A Right leaning Leftist?

Did the American Left change, or did I?

In my forty years of life, I have always considered myself a Leftist. Regularly to the Left of Chomsky on most issues in fact, especially in regard to military engagements. I am certainly not going as far as wanting to change the United States into some idealistic socialist utopia, all of which have caused the deaths of millions of people around the world. Humans cannot handle that type of dictatorial power as this has been proven time and time again throughout our history. If you’re reading this, I doubt I need to go down the list of history’s utopian regimes. That being said, I am also well aware of the inherent monopolistic flaws within Capitalism. I have always envisaged a careful blending of the two systems into a more cohesive way for humans to thrive; a way for everyone to create their own destiny as individuals. Ideally with healthcare for all (not access to healthcare as politicians like to say) and a strong social safety net. I suppose if I had to adhere myself to a term, I’d consider myself to be an individualist at heart. I think Individualism is something on which most Americans would agree whether they lean to the right or to the left if they gave it some consideration.

September 11th, 2001:

This catalyzing event was the day of my own political awakening. I turned twenty years old only a couple of months before the attack on our country and personal liberties. we were told, “you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists”. Fortunately, by that time I had listened to enough Geore Carlin to know I had no desire to partake in the great game which was so clearly rigged by and for the rich. Things like voting, protests, or allowing tribalistic indignation to make me do something rash like joining the military to fight an organization like Al Qaeda, was insane to me considering we funded and trained them in the two decades leading up to 9/11. That particular rabbit hole is as deep as it is wide in hindsight, to say the very least. Fortunately, it did light a spark beneath me to start really examining the history of the world and our place within it in a very real way. I spent large swaths of my free time reading and watching documentaries, studying works from people like, but not limited to, Thomas Paine, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Niccolò Machiavelli. I was trying my best to wrap my mind around the American condition, as well as the overt and covert conditioning of Americans by intelligence agencies and oligarchs with their proxies in the media. The spoon-fed propaganda at the time was ubiquitous and overwhelming to almost everyone in the country at the time and I had never lived through anything like that in my then myopic life experience.

Guided to the Left:

Carlin taught me that the greatest American pastime was not baseball, it was in fact bombing people. (Carlins 1992 bigger dick foreign policy bit) I have always been against war; it has always seemed insane to me to punish the collective for the doings of a small faction of people within a given country. My biggest issue with the right-wing was and is that of a complete lack of empathy until they experience something personally. George also made me aware of how vapid the Liberal arguments against Republicans tended to be as they are merely the left arm of the same party, the money party. The Third Way Democrats like the Clintons and Obamas helped to amalgamize right-wing policy goals under the banner of pro worker left-wing politics while they destroyed unions and anti-trust laws, as well as the Magna Carta, respectively. After four years of continuing and expanding the authoritarian Bush era policies, the obvious dichotomous rhetoric and actions of the Nobel Peace prize winning Obama administration, I was done with corporate politics and the political mind games of the one percent. Then we watched in horror for four more years as Obama didn’t correct course, but he also doubled down on the authoritarian policies and actions both at home and abroad. From persecuting journalists and prosecuting whistleblowers to allowing corporate mercenaries to attack peaceful protesters multiple times in egregious ways, the Obama legacy has lived on and has only been expanded under the Trump and Biden administrations.

The Hillary Clinton farce:

The greatest divider of the left and the country has to be Hillary, who is possibly the most Machiavellian politician in American history. She not only uses political rhetoric along party lines, but she also managed to divide people among the race and gender lines and was instrumental in helping to ignite the most fatuous culture war the world has ever known. Literally everything became a line of division in the 2016 election cycle. It seems once any political movement or rhetoric gains enough inertia, it often becomes an unstoppable force regardless of the push back. This was especially true with the help of Hillary Clintons’ comrades in the intelligence, tech, and news media establishment. If this wasn’t bad enough, her pied piper election strategy meant to thin the Republican field by boosting Donald Trump, (The Democratic party’s 2016 strategy) along with the billions of dollars in free media given to Trump by the same corporate media is in fact what got Trump elected, not Bernie Sanders, James Comey, or Wikileaks. She was under investigation for serious felonies while running for President, this was her biggest issue along with her direct connections to uranium deals with Russian oligarchs while she was Secretary of State. So, in true Machiavellian fashion she had MSNBC, CNN and a litany of neoliberal propaganda arms take her weakest link and put it on Trump… relentlessly. For five years.

As most people hopefully know, what makes propaganda effective is the constant reiteration over a long enough period of time. This strategy is that of the boomer generation, as they clearly didn’t understand that if people were inclined, they could easily refute these accusations in real time with just a little bit of research and common sense. This, however, would not be the case for very long as we witnessed the birth of the fake news narrative take hold of the neoliberal voting bloc. Instead of debating ideas and letting the best rise to the top, we were then being trained to ignore and attack anyone that dared stray away from the corporate orthodoxy. The irony of this was not lost to the thinking Left, as we remembered that before Obama put the Left to sleep for eight years, corporations, the mainstream media, and intelligence agencies were hardly the bastions of truth and justice. They were and still are the polar opposite of these values. A conspiratorial view of these events involving Russia tend to lean towards the Russia-gate narrative being used because it would in fact widen the divide between the U.S. and Russia while pushing China and Russia closer together. (This view depends on how you feel about globalism and a global oligarchy making moves regardless of the desires of billions of people or Nation States. To get into that grand chessboard algebra would take an entire post in and of itself.) What we do know is this: Hillary Clinton and John Podesta cooked up the Russia-gate narrative to cover up the fact that even with the entire establishment, media, and tech companies on her side, they still lost to a game show host.

Covid global lockstep policies enter the great game:

In November of 2019 I remember vividly watching the Netflix show episode called Explained: Pandemic. This is before the leak/release of covid19 in Wuhan, China. At the end of this episode, Bill Gates gives this creepy smile during his interview as he warns about a pandemic that is coming, a pandemic for which we were all ill prepared… or so it seemed. Our governments were amazingly prepared, not for a pandemic, but for the implementation of draconian policies in democratic countries all over the world. Remember how every western country and affiliated news organization were stunningly in lockstep in regard to not only a collective narrative, but also in policies? (Watch Event 201 staged in October of 2019 for more information on how this happened. It’s on YouTube.) None of which actually focused on the virus, but instead focused on the destruction of civil liberties, especially freedom of association with contact tracing, and the ability to protest unless sanctioned by the political class and mainstream media. These are fundamental human rights as outlined in Constitutions all over the world and they were tossed aside for an illusion of safety. Ben Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor safety.” Cowardice and ignorance have been the downfall of most societies.

Authoritarianism by way of Technocratic Totalitarianism:

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” once quipped Mark Twain

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

We can all keep pretending like we have not looked this particular demon in the face before, but it’s at our own peril. I, however, prefer to look for a way out of this whirlpool of deception and manipulation. The only way to circumvent this rise is technocratic totalitarianism is to remember the core principles that allowed democracy to flourish in the first place: Freedom of speech, thought, association, and action. Humans can and will adapt to anything, if you don’t believe me, I urge you listen to defectors of the Soviet Union or North Korea. Totalitarianism indeed works in practice, so well in fact, that western democracies have decided to implement it themselves under the guise of Covid policies. (Ask any Australian in 2022.)

Covid19 policies:

Here in the U.S. the first thing the Federal Government did was transfer five trillion dollars to the richest oligarchs, took control of production, all while telling small businesses to close down because they were “not essential”. Somehow, your privately owned restaurant had to close the doors, yet publicly traded restaurants did not have to follow the same rules. This applies almost ubiquitously across the board no matter what type of business you own. Meanwhile, the laptop class was busy telling you to flatten the curve, too dense or too bought to realize the obvious truth: this policy was meant to flatten workers and the middle-class, not to stop the spread of an engineered virus. This might sound outlandish or even conspiratorial to some people that do not know that for an entire generation the American business class has been syphoning money from all of us to line their own pockets and to prevent the possibility of power structures changing in favor of the proletariat. The internet has been a frightening double-edged sword for the rulers of the world. They can use it to manipulate your thoughts, incite trends, spy on you, keep a history of everything you do online, and if you have a smartphone, they know everywhere you have gone, going back years. We know a lot of this thanks to people like Edward Snowden and Glen Greenwald, which is the one thing that scares oligarchs more than anything, the sharing of the knowledge that keeps them in power. The Covid vaccine has allowed tech and the government to censor, smear, and delete people with dissenting voices from the digital public square. Horrifyingly, this is being implemented with punitive lockdowns in countries like Austria, immunity passports, that are also called a green pass in some in so-called liberal democracies around the world. (Which is a clue to where this technology is headed… climate lockdowns and green passports for the obedient.) Covid policies are about making all of us obedient to power, not to save lives as the policies undoubtedly will kill more people than the virus. Probably by orders of magnitude when it’s all said and done. Incredibly, even Noam Chomsky argued for letting the unvaccinated starve to protect the people at risk of death from covid. Chomsky actually compared the vaccine mandate to traffic laws… Unfortunately, it seems, one either dies a hero or lives long enough to become a villain.

The C.A.R.E.S act theft was simply the largest and most egregious example in this generation that we do indeed live in an oligarchy. Money is the prerequisite of power, take the money, take away objective reality, freedom of speech and association, isolate everyone, then manipulate the aim of justified proletariat anger towards the system and make us aim that fear and anger at one another. Soon, all we are left with is hate, division, cynicism, and free-floating anxiety that never ends.

All of this may be expected from the Right-wing, as they represented the entirety of the business class power for decades. Now, there has been quite a paradigm shift in that regard. Tech companies espousing democratic and scientific principles using woke ideologies undoubtedly djinned up by public relations companies at the behest of tech monopolists have infected Universities, social media, companies, and our personal lives to such a degree, to believe it happened organically one would have to be as ignorant as a newborn child. This is not the same Left that fought against the Bush administration wars for eight years and that organized behind Occupy Wall Steet in 2009. The New Left is a corporate left, one that is happy to implement authoritarianism because they fully believe that their side is on the right side of history, whilst simultaneously forgetting the lessons of history.

I truly hope one day people will realize what is inherent within any and every single unfounded be(lie)f structure, be it religion or false scientific consensus. If you’re principled person asking yourself the same question that I posited in my title, you are not alone. The Left has indeed drunk the corporate Kool-Aid of technocratic totalitarianism and destroyed itself in a way I didn’t even know was possible.

Through writing this piece I have figured out that I in fact do not lean right or left anymore, I lean towards personal liberty and common-sense policies. I sincerely hope more people feel like they can join me here on this ideological Elba.