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The Inescapable Self-Destruction of the Left

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Recently, talk show personality Dave Rubin came out against his fellow progressives, claiming that he no longer identifies with them, saying that, “Defending my liberal values has suddenly become a conservative position.”

Rubin claims that the left doesn’t believe in free speech or tolerance anymore—that the left has left him; but that’s not a bug in leftism, it’s a feature—a founding feature.

When the terms left and right first came about to identify political positions, they represented the sides in the French National Assembly. Those who supported the king sat on his right and those who supported the revolution sat on his left. Since its inception, the left has been about rebellion against the status quo.

Rebellion is fine if the status quo is tyrannical, but it’s a problem if the status quo is amazing.

Revolution was necessary to help civilization progress toward classically liberal ideals, but a political faction that identifies primarily with revolution will end up revolting from itself, which is what we’re seeing today in the most dramatic and rapid inversion of ideology that has ever been witnessed.

The left used to think that people should be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. Now it’s the direct opposite.

The left used to promote scientific inquiry. Now they ridicule people who dare inquire incorrectly.

They used to be against segregation but now demand it.

They used to preach open-mindedness. Now the only thing that’s open is their mouths.

The left used to believe in tolerance, freedom, and civil rights. Now it is the most intolerant, anti-freedom, and anti-civil rights political faction on Earth.

It’s no coincidence that the epicenter of this implosion of logic is the modern American university system; where the students are veterans of the participation-trophy purgatory that is elementary and secondary education across the country.

Economically, they haven’t earned anything, not to mention they enjoy the absolute lap of luxury that is American college life.

An increasing number of students in these monuments of “Western” wealth are there not because of extraordinary achievement but because of the color of their skin, and these are the people who have the audacity to complain about someone else’s privilege?

Their rebellious predecessors in the 1960s at least protested actual evils in the world. They fought against the government’s drafting people into unjust wars and releasing police dogs on innocent people because they weren’t the right skin color.

Today’s crybabies, however, throw shrieking, public, temper tantrums because they got their feelings hurt.

Sometimes, when no one’s feelings got hurt, the professional complainers had to hurt their own feelings. This was the case when a racist note directed at a Minnesota college student sparked protests before it was discovered the note was fake.

A violent hate crime against a Muslim in Louisiana was also found to be completely fabricated.

Another ‘hate crime’ against a North Dakota gay man was shown to be a hoax too.

It would seem that there are more fake hate crimes than actual hate crimes in this bizarre “Twilight Zone” episode called America.

But that’s what happens when your socio-political ideology demands that you protest and there’s nothing left to protest.

This is the state of rebellion in the age of awesome.

Eventually, if these overgrown toddlers don’t destroy the system that gives them their privilege to destroy it, they will destroy themselves.

As a pop song once put it, “When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.”

You already see it happening in the insanity of the social justice “Hunger Games” that pit various leftist groups against each other in a race to see who’s the most oppressed. This is what happened when Black Lives Matter protesters shut down a pride parade in Toronto, claiming Pride Toronto had engaged in “anti-Black racism” by reducing the visibility of gay people of color in the march.

This was the case when paleo-leftist professors at Yale were run out of town by neo-leftist students for not being leftist enough.

In a shocking exchange, students demanded an apology from their faculty-in-residence Nicholas Christakis for hurting their feelings. He eventually did exactly what they wanted and apologized, but he didn’t apologize hard enough evidently – he was gone six months later.

That burlesque was recently upstaged by the witch-hunt at Evergreen State College in Washington, where students disrupted one self-professed “deeply progressive” professor’s class, surrounded him, cursed at him, screamed at him, called him a racist, and protested for him to resign or be fired.

What evil did this professor commit? Not going along with a day of race-based segregation that another professor had organized.

The quintessential case though, is Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who claims to be black using the same arguments that transgendered people use to claim to be another sex.

For some reason, this is heresy to the cultural Marxists and when Hypatia, a Journal of Feminist Philosophy, published a “Defense of ‘Transracialism’,” the claws and the explosive-tipped arrows came out.

Basically, women, though oppressed in their own right, aren’t oppressed enough to have an opinion about race or “trans” issues if they’re white and “cis-gendered.”

Evidently, you have to have at least two badges of oppression to really be oppressed nowadays.

No wonder reasonable people like Dave Rubin are speaking out against the left. They realize that revolution is just a means, albeit a necessary one at times. It is not an end.

What we’re seeing in the left today is the inevitable self-destruction of an ideology predicated on the means of revolution. It cannot last. It will not last. All we can do is pray that the tornado of illogical self-destruction doesn’t take the entire civilization down with it.

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JSB Morse is a husband, father, author, entrepreneur, and philosopher. He has recently written "Paleo Family" with his wife and previously written the political thriller "Gods of Ruin" and the spiritual fiction "Now and at the Hour of Our Death". He is editor of "The Libertarian Catholic" and can be found at jsbmorse.com.
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