For over two centuries, Leftist movements have dispatched any and all opposition in a near-identical manner. They start with enemies furthest to the Right and work their way leftwards until only those and the far Left are still alive or not in prison. This method is simple, and it has been used in every instance of Leftists successfully seizing and solidifying dictatorial power.
When this happens, the moderate Left (i.e., traditional liberals) is always completely unprepared when the far Left inevitably turns on them. The liberals can never fathom that their former allies have betrayed them and are now persecuting them as counterrevolutionaries. This eleventh-hour realization was felt by the Girondins in France, the Mensheviks in Russia, the peasants in China and Cambodia, and many others.
This occurs for one of two reasons. Either the liberals naively thought the Leftists were actually interested in an honest and permanent alliance with them against the Right. Or they assumed the Left was a bunch of disorganized rabble-rousers, useful for leverage against the Right but in no way considered an actual threat to the liberals by any sane person.
This betrayal is now being felt by mainstream liberals in the United States and elsewhere in the West. Liberals, who were considered the vanguards of progress just a few years ago, are now viewed as insufficiently revolutionary.
This includes Glenn Greenwald, nobody's idea of a conservative journalist. For decades, he won the accolades of the Left for going after Republicans and corporate America. But when he started writing about how the 2016 Russiagate scandal was a psyops campaign to keep Trump out of office, all that built-up goodwill evaporated. His former editor-in-chief at The Intercept called him "a practitioner of manufactured controversy in the service of the hard right." The New Republic declared that "bombast and ego" drive Greenwald's writing. Convicted traitor and cosplayer Chelsea Manning tweeted, "You're greedy, unprincipled, and I'm embarrassed for ever considering you a friend."
It also includes Martina Navratilova, the first openly gay female tennis player and staunch anti-conservative. She has compared Republican presidencies to the Soviet-installed puppet regimes of Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, she has enough sense to recognize the innate unfairness of biological men destroying women's sports behind the smokescreen of transgenderism. The group TransActual labeled her, predictably, as "transphobic." Trans powerlifter JayCee Cooper claimed Navratilova helped "usher in an entire platform of hatred of the trans community" and that she "should be held accountable." Athlete Ally removed her from their advisory board.
This includes Bari Weiss, the former New York Times writer who was bullied into resignation after having the audacity to suggest that one of history's most influential newspapers shouldn't let its op-ed pieces be censored by Twitter mobs. The New York Daily News mocked her "whining" as "the picture of privileged hypersensitivity." The Guardian accused Weiss of building her career "by seeming to solicit and revel in online anger" and of being a "professional rightwing attention seeker." Alex Shephard of The New Republic, presumably sober and with a straight face, defended the New York Times as being "hardly an organ of the woke left."
This includes Matt Taibbi, a former Rolling Stone journalist whose leftist writings would raise Lenin's eyebrows. But like Greenwald, Taibbi thinks that whatever the righteousness of one's causes might be, they should not be attained via manipulation, coercion, and deceit between the media and the highest levels of government power. But when testifying before Congress regarding their work on the Twitter Files, both Taibbi and fellow journalist Michael Shellenberger were derided by congressional Democrats as "so-called journalists" whose integrity is compromised by the fact that they get paid for the work they do. And on the day of Taibbi's testimony, the IRS...the same IRS of Obama's "not a smidgen of corruption" fame...showed up unannounced at his front door and searched his home.
And this includes Bill Maher, whose recent broadsides against the woke Left are most refreshing, but are delivered with brow furrowed and mouth agape, with a befuddled et tu Brute? manner, as if he couldn't have seen this coming.
Whether these Johnny-come-latelies grasp the full significance of their battles is up for debate. Navratilova seems concerned only about keeping biological men out of women's sports. She appears unfazed at the untold numbers of mentally ill girls and boys who are being bamboozled into irreparably mutilating themselves by the unholy alliance between the far Left and the Mengele quacks in the medical and psychotherapeutic professions. She has partially backtracked, offered apologies, and pulled the "but I have friends who are trans" card.
Author J.K. Rowling is a misandrist, and she displays some pretty impressive verbal gymnastics in attempts to parry charges of transphobia by reframing her arguments as a defense of vulnerable women against the omnipresent Toxic Male. Both her father and first husband were abusive creeps, so her own biases are understandable, but she fails to completely recognize the foundation of the problem. It would be news to her that recent polling indicates that Republicans support (67%) keeping biological men out of women's areas, whereas Democrats support (64%) putting women at risk. Regarding women's sports, Republicans support (85%) and Democrats oppose (63%) requirements that athletes compete on teams matching their biological gender. These issues don't pit men against women; they pit the Left against the rational.
Weiss, Taibbi, and Maher seem to be made of sterner stuff. Maybe it's because the nature of their professions naturally put them into daily contact with Leftists and their authoritarian mindsets, and they better understand the threat from the inside out. Maybe because they come from the media world rather than from the sports or fiction writer world, they possess a sort of instinctual grasp of the importance of words, communication, persuasive argument, evidence, and the paramount necessity of the right of supposedly free people to express their opinions, whatever those may be. Maybe they understand the historical significance of current events, and it has dawned on them that they are simply the latest version of the Girondins of France and the Mensheviks of Russia, temporarily useful to the Left but inevitably dispatched as contaminated bourgeois.
While these epiphanies are welcome, their recipients need to understand that their decades-long unabashed kowtowing of the Left helped land us in the dismal state of affairs in which we all currently wallow. This game ends in one of two ways. Either the far Left wins, or the traditional liberal/conservative entente wins. If we are blessed enough to experience the latter, perhaps liberal America will absorb the lesson here that maybe, just maybe, they should reevaluate their smug condescension towards millions of peaceful, hardworking conservatives who simply want the government to leave them alone. Disagree as we will about abortion, health care, and everything else, there is an underlying respect from conservatives for basic constitutional rights that simply doesn't exist among the woke Left. When the dust from this settles, you should reconsider precisely who is and who isn't...what's the word?...deplorable.
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