugh at the lunacy of contemporary liberalism, its derangement has very serious consequences for all of us. Just like Stalin, just like the Stasi, just like Mao, modern liberalism has lost sight of its tolerant past and now increasingly seeks to control the culture by policing and dictating all the things we’re allowed and not allowed to say.

Gray cites an essay by a (liberal) New York Times writer Michiko Kakutani called The Death of Truth, in which she describes the problem without realising that her lot are the problem:

The corruption of language is discussed as if it were a practice unknown among liberals. She tells the reader that soon after taking power in China, Mao launched “a plan of linguistic engineering”, creating “a new political vocabulary in which some words were suppressed; others were injected with new meanings … People were to understand that there were ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ ways of speaking.”

She omits to note that a similar type of linguistic engineering is underway in America (and western countries) in which deviations from “correct” ways of speaking are severely punished. Nothing is more authentically of our time than the spectacle of people being banished from public discourse for the crime of using forbidden words, and pleading for rehabilitation in humiliating Mao-style internet struggle sessions with their liberal accusers.

This is the context in which we need to understand the attack on Toby Young. It wasn’t about anything he actually said or did but simply about what he represented. In Maoist terms he was, simply, a capitalist running dog lackey – and therefore had to be destroyed.

Some conservatives (I use the term loosely to embrace all the different factions – libertarians, classical liberals, free speechers, etc – the liberal left hates) still don’t get this. I noticed it when I wrote about my (relatively minor) persecution at the hands of a few SJW cry bullies when I went to speak at Cambridge University Conservative Association. One or two readers, who I don’t think were necessarily leftists, tried telling me that well of course it’s what I should have expected when I made one or two mildly tasteless references. In their view I had deserved it.

But if we take that squishy, turn-the-other-cheek position then we’re lost. Which is why in the podcast, you’ll hear me rebuking Young for being a “cuck”. The fact that he has recovered from his monstering with such good humour and resilience is admirable. But his conclusions – that we should show a tolerance and forbearance to the enemy that they would never show to us – are more likely to entrench the problem than solve it.

Take Sarah Jeong, whose racist tweets Young thinks shouldn’t have prevented her from being allowed to join New York Times editorial board because, hey, we all have one or two stupid moments on Twitter.

I agree with the last bit. But these weren’t just odd moments were they? Jeong’s Tweets were consistent with an obvious and unashamed loathing for what she calls “dumbass fucking white people” – borne, no doubt, of her adherence to the current liberal orthodoxy that “white people” really are a form of Untermenschen who deserve to be reviled and punished for their unearned “privilege.”

Jeong said this stuff because she meant it. She said it because it’s what liberals have given themselves permission to think and to feel good and morally superior about thinking. (That’s how deluded they are).

That’s why it’s a disgrace she was invited onto the Times editorial board: not because people should be judged, as Young was, on the basis of one or two remarks, jokes and cruderies – cherry-picked from a lifetime’s career and taken out of context; but because people should definitely be judged on their overall behaviour and intent.

This used to be why you used to go to study liberal arts subjects at university: to train you in the art of critical thinking. Critical thinking, at bottom, is the ability to discern enduring truth and value in a world of dishonesty, fakery, and lies. So when, as I did, you study a work of literature, you’re assessing things like style, tone, context, and biography to assess what an author is trying to achieve and how successfully he has achieved it. When, say, Jonathan Swift writes his A Modest Proposal… is he really proposing that Ireland’s poor make ends meet by selling their children as food for rich people? Or is, there, perhaps some satirical element involved?

Or say the author you were studying was Toby Young, you’d need to be an utter moron – or, maybe, a current Cambridge English literature undergraduate – to conclude that he was anything other than a fundamentally decent person: a bit puerile and laddish and irresponsible at times maybe, but well-intentioned and someone who, furthermore, has really sought to make a difference with his charitable work in the educational sector.

This would still be obvious even if he hadn’t been responsible for setting up various free schools which have given many disadvantaged children a much better education than they’d otherwise have had. It’s just clear from the general tenor of his journalism and commentary that Young isn’t a racist or a eugenicist or poor-hater or any of the other confected crimes he has been accused of. And you really don’t need to have studied at Oxford and Cambridge, as Young has, to see this. It’s just a basic, common sense reading of his work.

Critical thinking really is just applied common sense. But they don’t teach applied common sense at many universities any more, least of all at places like Oxford and Cambridge. If anything, they teach the exact opposite, post-modernism being essentially an inversion of common sense.

Which is why we have such a problem. Post-truth liberals do not operate according to the rulebook of logic and fairness and facts by which the rest of us play. They do not want to play nicely with us or be our friends or engage with our arguments because, as far as they are concerned, we are just verminous prisoners of our wrongthink. That’s why there is no point in adjusting our principles – let alone our language – even slightly in order to soothe them and accommodate them. However careful we are, they will always find some reason to hate us, however obscure or minor or long-buried in our past, because their purpose is to be offended – never to pause and ask themselves whether they are justified in being offended.

With an enemy as malign and vindictive and relentless as the liberal Maoists there can be no middle ground where we can all find happy accommodation. They hate us. This is war. They are the bad guys. So let us never apologise, never weaken, and never take prisoners. It’s not like they ever would with us, eh, Toby?

The Truth Must be Told

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AlgorithmicAnalyst

5 years ago

They are really leftists, not liberals, but that is just an academic semantic point these days, given the way usage of the term “liberal” has changed.

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Achmed Mohandjob

5 years ago

Reply to  AlgorithmicAnalyst

People have allowed the left to take over words and, to a certain degree, the language. Anything with which they disagree is “Far Right” or “White Supremacism”. They call themselves “progressives”, when in reality they are “Regressive”.
Call ’em what they are, Far Left Regressives …. or, Far Left Wingnut Regressives.

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Rob Porter

5 years ago

Reply to  Achmed Mohandjob

In fact they are infantile, stupid and brainless. The cavity inside their skull is filled with mush.

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felix1999

5 years ago

Reply to  AlgorithmicAnalyst

Liberal = lawlessness. They redefine words on purpose to create more confusion. “Gay” used to mean happy. Now it means a synonym for LBGT. If you are straight, you’d never use the word “gay” to describe yourself. Social justice has become a synonym for communism. At the link, you can see how the word evolved and how the church happily goes along with the redefinition of it.

https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/social-justice-not-what-you-think-it

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Rob Porter

5 years ago

Reply to  felix1999

I don’t ‘go along with it’. What to them is ‘gay’ is to me homosexual with men choosing to consider as a sexual organ the passage through the body excretes its waste. That is sick and filthy and causes all manner of disease. Any church that “goes along with the re-definition” needs to be rejected. These fools took a perfectly nice word and turned it into something dirty.

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R. Arandas

5 years ago

Reply to  AlgorithmicAnalyst

True, they have almost nothing in common with the true “classical liberals” which helped found our nation.

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Menseismal

5 years ago

Reply to  AlgorithmicAnalyst

….cultural Marxists who follow the Frankfurt School of Thought.

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felix1999

5 years ago

Honestly, I have never seen anything like this. THIS is truly global madness. All I can say is thank God for Trump. He is a genuine outsider and not politically correct. Our country would not have had a chance had Hillary or ANY of the other GOP candidates won. The swamp is deep and with few exceptions, career politicians don’t want any sunlight on their betrayal and lawlessness.

I hope documents are released circling the DOJ and FBI investigation. The problem is the “sources and methods” are where the corruption is! Yes, the “sources” and “methods” used are dishonest and our legal mechanisms were illegally perverted to unseat Trump as President. The deep state hides behind this. That disturbs me. If the swamp manages to get the majority in the midterm, our country is finished. So get out and vote R even if it is a RINO. Sickening but that will force RINOS to behave themselves for the time being. We have to clean things up as best we can.

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VoiceInDesert

5 years ago

Reply to  felix1999

Maybe we can turn this back into an elephant:

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Suresh

5 years ago

Left/Liberals can only destroy countries like this Left/Liberal utopia http://tinyurl.com/yavxfl4m

…where its Gun Free , govt terrorises citizens and they hunt cats and dogs for food !

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felix1999

5 years ago

Reply to  Suresh

President Reagan also predicted this! They will call themselves the OPPOSITE of what they are.
Antifa is the perfect example of being the very. definition of FASCISM and yet they claim to be ANTI FASCISM. Progressives talk in opposites. Obama did this for EIGHT years! Obama also liked open ended sound bites that you could read into it whatever you wanted it to mean.

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Ziggy46

5 years ago

Reply to  Suresh

Amen.

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R. Arandas

5 years ago

Today’s liberals have nearly nothing in common with “classical liberalism”. They are just leftists through and through.

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Underzog

5 years ago

Iknow this very well as it happened to me. My firing frommy job of 16 years was straight out of the cultural revolution of Mai’s China.

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Laurence Jarvik

5 years ago

I agree! See my own article on the subject: https://thelatest.com/tlt/conservative-surrender-fueled-crisis-humanities-political-correctness-humaniti-1536363216

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John Forbes

5 years ago

The Communsist are still here but now morphed into the Postmodernists of Jacques Derrida & they are in all Western So called Universities.
They will have to be routed out & fired if this can be done peacably but it has to be done.
In light of what is going on against the Trump Administration it is imperative that TRUMP wins in November after which he must be encouraged & helped to route the Post Modermists Democrat Marxist Left.

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Alleged-Comment

5 years ago

Satan attacks the weakest minds. Lieberals are secularist making them an easy target for SATAN because their mind is void of GOD!

Any mind VOID of GOD is an easy target for Satan and his demons. Whether it’s Catholics, Demoncraps, Lieberals or Hillary and Bill, it’s all the same to the DEVIL.

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Josara Dezmen

5 years ago

We are running on borrowed time!! Marxist/Maoist/Leftists are poised to strike if this midterm goes their way, we will be in deep dung!! Trump needs to release everything soon! Mueller and company are pushing all their chips into the middle of the table, and if the Pres waits too long to call their bluff, we lose!! Time to call upon The Almighty….praying in Jesus Name, for truth and justice!!

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VoiceInDesert

5 years ago

Unfortunately, today’s Democrats work for the devil, who is the author of lies, chaos, confusion and destruction. The only way they make their voice heard is to shout and scream above those who have the truth. But, it is written, “You, little children, are from God and have overcome them, because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4 Berean Study Bible).

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Steve

5 years ago

Inside every Progressive is a Totalitarian screaming to get out.

It disgusts me to say this but soon, if not already, we are headed to the saying “The only good LIberal/Progessive is a dead one.” Before you tell me it is offensive or over the top THINK about what they have been doing? This is becoming combat and not a war of words. Diplomacy/Nicety ends at some point and bullets fly.

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Menseismal

5 years ago

A good article thanks, but a little late in coming. Some of us have known this since Obama was voted in, twice!
How easily people are willing to dance with the devil.

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