Switching Sides — A Speech
The below is a speech given by Roger L. Simon, PJ Media CEO, to the Roanoke Conference — the annual gathering of Washington state Republicans — on January 25, 2013. The other keynote speaker at the conference was Bob Herbold, former COO of Microsoft.
Thanks for having me here. When my friend Todd Hermann emailed me to invite me to speak to this group, he directed me to Steve Buri, whom I suspect many of you must know. Anyway, by way of advice, Steve me told this audience was depressed by the election. (No surprise there.) They need cheering up. So I thought — oh, great… a group of Republicans in the northwest during the dead of winter need cheering up from a disastrous election, Obama’s inaugural speech announcing the installation of socialism in America followed by Hillary testalying about Benghazi. That’s going to be a real walk in the park…
All right, here are five words that should make you smile: You don’t live in California…. I would imagine that saves many of you ten thousand dollars a year or more right there. There’s something to be happy about. Speaking of which, since I live in L.A. but spend a lot of time in this state, I’ve always been perplexed why everything seems to work better up here… the roads are better, the services are better… but we pay the ridiculous amount of state income tax. I don’t have to tell this crowd — don’t ever go there.
So I will try to cheer up you up, but I’m not going to make any false promises. Years ago I wrote a movie for Richard Pryor who was then supposed to be the funniest man in America and I never met anyone gloomier — unless it was Woody Allen with whom I worked several years later.
But Pryor did tell me something interesting when I asked him why he never cracked a joke in person during our meetings. (BTW, I was always trying to make Pryor and Allen laugh… probably to prove myself in some way, kind of a guy thing… I never did get even a smile out of Richard, but finally did get one out of Woody. You won’t be surprised to know it was a dirty joke.) Anyway, Pryor said the secret to his standup is he just got up and told the truth and that, by itself, made everybody laugh. Somebody should to tell that to Bill Maher.
Anyway, Steve and Todd also thought I should tell you something of my personal story, my evolution from standard issue Hollywood lefty to the reviled mouth-breathing right-wing often libertarian co-founder of PJ Media I am today — maybe as a “Yes, it can be done. Even in Hollywood, kind of thing.” Fights post-election depression syndrome.
I have already discussed this at length in my memoir Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine: The Perils of Coming Out Conservative in Tinseltown, but it’s been a few years since I wrote the book and this speech gives me an opportunity to reexamine the subject of political change. Actually, I haven’t ever really deserted the topic because that is partly the theme of The Party Line, the just-published play by Sheryl Longin and me that is set in Moscow in the thirties and Amsterdam in more recent times. The subject fascinates me.
One of the most interesting aspects of political change is that most of us who have experienced it don’t feel as if we have changed. We still see ourselves as the same person, live in the same skin. To us, it is the world that has changed — at least for the most part.
As an illustration, a significant number of people changed their views of global affairs immediately after September 11, 2001. Our country was attacked by an ideology that was misogynistic, homophobic, anti-democratic, racist, xenophobic, and religiously intolerant and that sought world domination — in short was the enemy of all classically liberal society since the Enlightenment.
The majority of our people recognized this and sought to push back, asserting the values of our culture — for a year or two. Then — as that most hypocritical of ideologies “political correctness” reasserted itself — the majority of that majority reverted to type and we had the election of Barack Obama… twice.
A few of us remained changed, now open to ideas we once thought anathema, or reactionary, when we were younger. How did that happen and why was I among them?
To be honest, despite having written a book and a play about it, I don’t really know. Political change remains a mystery to me, although I think it one of the most important topics, perhaps the crucial topic, we need to examine, because without political change, what’s the point of democracy? If people can’t be persuaded to switch sides, why bother?
The reasons for resistance to change are clear to me, however. Those who change risk losing friends, family, and livelihood. Even more importantly, they face personality disintegration, the loss of self-image, the “who” of themselves. Who wants to deal with that?
I did apparently. But it was largely accidental. I was part of that majority reaction after 9/11, but, unlike others, I never looked back, was not recidivist. Part of the reason for that was my vocation. As a writer, I found it difficult to lie – particularly in print where people could easily catch me. I couldn’t write well what I no longer believed.
Yet all around me I saw split personalities, still do. The prototypical Hollywood (and DC) liberal lives two disparate lives, one public and one private. In public he or she is the greatest of altruists, in private the greediest and most ambitious of persons. The former acts as a cover for the latter, to themselves and to others.
This system is so enduring, so entrenched, that it makes political change exceptionally difficult to achieve. How do you change someone so successful, someone who has so much wealth and power while feeling so inordinately good about him or herself?
I am speaking obviously about the so-called thought leaders here — the elites of New York, Washington and Los Angeles who dominate our media and entertainment and tell the hoi polloi how to live and think. These people have little incentive for change, even though in some cases their careers are in jeopardy. The New York Times is hemorrhaging reporters, last time I looked. Still, it’s hard for them to make a connection between the current economic uncertainty and the system that nurtured them for so long.
So what can we do to encourage change, this fragile sprout of Spring when we see it? Here are some preliminary thoughts.
Be humble. Few, if any, of us make drastic alterations in our lives and thought because someone won an argument. We have to come to things ourselves — or think we have. I know this was my experience. I just woke up one morning agreeing with every Charles Krauthammer said… or most of it…. We have to own our change. These things take time and happen when we least expect them, sometimes when we don’t know they are even happening.
When you see someone who is ripe for change, encourage him or her, but do it gently, responsively, and not confrontationally. And do not look for or expect a complete ideological shift. Be grateful for what you get.
For example, I am still more or less a social liberal, especially on marriage which is to me a civil rights issue, and likely to remain so. I have changed mostly in the economic and foreign policy areas. Many are like me. Be glad we’re here. We’ll try to accept you too, if you’re socially conservative.
Most of all, do not gloat — on the inside or on the outside. Generations of therapists have warned us of the perils of our “need to be right” (not politically but personally) tripping us up. The therapists were correct in their admonition. Remember, the goal here is the political change of others, not to be victorious ourselves.
But speaking of the personal meeting the political, let me contradict myself to a small degree and tell you a little of what I understand of my own evolution.
Although I have a vacation home on Bainbridge Island, which some day I wouldn’t mind making a permanent home, and not just to avoid those confiscatory state taxes in California, but because I like the place, I am a city boy through and through, having grown up on that other island the same physical size, but not population size, as Bainbridge – Manhattan.
My parents were typical Jewish liberal Democrats of their generation, my father having served in World War II as a flight surgeon. They did well in the New York of the fifties, living the American dream and eventually moving to the suburbs.
Like many of my generation, I rebelled. My parents’ Jack Kennedy-style liberalism was too bourgeois for me. Although a privileged graduate of Dartmouth and Yale Drama School, I went left… New Left, as we said in those days. I hung with all of them, the names you know — Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, virtually all the Chicago Seven, plus Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton.
That’s right, the Black Panthers. When I first came to Hollywood in my early twenties — phenomenally lucky as you could be in those days when they threw inordinate amounts of cash at clueless young screenwriters — I felt class guilt… white skin privilege, as it was called… and became one those sponsoring the Black Panther Breakfast Program for kids, although I never knew whether my donations were going for eggs, bacon or AK-47s.
It took me a long time to get out of that, decades really, because my leftism was well rewarded in the entertainment industry. It was cool. And the movie moguls loved it because they wanted to be cool by osmosis.
Meanwhile, I had invented the pot-smoking private eye Moses Wine, made into a film with Richard Dreyfuss, The Big Fix, and couldn’t conceive of being another way. For a time I even lived in a working class district of Los Angeles, Echo Park, to fit my image.
But, in retrospect, it may have been this largely phony left-wing reputation… most of such reputations are largely phony… that caused the beginnings of my change. For a book I was writing, I was able to wrangle an invitation to the People’s Republic of China in 1979, the days when they were still all in Mao suits. The trip was, of course, fascinating. It was China, after all, and at that point there were no more than a couple of dozen lucky tourists in that entire huge country, but something about it disturbed me even then. I had a feeling I was in a giant jail with undercover agents watching my every move. In fact, that was true.
Later, on subsequent cultural exchanges to the Soviet Union in the eighties, I learned just how true as KGB agents followed us everywhere, including the bathroom. An attempt was even made, at hotel in Yalta, to draft me into Soviet intelligence by a female reporter from Soviet Screen magazine. Not only was I not tempted, I was terrified. Maybe I wouldn’t be allowed back home, I thought — what a disaster. And in any case, the only secrets I knew could be written on the back of a bubble gum pack. (Only lately, have I begun to understand what it was they wanted. More of that in a moment).
My disaffection with Communist China and the Soviet Union was probably step one in my political evolution. Step two was, of all things, the OJ trial. The mega-circus took over my home city of Los Angeles back in 1994-1995. In fact it dominated the country’s media and in the process changed the face of media as we know it. I wanted to attend the trial myself. It was the hottest ticket in the city and every writer I new wanted to be there.
After I finally got to see it, sitting in the surprisingly small room in L.A.’s Superior Court, I was mightily depressed. The miscarriage of justice was overwhelming. I had been a civil rights worker in the South in the sixties and was appalled to see racism turned on its head with obvious DNA evidence disdained. In this one case at least, the blacks were worse than the whites. The great lie of political correctness stalked the land and I was just beginning to see it, even though I didn’t want to. Change, as I said, is hard.
But when step 3 happened, 9/11, all the scales dropped from my eyes. There was no longer any way I could hold them up.
I started writing about this change online — and that is some of the reason PJ Media, now called PJ Media, was born.
But let me roll back on that a little bit.
I had written one of my crime novels shortly after 9/11 in which my very liberal detective hero, Moses Wine, was starting to undergo a political change similar to his creator’s. In fact, the opening line of the book was “I knew I was in trouble when I was starting to agree with John Ashcroft…”
I could tell the publisher, a branch of Simon & Schuster, didn’t care for this and wasn’t going to promote the novel. I had to do something myself. But the author websites I had seen were static advertisements and scarcely worth anyone’s time.
This was all at the beginning of blogging and I had been reading the work of this Tennessee law professor, Glenn Reynolds, whose pioneering blog Instapundit went live just a few weeks before September 11. I decided, in imitation of Glenn who eventually became my business partner, that I would blog to promote my new novel.
It didn’t work. The novel sunk like the proverbial stone. But something else happened. The blog itself became immensely popular with tens of thousands of readers online every day because I was writing about… political change…. something a lot of people were undergoing in those days, as I mentioned.
Glenn, I, and others started talking to each other about this new form and, being pro-capitalist, decided to do something with all this Internet traffic we were getting,. That led to the debut of PJ Media in the fall of 2005 and of PJTV at the Republican Convention of 2008.
Our company got its name from a slur by CNN executive vice-president Jonathan Klein. When some of us alleged that a document being flogged by Dan Rather on 60 Minutes as proof that George W. Bush had not completed his National Guard service was a forgery — Klein called us “amateurs in our pajamas.” We thought that would be a nice name — hence, PJ Media. Of course, we were right about those National Guard papers. The exec, like Rather, lost his job. PJ Media is a thriving online media company with page views roughly equivalent to National Review and Weekly Standard, with many of the same writers like Victor Davis Hanson and Andrew McCarthy. We have recently added former Congressman Allen West for a new television initiative.
And I have been an accidental CEO for over seven rather amazing, incredibly fast-moving, years. My only regret is in that time I have not done as much screen and novel writing. That’s about to change. The last election… not that I want to bring up that ugly subject again (my mission being to make you laugh)… has convinced me, if I even needed convincing, that my friend the late Andrew Breitbart was right when he said “politics was downstream of culture.”
Many on the right love to attack Hollywood and make fun of the likes of Sean Penn and Oliver Stone and they deserve it. But this abjuring of the entertainment industry happens at our peril. The rest of the world is watching that entertainment no matter what you say or do, most especially your children. Rather than boycott Hollywood, take it over – at least part of it. But do it well and professionally. Otherwise there’s no point. No one’s interested.
As one who was given by God, or my parents’ DNA or something, the ability to write dialogue and make up stories, I am going to be devoting more of my time to that in the future, putting some of the skills I learned as a liberal to work as a conservative. Toward that end, my wife and I have written the play The Party Line I referred to earlier and have several other screen projects in the hopper.
One I am doing for a young Russian director may actually get me truly blacklisted this time. (The title of an earlier version of Turning Right at Hollywood & Vine was Blacklisting Myself.) That screenplay posits an America where everybody is working for the government. I’m writing that one fast. I don’t want it to be passé before I’ve even finished — and the way things are going, that’s a genuine risk.
And people like me need the support of people like you more than you know. After decades of pervasive liberal culture, we need an audience, financial support, and new means of distribution. That’s a whole infrastructure, if you think about it. And then there’s educational system and the media to think about…. Whoa…. No one ever said it was going to be easy. Thank you.
“Our country was attacked by an ideology that was misogynistic, homophobic, anti-democratic, racist, xenophobic, and religiously intolerant and that sought world domination — in short was the enemy of all classically liberal society since the Enlightenment.’
This, using the word “ideology”, is a very big improvement over authors who use such words as “Islamism” and “Islamists” as it hits the target, but it would be even better to hit the bull’s eye and say “Our country was attacked by followers of an ideology that is misogynistic, homophobic, anti-democratic, racist, xenophobic, and religiously intolerant and that seeks world domination — in short the enemy of all humanity – Islam”.
Islamo-Fascism!
Wraps it up with a nice, pretty bow.
Four Stages of Islamic Conquest
“To be honest, despite having written a book and a play about it, I don’t really know. Political change remains a mystery to me, although I think it one of the most important topics, perhaps the crucial topic, we need to examine, because without political change, what’s the point of democracy?”
I think you hit on it with that third word Roger. HONESTY. And lest you think the democrats are sadly in honesty and the GOP has it in spades – NO! There is a moral void in DC when it comes to honesty. Both parties are out to crush each other – and in the meantime are crushing us. Currently the democrats have the upper hand. The shoe will be on the other foot some day – and like always – nothing will get done for “We The People” even though both sides profess to be working for our best interests. DC is a money pit black hole. And we all know how that turns out.
There is no mystery about political change, assuming that we are instructed in the social movements that confronted the modern world. I laid out my own disillusion with the New Left and the counter-culture here, but I also had time to reflect upon the ideologies that turned me off Pacifica Radio, my preoccupation since 1969 through 1998. See http://clarespark.com/2010/07/04/pacifica-radio-and-the-progressive-movement/.
I find much to recommend in “classical liberalism”–an idea put forward by such as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, but not Thomas Jefferson.
Great speech Roger, I wish I had been there to hear it in person.
Roger MANNY THANKS FOR COMING OUT it’s about time the American people found out what’s behind door # two and three. It won’t be a cake walk,however it’s imperative that people find out that one size does not fit all and you as a writer in Hollywood are in the right place and in the right time. We cannot un-ring the bell but we can explain the dynamics rationally and hopefully muffle the side effects for the future. Keep going!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
” An attempt was even made, at hotel in Yalta, to draft me into Soviet intelligence by a female reporter from Soviet Screen magazine. Not only was I not tempted, I was terrified. Maybe I wouldn’t be allowed back home, I thought — what a disaster. And in any case, the only secrets I knew could be written on the back of a bubble gum pack. (Only lately, have I begun to understand what it was they wanted. More of that in a moment).”
Maybe I missed it – but what was it they really wanted?
Another Agent of Influence to assist them in achieving their aim
of persuading the American people to indulge their baser natures.
Given the bent of Hollywood, then and now, it seems silly for them to have bothered….Not merely “ice to the Eskimos,” but trying to turn someone INTO an Eskimo in order to bring ice to the Eskimos
I missed it also.
M. Report has it exactly right. The Soviets always wanted to infiltrate “knowledge workers,” most of all in Hollywood because of the extensive influence. Ron Radosh has a terrific book about how this worked in 40s and 50s – “Red Star Over Hollywood.”. By the time I got here, 80s, it had been dialed down a great deal, but still existed. They would have wanted me to influence my peers, movie productions, anything. They also might have wanted to know my take on the political views of people working in the industry. Don’t know because it never got that far – not even close.
Roger – What a terrific speech. I have always admired your work and am very pleased to now know that you are an alum of the College. Thanks for sharing your courageous story.
As you can tell from my screen name, I frequently contribute to blogs but presently remain in the closet. I consider myself a moderate – who highly values liberty (and thus distrusts government) but recognizes and appreciates the desire for government to help solve problems and the dilemma posed by circumstances where well-intentioned government programs may help alleviate the problem or may worsen it (take ObamaCare, please). Yet, in today’s “polarized” (read: dissent-crushing) society, I fear something so innocuous as revealing that I voted for a ridiculously accomplished moderate (Romney) over arguably the worst President in history (with a record of mind-boggling economic and foreign policy failure and dishonesty to prove it).
How do we change this dynamic and what should someone like me do in the meantime? I have a family to feed. I am quite convinced that I would lose business if I signed my real name. I fear writing under this name – someone who was really interested could figure it out. Yet, it is clear that by not signing my name, I am part of the problem.
Thoughts?
Roger,
I’ve been following you since just about the first day of your blog – more than ten years now (I was Silicon Valley Jim in those days). I’ve had a great admiration for your posts all along. This is the best one yet. Well done, sir!
Obviously, they wanted an “agent of influence”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_of_influence
Someone who spreads memes that weaken the West’s ability to resist communism/socialism (i.e. by making us unable to think clearly). The various mainline communist nations spent a lot on money on this, far more than for traditional espionage. (They knew very well that culture is upstream of politics.) Largely unopposed, these efforts have been very effective, even past the demise of the originating regimes – hence our current dismal situation.
When I look at the media today I often recall the Fred Saberhagen “Berserker” stories about weapons that had been released and continued to kill and destroy long after the civilizations that had created them had ceased to exist.
No need for communist nations anymore obviously, since we have very effective domestic equivalents now.
Even at West Point cadets are being told that the “right wing” is “Anti-Federalist” (turning the meaning of federalism on its head), and that it represents a grave domestic danger.
even the right wing thing is a lie…
Roger,
This should put a smile on your face- Always nice to read good news -
” According to a source in the security forces protecting Fordow, an explosion on Monday at 11:30 a.m. Tehran time rocked the site, which is buried deep under a mountain and immune not only to airstrikes but to most bunker-buster bombs. The report of the blast came via Hamidreza Zakeri, formerly with the Islamic regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and National Security,
The blast shook facilities within a radius of three miles. Security forces have enforced a no-traffic radius of 15 miles, and the Tehran-Qom highway was shut down for several hours after the blast, the source said. As of Wednesday afternoon, rescue workers had failed to reach the trapped personnel.
The site, about 300 feet under a mountain, had two elevators which now are out of commission. One elevator descended about 240 feet and was used to reach centrifuge chambers. The other went to the bottom to carry heavy equipment and transfer uranium hexafluoride. One emergency staircase reaches the bottom of the site and another one was not complete. The source said the emergency exit southwest of the site is unreachable.
The regime believes the blast was sabotage and the explosives could have reached the area disguised as equipment or in the uranium hexafluoride stock transferred to the site, the source said. The explosion occurred at the third centrifuge chambers, with the high-grade enriched uranium reserves below them.
The information was passed on to U.S. officials but has not been verified or denied by the regime or other sources within the regime. ”
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/sabotage-key-iranian-nuclear-facility-hit/#qei1od6gQGWwRPLD.99
” Israeli Source Confirms Iran’s Fordow Nuclear Plant Exploded
Israeli intelligence source confirms underground nuclear facility sustained major damage in a “mega explosion” last week.
By Chana Ya’ar
An Israeli intelligence source has confirmed Iran’s Fordow underground nuclear uranium enrichment facility sustained major damage in a “mega explosion” that occurred last week. ”
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/164645#.UQaCnhwU4QM
Fine Post Roger — I think you’re doing a reasonably good job. Too bad you aren’t quite on Clint Eastwood’s radar, who could have had a call out for when the only other conservative he could remember by name was Jon Voight.
Laughter and ridicule at the liberal’s hypocrisy should always be high on a conservative’s agenda — you would do well to follow the Martian’s advice (to Woody) and “tell funnier jokes”.
It’s great you’re improving PJTV and Allen West’s TV initiative. I’m sorry you so quickly stopped your associated blogger network. The USA really does need a conservative news alternative to Fox. I was hoping bloggers could provide a good amount of raw content, which good editors to prepare for a better site.
But I always go read Glenn at Instapundit, and only often come to PJ Media.
(And now I have to go to World Affairs Journal for Michael Totten, still among the best writers who are blogging regularly).
Keep up the good work — tho doing more art might be even better work.
My transformation from liberal to conservative, which began in the mid-’70s, culminated in a courtroom, too, in Manhattan in 1981. I was summoned to jury duty and wound up as foremen (I mean – ahem – “forewoman”) on a civil case with six female jurors. A 50-something woman was suing one of the major real estate companies, owners of her Upper East Side high-rise, because she had fallen down the stairs. She claimed the fall was due to broken lightbulb glass on the stairs and that the fall had destroyed her career as a lounge singer. The evidence clearly showed that her career, such as it was, had ended in the ’60s and that she had an alcohol problem and on the day in question was also under the influence of valium. Furthermore, it was an elevator building and she had taken the stairs rather than wait the few minutes it would have taken for moving men to clear some furniture from the elevator. The first poll of the jury was 3 for the plaintiff (the woman) and 3 for the defendant (the company) and after a week of deliberation no one changed their opinion. The 3 who wanted to award the woman as much money as she could get were all middle-aged, two African-Americans and a feminist who worked for a union. The 3 of us who didn’t think she deserved a penny were a 30-ish Jewish business woman, a 20-year-old Puerto Rican girl and I, a 36-year-old WASP artist. It was a hung jury and I later learned that they had settled out of court and the singer walked away with a bundle.
The unwillingness of the 3 jurors who only cared about “sticking it to the man” to even consider the evidence was shocking to me. I realized, for once and for all, that liberals really do believe that a concept like the truth is just an impediment to be disregrded at will. I finally knew I was a conservative and never looked back.
Truth, to a Leftist, is just a malleable construct to be twisted and warped to meet the current need.
Roger – If you are requesting a change in politics that followed culture, then I think I have something for you. I agree OJ and 9/11 were seminal events, but even they could not absolve Republicans from their original sin … Watergate.
In researching my penultimate whodunit (smug Liberal lawyer takes on Richard Nixon as his Impeachment Trial client) I stumbled upon what can only described as a bombshell. (And, I realize challenging Liberal dogma makes me a nut!)
Nevertheless, my new (heretical) truths are ensconced in WATERGATE FICTION the trail the trial the truth. It’s historical revelations are now available on Amazon, but (as you noted) in our Hollywood dominated “reality” … who will notice?
So if you want to encourage political change in someone you should be humble and not gloat. I think that’s true.
Which leads me to believe Obama isn’t interested in changing minds. Just transforming the nation. And, the Obama is initially ran for President talked of bringing the nation together so Obama was lying about his intentions from the beginning.
Dishonest to the core.
Unlike me I’m proud to say because taking guns away from Americans. Turning this nation so far left they either go straight or right at intersections. Applauding a school system that carries the banner for communism.
In two years, I want every class started with a pledge to a communist future for our country. Which requires teachers who believe in the cause. Which most of them do if they want tenure.
You should know that, as a Black Muslim, on the evening of 9/11 2001 we had an “ashes, ashes we all fall down” party in Manhattan attended by some of the biggest names in NY theater. Obama hates everything this nation stands for. Thought it was a good lesson to Americans that the world doesn’t respect the sanctity of American soil on foreign land (our consulate at Benghazi).
I was especially proud of the way the mainstream media cheered for Hillary after the made a mockery of the Benghazi investigation, and how Marco Rubio showed his true colors by backing down to the woman with balls the size of coconuts. Even the Catholic Church is planning a strategic withdrawal since Obama’s forcing them to give up their beliefs and principles.
The progressive communists are clobbering the old American ideals and values. If this were a football game, John Boehner, the quarterback of the Republican Party would have left the game with a concussion 6 months ago.
Taking away America’s last line of defense; their guns, was the natural reaction to the media frenzy of Sandy Hook. Couldn’t have come at a better time. The lives of a handful of six and seven year olds actually was a small price to pay. Consider that the left has liquidated 55 million would be six and seven year olds since Roe V Wade.
Roger Simon went through a major change after 9/11. I think it’s about time he starts changing back. America’s future doesn’t lie in freedom and liberty. It lies in in works of Schlegal and Schleiemacher and K. Marx, the most serious of the Marx brothers who wrote killer stuff.
If the flamboyant Obama is allowed to shine his brightest, Americans in foreign lands will be eliminated with the ease of a flick of the finger to remove a spec of dandreff.
Both Roger Simon and David Mamet are winning hearts and minds. I am truly grateful.
BUT; Herr Obama is vanquishing their achievements with his polarization and intense dichotomy of the American People.
Bill Clinton tried his best to accomplish this. But. Herr Obama is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams.
Of course he could not accomplish this dastardly task without the absolute complicity of an obsequious Congress and media.
Roger-
I realized in a thing you said here why I read PJ Media, you indicated that you are still socially liberal, but otherwise conservative. I think you are probably more libertarian than liberal in that regard. I’ve stopped reading National Review online as I feel it has drifted more Socon over the last few years.
We need to establish a ‘platform’ that generally allows the individual to practice what their own beliefs are without forcing others to practice the same. The right really needs to promote economic and social freedom, one that rewards hard work. The right really needs to be seen by the young as a viable belief, and one they can feel comfortable announcing to their friends. At this time, the message of the right is seen by too many as a belief of “them”, not “us”.
I think there’s a real division in conservatism today. Some are more “libertarian conservatives” – the fiscal-not-social conservatives and others who are more worried about reigning in government than preserving traditions. Others are more “traditional conservatives – who definitely want to preserve traditions by reigning in (or at least not legitimizing) non-traditional behaviors and lifestyles. Each side thinks it has “the answer” to saving the Republic. In reality, each side has part of the answer. They need to work together to achieve anything.
The same dichotomy is at work among liberals: there are traditional capitalists who are socially liberal and there are Socialists who are only liberal as long as everyone else does what they say. I think they’re more willing to work together than we are.
“I think they’re more willing to work together than we are.”
They have a very simple rule which they strictly follow, “No enemies to the left.”
I think mostly the left is trying to divide us. 95% of socons are fine. The left plays up the nuts… If anything we should return the favor and start talking about their nuts… since there are so many more on their side…
You need to have 3 or 4 parties:
- Socialist/Social-Democrat — statists, semi or completely socialist economy, socially partly liberal and partly affirmative action mindset.
- Liberal (in the classical sense)/”Social” Liberal — mostly free market economy with some socialist characteristics (social security, some regulations, some gov’t programs, but generally limited gov’t intervention and welfare compared with the statists), socially liberal.
- Liberal/Conservative Liberal — free market, socially liberal.
- Conservative — free market, socially conservative.
It’ll make more sense for the two liberal parties (“center-left” and “center-right”) to join into a single party than for Dem liberals to join with the socialists and communists, and for Repub social liberals to join with social conservatives. Voters who support fiscal responsibility, but are social liberals likely feel they have no party that truly represents them and have to make a crucial sacrifice when voting for either.
Social conservatives are a large and strong group on the right, but a minority nationally. Their values are not likely to attarct most of the young, the women and the secularists, nevermind the gays. They scare them off. A party made of fiscal conservatives who are socially liberal (in other words, classical liberals) and of “moderate” former Dems (i.e. who are mostly non-socialistic and largely liberal in the calssical sense) has a better electoral potential in the long run.
Pnina… your analysis is interesting. The reason social conservatives are losing this country is precisely because of the suppositions in the article. The “agents of influence” have been totally influenced themselves by the ideology of the far left, and do such a good job at spreading the lies and mis-information. They are unwilling to do the right thing for fear of rejection amongst their peers, or fear of losing their source of income, or whatever. So they continue to spew their venom to our society, mainly at our children who are so easy to convince that our country is evil and the cause of all problems in the world. The re-election of our liar-in-chief is evidence that they have become victorious in their mission of changing America from a liberty-loving country to a country full of low-information voters with their hands out waiting for the Dear Leader to give them their cell phones and gas. They control our media, our news, our schools, our colleges, our institutions, et al. Fifty years ago 75% of the country would have fallen into your “free market-socially conservative” category, but that has been reversed by years of propaganda from the left. We socially conservative Americans have not left the country, the country has left us. If it is truth that you seek, but you accept the fallacy that abortion (infanticide) or sodomy or pantheism is acceptable as long as we can get our fiscal house in order, then no amount of cooperation between the “moderates” will save this country. Remember, the love of money is the root of all evil. Wealth does not make a nation, it is duty, honor, community, freedom, unalienable rights endowed by the Creator, the adherance to the Creator’s laws that make a nation great. If you put these things first, the wealth will follow.
Too often people confuse being libertarian with being libertine. There is a very important difference. A society of true libertines could not be a society for very long because none of them could trust the other. It would be a society that would need to be ruled and have social order imposed from above. Leftists would love for us be a truly libertine society lacking in self-restraint and discipline and many of us have become just that, and look at how many of the rest of us have fallen right in line with ours calls for new laws to be imposed on those who cannot govern themselves.
Libertarians are those who can impose discipline and order upon themselves. They are those who understand that there must be some kind of moral order in their lives in order for each citizen to trust his fellows enough for a society lacking in laws to work because a man’s (or woman’s) simple word is bond enough. True libertarians understand that they are responsible for their own behaviors, both good and bad, and take responsibility in full for them.
I take no issue with true libertarians who want only to be left alone and keep their behaviors in their own lives and under their own control. But I cannot trust or endorse a policy of libertinism masquerading as libertarianism, and many of the youth of today don’t understand the fine distinction. They want state financed libertinism.
Paragraph #26: When I first came to Hollywood in my early twenties — phenomenally lucky as you could be in those days when they threw inordinate amounts of clash at clueless young screenwriters . . .
Paragraph #31: It was the hottest ticket in the city and every writer I new</I wanted to be there.
You missed, “. . . and that is some of the reason PJ Media, now called PJ Media, was born.” The first reference would of course be to “Pajamas Media” the absence of which makes some of us forlorn.
Hillary testalying about Benghazi…
Particularly her faked incredulity when the Turkey/Benghazi Annex arms transfer subject came up. She’d never heard of such a thing !
Great word, should enter the lexicon.
That screenplay posits an America where everybody is working for the government…
Special on (the dreaded) Fox News last night, with Steve Bannon (Breitbart) and another very articulate guy detailing the federal government as biggest US employer (of paper pushers), incestuousness of lobbyists, Washington DC as Boomtown (just ignore DC’s poverty and crime right around the corner).
Point being that the culture of corruption and back scratching is integral to, endemic in, both political parties, i.e., they ALL get off on it.
Combine with twerps like this running on MSM, enlightenment seems extremely remote
I agree with you. All the political class is doing is conducting a fight to see who has first rights to feed at the trough. And we the people get to vote them in and pay for it all.
Roger, although I was never as radical as you back in the sixties, I was an ardent Democrat and didn’t know more than a very few Republicans. Being a Democrat and believing in the benevolence of government back in those days was a natural occurrence, it was the Republicans who were the fish out of water. A conversion to Christianity began my slow movement toward a libertarian position and Jimmy Carter made the move complete.
That was a great speech you made, by the way, and please inform the rest of us when these projects come to fruition. I heartily agree with you that culture is key to politics and the only way to truly preserve freedom is to reinforce the culture of freedom.
In finishing, I find it interesting that some of the most effective anti-big government works have been done by science fiction writers going all the way back to the fifties and continuing forward.
I wish you much success.
Simon, you still have a jarring vestige of your old self. You continue with the PC form of “him or her”, “he or she”, “his or hers”. Same with calling God a “she”. That’s BS.
English uses the masculine pronoun for the collective, just like other languages. To not do so is to kowtow to those feminists whose agenda is not improvement of their lot, but emasculation of yours.
actually, in professional writing, “him or her” is passe. one should generally associated negative traits or statements with masculine and positive with feminine pronouns. his use of both is rather counter-cultural instead of emasculation…
Or better, use the invented gender neutral pronouns “Sie” and Hir” which oddly enough follow the pattern of female pronouns by using the same word for the objective and possessive cases.
Hell, my Dad used to yell at Burger King commercials that said “Everyone’s doing things their own way.” And don’t get me started on “To each their own.”
How else can those among us who do not like watching videos or TV support your PJ Media efforts than just by signing up for your Daily Digest email? To me, reading a blog post is usually more efficient than listening to the same words in a video.
I agree that our focus needs to be on offering alternative culture, rather than political campaigning as such. For instance, rather than only arguing with affluent “progressive” friends and relatives about why grabbing guns would be particularly unjust to single moms and their kids in bad neighborhoods, I issue invitations to visit a range with me. Who knows, maybe someday one of them will even accept the invite? Meanwhile, I’ve just held my nose and signed up for a multi-year NRA membership after disdaining their efforts as “over the top” for decades. My year-end charitable gifts this year also included Cato, the Institute for Justice, and Hillsdale College, along with my usual less political ones, figuring if we don’t defend justice efforts now, nothing else we do to help the poor will last.
The way to fight the gun ban culturally is to create movies, TV shows and rock/pop songs where, for instance, one of the first steps of a would-be tyrannical gov’t is to disram the citizenry in the purported interest of “public safety”.
To do this two things are required:
1. Artists capable of creating compelling contemporary popular pieces.
2. The conservative base being ready to contribute to such productions since they most likely won’t get a Hollywood contract and have to be indy productions.
Roger,
I was first intrigued by you precisely because you were a former lib who now professed a genuine conservative approach to life. I likewise discovered Neo-Neocon and Vanderleun as well as quite a few others who made this transition. And this from a person whose first vote for President went to George McGovern. Thanks for what you’re doing to help America remain the most remarkable country in the history of the world.
Roger
What was the Moses Wine book that sank like a stone without promotion? Is it available on Kindle? Given the changes you have undergone, (pecuniary interests aside) would you still recommend reading the Moses Wine books? I ask the last because I have become exceedingly weary of authors making snide comments about people like me and the things I believe when I am reading for entertainment.
Interesting to cite the OJ trial. I was still a brain-dead default liberal at the time, and it was astonishing to see that every single black person in my workplace was jumping with joy over the acquittal of the most obvious murderer in US history at least, whereas there was no reaction or disbelief from every white person. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but the scene is something I remember clearly to this day.
also sounds like a good plot considering….
the left always takes the moral high ground… but they clearly do not deserve it. Talking about events and reactions that day is an example and should be remembered like other important events….
I couldn’t agree more that what we need are movies that present the conservative take on our problems and that reach a mass audience. Obviously I am not talking about blatantly didactic films. But films that would, for example, present the struggles of a young couple trying to establish a business and being knocked down over and over again by monstrous punitive bureaucratic regulations and finally building that despite the you didn’t build that crowd. Such a film, with romance, drama, and most of all embodied villains and heros, could help millions see what they can only vaguely apprehend behind the torrent of statist propaganda that rains down on us daily.
A TV series on cable would be even better, as more themes can be explored. Setting the series primarily in a post-Obama, post-Hillary future — 15-20 years down the road so America is still recognizable to the viewer, except for the startling results of changes wrought by progressivism and expansion of government power. There are all sorts of aspects of this near future that can be explored, with the common thread being a yearning for that freedom known as “Liberty.”
Mr. Simon,
You have led an interesting life with many advantages that the typical American hasn’t had. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to get money and power as a leftist, then switch to the right and get money and power.
And it’s no secret to me as a writer that I could make a better living if I could just bring myself to sell my soul to the devil and write for the left.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that your story is just that–a writer’s story and you’re in it for yourself.
Where oh where are patriots who never compromised or who were truly enlightened and woke up to the truth of what America stands for?
Oh, and one last thing, I have news for you: a socially liberal viewpoint means you’re still a liberal. Just because you like to make money doesn’t change that fact.
Are you joking?! No lefty artist moves to the right for financial gain. As the left is the hegemon in popular culture switching sides is a suicidal move career-wise — there’s a good chance you’d become a pariah, lose your job, your standing, your connections, your friends, future contracts etc. Being open about his political transformation was a brave move on Roger Simon’s part that entailed personal sacrifice. Others might have remained quiet about their conservatism to avoid the losses. He did not. But unlike you he also did not conform himself to just sitting and whining about the opportunities he now can’t get from the rich and powerful in the leftist cultural establishment, but instead went on to initiate new and pioneering projects. Just because you disagree with his social liberal views doesn’t make your slnader any more true.
And BTW a person can be a conservative (or classicl liberal) on the economy, the degree of state intervention and foreign policy, and at the same time also be liberal on social issues. There’s nothing that really binds all those political aspects together. Being against statism and for individual liberty in the economic sphere doesn’t mean that you must be at the same time against individual liberty in the personal sphere and for society determinig for the individual who they may and may not take for their romantic and sexual partner, what kind of occupation they must and must not choose based on their gender, or what they’re allowed and not allowed to wear, eat or drink (the latter are in the territory of leftist statists, but both similarly attack individual liberty).
Please contact me and tell me what I can do to (quietly) help.
I too have enjoyed P J Media over the past 10 years or so. This Post gives voice to my own evolution from liberal to conservative. Thank you Roger.
On the subject of cultural efforts to change the political, you should go out and pick up the novel, “Full Asylum” by Michael Isenberg. It’s comic dystopic novel all the more relevent in light of the recent election. You can get it through Amazon or more directly through http://fullasylum.blogspot.com/.
There was a joke I recall from before WW II in Eastern Europe in which a man approaches a fellow businessman and says, “Mr. Meyer, are you aware that your son has become a Communist?” Meyer nods, “My son is now 20 years old. If he had not become a Communist by now I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 29 I will disown him then.”
The process is sometimes called “growing up.” Sadly, many never manage that.
This is an article I would like to keep and read at more leisure. People change with increased age and experience. (Some would say that we crotchety ones don’t change fast enough so that we are simply left behind.) Roger Simon usually has something interesting to observe, but perhaps I only say that because I normally agree with him. I don’t remember who said it: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” When we make mistakes, it is best to own up to them and correct them.
Deductive reasoning’s natural home is in the spiritual life in the place of worship and in the home. Inductive reasoning is the natural resident of daily life and the World of Work. When the spiritual life mixes in with daily life and work, it carries the Deductive reasoning with it. People who are holistic have this. Too much Deductive reasoning can build up a structure which will not withstand Inductive reasoning. When too much reality feedback impacts enough of a person’s Deuctive reasoninge elements, the illogic weight can cause it to collapse and get rearranged by Inductie reasoning.
People who are power-groupies will not have such a therapeutic collapse.
The therapeutic collapse in Arthur Koestler happened in solitary confinement when in reverie his sensory perceptions gradually overpowered his Leninist doctrine and collapsed the Deductive reasoning structures.
People with a separation between church and state within themselves do not contaminate their daily life or the World of Work with misplaced Deductive reasoning.
“…don’t feel as if we have changed.”
We haven’t – the Dem Party has gone from opposing racism to endorsing it, and institutionalizing it, in a large variety of ways. To the Dem Party, the KKK now ostensibly includes every white person in America, if not the world, even liberals, who must therefore acknowledge their “white privilege” and maybe say ten Hail Marys to get their “street cred.”
You have to be a flaming lunatic or moron to belong to the Dem Party in 2013; unless of course you’re one of the approved groups, then it’s de rigueur.
I’m in! Where do I sign up? Let’s change the culture. Art is supposed to be subversive and explode old tired lies. Art is about LIFE and TRUTH. Let’s tell some!
i don’t get the incessant california-bashing. i mean, i can see how the line “be glad you don’t live there” is good for endearing one to other parts of the country, but c’mon, simon, if it was so horrible you wouldn’t continue to make your home here. does the state have big problems? ..oh hell yeah it does… but i still can’t (and, apparently, neither can you) imagine living anywhere else. there’s reasons apart from politics why living here is expensive. for me, the weather alone is ‘worth the price of admission’.
It got down to 45 degrees the other night.
I tried to close the hollywood windows, except the crank mechanism did not work because I had never closed my windows.
Long ago I did have Gonzales Brothers install wrought iron bars to stop people from breaking in and stealing my tv set.
I have a liberal friend who works in a designer, creative industry. She is higly educated and has a extremely unrealistic view of the underclass.
I tell here stories of the underclass that are funny, maddening, shocking, and uplifting.
She told me that I might turn her into a Republican.
I told her that is not my goal. I just want her to be a firewall against the conservative demonization that is so common wherever the creative class congregates.
Itellectually honest liberals of good faith are our friends.
“Intellectually honest liberals of good faith are our friends.”
Perhaps, but they do seem far and few between.
Treat nice liberals like precious stones because they are so rare.
Conversely take the fight to the most toxic of leftists. They are so full of hate only a verbal 2×4 to the head will work.
The second they get personal tell them that if they want to go back to high school tactic of personal attack so can you.
I walked left the Democrat Plantation when Jimmy The Inept was President. My parents were old line Democrats who thought Harry Trueman was the model for a perfect POTUS. Jimmy’s ineptitude combined with Democrat behavior since the 1968 made me realize that the Dems talked a good game but all their plans end up failing, and that they were no longer Pro-American & Pro Capitalist. Smartest move I ever made.
This is the perfect point in history to launch a counter revolution against the media educational government axis. All their power rests on the fact that it used to take massive scale to deliver their services at a low unit cost. That is no longer true of movies or music or literature or education. Modern technology has all but zeroed out the costs of production and distribution. The mainstream entertainment products are all spectacle and no substance. The education most kids get is laughable and overpriced. The Leviathan has neither talent nor the ability to adapt.
We can win the culture war. Movies, music, and books can be made and distributed cheaply. All we need is good products and they will become cool. Consider that the most culture altering acts in the music business, Elvis and The Beatles, were not products of the machine. The machine was giving us crap like Bobby Vinton and girl groups. They needed the machine to distribute them, but that would not be true today. The machine is delivering pure crap for the most part, as it always has, it knows no other way. The world is waiting for the next Elvis and he ain’t gonna come from the people who brought us such super-talents as Katy Perry and Britney Spears.
Good books, movies, and music can be made and distributed without the machine. My kid, who is 19, tells me radio is obsolete, only old people listen to it. She downloads her music and books onto her telephone. It is a new world we are living in. Hollywood, The networks, the big papers and magazines, and the universities are dinosaurs who fancy themselves Immortals. They think the blinding light in the sky is a new dawn.
Anybody who is known as the Polish Prince cannot be all bad.
The ‘don’t gloat’ advice hits home. It’s centrally important!
Also, and this is where the resistance to the daydreamy (at best) Left tends to break down, because ‘fiscal conservative/social liberal” has a 30 year track record of electoral failure. It just doesn’t work, and the very fact that the lefty media and pundists push it so very hard, year after year, should be all we need to know to understand that it’s poison. It they _really_ believed that their opponents lose because of social conservatism, they’d be pushing us to adopt more social conservatism.
The real sticking point is that the SoCons and libertarians are at odds on economics. SoCons often kind of agree with the New Deal, and hate the Great Society (in spirit, that’s the divide). When Republicans run against Social Security or Medicare (and yes, I know Medicare was born in the 1960s), they are committing electoral suicide, because that’s not what their base wants.
The opposition to Obamacare is to a large extent rooted in social conservatism, it’s as much or more about abortion and ‘death panels’ than it is about cost. Yet the GOP only wants to talk about the cost, and Mitt Romney couldn’t make a convincing case that he was even opposed to Obamacare in the first place, he said it, but many on our side just didn’t believe him.
Likewise, the GOP elites long to support open-borders immigration and amnesty. That position is _anathema_ to many SoCons and national sovereingty conservatives. It was amnesty for illegals, more than the Iraq War or Katrina, that cost the GOP control of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008. Again, Mitt Romney couldn’t convince the base that he would be strong on the borders.
The business community is no longer particularly beloved among the GOP base, for that matter. There’s a growing (and largely accurate) perception that the business class is aligned with the ‘progressives’ on most issues.
Libertarians don’t have to _agree_ with the SoCons and national sovereignty conservatives, but they do have to work with them to win. The price of smaller government in economics is more social conservatism and border and defense security measures, and making a certain amount of peace with the New Deal. Refusing to do so just means we get Obama, full-bore and undiluted.
Roger,
When I was 23 I went from a small southern town in flyover country to graduate school at a large West Coast state university. The year was 1970. It was if I had dropped down a rabbit hole into Wonderland. I gradually went from a political neutral to a liberal, under the influence of my peers and a lot of dope smoking, although I was agog at the violence and rabid intolerance of the campus leftists. I live again now in flyover country, in a small college town, where so many of my friends and aquaintances are mild-to-committed liberals for all the best reasons, and I am something of an oddity as a conservative and a Republican. They don’t understand why, because most of them know of leftists of the seventies only as the flower childern and candle holders they saw in their own little towns and colleges. They don’t know who really is leading at the front of their march. I found myself in one of those marches long ago and stopped to ask who was way up there at the head of it, where I couldn’t see, and what were the signs they were carrying, and were the chains and clubs going to come out this time. I stepped aside and let them pass. They are still marching. I want to thank you for your journey, and for your advocacy, and for this website which is a haven, an inspiration, and a rallying point for so many of us who do not want to see our country destroyed.
“They don’t know who really is leading at the front of their march.”
I am from a small town in Mineesota and have seen many Democrats (I wont call them liberal) like this also. They are simply low information, and will pull the “D” in voting all their life because grandpa was a farmer in the DFL.
Dear Mr. Simon,
Excellent speech. My only question would be “Why did it take you so long to see the light?”
But my other point is PLEASE FIX YOUR WEBSITE! It’s driving me nuts.
Yours sincerely,
A bird that sees further than other birds
Dear Mr. Simon,
Excellent speech. My only question would be “Why did it take you so long to see the light?”
But my other point is PLEASE FIX YOUR WEBSITE! It’s driving me nuts.
Yours sincerely,
A bird that can see further than other birds (hat tip to Charles Moore).
“For example, I am still more or less a social liberal, especially on marriage which is to me a civil rights issue, and likely to remain so.”
I’ve been trying for years to figure out how anyone can believe that one can be both a “social liberal” and an “economic and foreign policy” conservative. The costs of a libertine, hedonistic society (the inevitable result of social liberalism) must be paid, whether you like it or not, and will eventually overwhelm both economic prudence and the will to self-defense.
“…my friend the late Andrew Breitbart was right when he said “politics was downstream of culture.””
Check out a much more detailed analysis and host of suggestions by “Sultan Knish” in Building Our Own Media @
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2013/01/building-our-own-media.html
Excerpt:
Buying an old media outlet, like a magazine, a newspaper or a news network is a poor value. These outlets have an aging readership and a white elephant infrastructure. Their only truly valuable part is their brand. And the brand will begin taking a vicious beating the moment it drops out of the left’s consensus network. The brand does have value. Newsweek in conservative hands would have been a useful weapon, but not a consensus-killer.
The consensus is a swarm, it’s a mob. Fighting it with one outlet is like trying to fight off bees with a baseball bat. Some bees will be swatted and you’ll be stung and the outcome will depend on whether you can absorb more venom than you can kill bees. It makes for a nice last stand, but not much else.
Countering one consensus with another is a problem that requires crowd solutions. And they already exist. The conservative consensus of social media, blogs and news sites is the talk radio of the net. Conservative news sites already distribute that content, and while they could use better designs, the basis structure of the consensus is in place. The next step is to begin expanding the consensus into the non-political sphere to target not just low-information voters, but people that are not strongly political.
(Only lately, have I begun to understand what it was they wanted. More of that in a moment).
So Roger, what was it they really wanted? I don’t think you ever got around to that.
Speaking of switching sides…
What is up with the liks to Salon stories? Why is PJM linking to a Leftist junk journalism site Roger?
I too am one who switched political sides after 9/11. I was 27 at the time. I’m 39 now. Why that&s important I’ll get to in a moment. But first of all, the reason, well, one of the reasons I switched is because I found the way that the Democrats reacted to 9/11 with all the finger pointing, reluctant to go to war in response, but most of all, all the conspiracy theories that popped up. All the “9/11 was an inside job” nonsense just turned me off from the Left and later, the looney leftist libertarians like Alex Jones. With all that craziness, I decided I could no longer be a part of an ideology that believed that way. But what really sealed the deal in my switch was just actually listening to the other side instead of getting the cliff note version from fellow Libs, and realizing that like Roger here, I actually agreed with the other side more than I ever agreed with the left.Why? Well, because the Right just seemed to make much more logical sense on all sorts of issues. Which made me realize that I was lying to myself (and others) when discussing political issues. Which leads me to my age from above. I was a Democrat all my life up until 9/11 at the age of 27. And then so when I switched, I literally became angry that I was being lied to, and lying to myself, for all those years. I know that’s the case because after getting into an argument with my older cousin just a year later, that he was using the EXACT SAME Talking Points that I was using before I switched.None of which being true of course, so that told me that Liberals seem to get their beliefs thru what others tell them to believe rather than thinking for themselves as to whether or not what they believe actually makes logical sense. Which leads to the constant question to liberals of “Do you actually believe the nonsense you just said?”