The Bookworm Beat 12/10/17 — the “Leftists are everywhere” edition

For Sunday evening, just a few observations about Leftists — how they’re made, what they want, and just how crazy they really are.

Socialists LeftistsWhat makes a Leftist. I was born a Leftist, in that I was raised in a family that voted Democrat. However, because my parents were Kennedy Democrats, when the Democrats took a hard Left turn and began the journey to becoming today’s Leftists, I bailed.

Today’s young people are becoming Leftists through the education system, as well as the media world in which they live. They’re indoctrinated and ignorant. One always hopes that they can gently be cajoled to conservativism if they are carefully introduced to logic and facts. Also, life in the real world, away from academia, has a way of helping people part ways with the factual fantasy that is socialism. It just doesn’t work as promised in the real world.

And then there are the ones who come to socialism through womanly wiles. Paul Krugman is repeatedly cited as an example of this kind of Leftist. Back in his heyday, when his economic ideas were sharp enough to win him a Nobel Prize, Krugman was a garden-variety Democrat. Somewhere along the line, though, Krugman lost his wits and became a socialist, guided by anger, pessimism, and paranoia.

Those who have followed Krugman’s career point to the likely cause: In 1996, he married Robin Wells, herself an economist. While Krugman was, as I said, a garden-variety Democrat, Wells is more of an actual Leftist who, among other things, has written sympathetically about the Occupy movement. You can get here a small sense here of the values that drive her economic worldview:

Colin Kaerpernick is another man who became radicalized through a woman:

As the French wisely say, Cherchez la femme, look for the woman.

In this case, the woman is hip-hop radio personality DJ Nessa Diab.She’s a Berkeley grad, a very dogmatic outspoken Black Lives Matter advocate and a Muslim. She and Colin Kaepernick are engaged, and Kaepernick converted to Islam during the off season.

The two are reportedly planning what Kaepernick calls ‘a traditional Muslim wedding.’

Pretty simple…boy meets radical girl, they find they have interests and ideology in common…except,it’s haram, forbidden for a Muslima (a Muslim girl) to marry a non-believer. This is not to say that Kaepernick wasn’t pretty far along the radical path anyway.

It’s a real love story…not only do they love the same things, but they can hate the same people too. There are certainly a fair amount of patriotic American Muslims, but many Muslims here follow the Qu’ran which says their first loyalty aside from Allah is to the umma, the worldwide Muslim polity. And no one with much common sense would call the folks at Black Lives Matter remotely patriotic. So it all fits together pretty well.

I think I can add one more name to the list of men who have become radicalized through a woman. That would be Jake Tapper. I know that when I started blogging back in 2004, most conservatives considered Tapper a straight shooter. Yeah, you could tell he was a Democrat, but he really seemed committed to reporting the news in as bias-free a way as possible.

Tapper’s lack of bias has been changing steadily over the years. He’ll still strike out against the extremes of Leftism (and he definitely gets the nod at Twitchy when he does so), but he also openly espouses some pretty hard-line Leftist views himself:

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Jake Tapper tangled on CNN’s State of the Union today. The main subject Tapper started out his interview using the statement of the Arab League:

“Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is a dangerous development that places the United States at a position of bias in favor of the occupation and the violation of international law and resolutions.”

Presumably, he did this because there have been minimal demonstrations in Jerusalem and he needed something to show that Trump is stupid and did a very bad thing.

Haley proceeds to eviscerate him, of course.

So where does Tapper’s more open Leftism come from? Well, maybe it’s his wife, whom he met in 2004 and married in 2006. We can guess at her politics from the fact that, before settling down to become a wife and mother, she was a regional field director for . . . wait for it . . . Planned Parenthood. Not proof of anything, of course, but definitely food for thought.

What do Leftists want? Leftists want us to respect them. This is especially true for gays. Their demand for gay marriage was less about legal rights than it was about forcing ordinary Americans to agree that gay relationships are precisely equal to traditional heterosexual relationships, except for the part about the biological fail.

The cake case is more of the same. It’s not about cake. It’s about insisting that ordinary people acknowledge that a gay marital relationship is indistinguishable from, and just as good as, any other relationship.

This is a pretty strange demand when you think of it. Let me explain:

I am one of those “praise from Caesar is praise indeed” kind of people. That is, the respect I seek is from people I respect in return. What you have with the Leftist gay mafia is the inverse of that desire to earn respect from those whom we respect. Instead, the Leftist gay mafia is using state power to force a show of “respect” from people they despise and revile. It’s not enough that they get a legal right to marry; they need to have people they consider deplorable grovel before them acclaiming that right.

It’s a pretty sick way of viewing the world, if you ask me.

And just how crazy are Leftists? They’re Lara Witt crazy:

As a queer femme of color, I keep close relationships with people who go beyond allyship; they’re true accomplices in the fight against white supremacy, queerphobia, and misogyny. If you’re not going to support marginalized folks, then we can’t be friends, let alone date. The personal is political.

Beyond the lovely cushioning, happiness and support that we receive from our platonic relationships (which are, in all honesty, soul-feeding and essential), feminists also date! But there are questions we have to ask before we get close to someone.

The following list of questions is applicable to all relationships — certainly not just cisgender, heterosexual ones:

1. Do you believe that Black Lives Matter?

Yes? Wonderful. Let’s start here. There are three categories that are non-negotiables for me: an understanding of race, class, and gender. Not everyone understands how these three can be insidious, systemic and intertwined, but anyone who doesn’t take the time to learn how systemic racism works isn’t going to care about how racism affects me or people who are darker-skinned than I am.

I don’t want to have to have laborious discussions where I have to prove to someone that white privilege or non-black privilege exists. If they are willing to learn and listen and make the space to decenter their whiteness (if they are white), that’s a good place to start.

2. What are your thoughts on gender and sexual orientation?

The gender binary is a tiny box and I wish it didn’t exist, but it does. I wouldn’t want to be with anyone who is queer-phobic. One out of many important elements to dismantling patriarchy is to abolish gender roles as well as the limited understanding that we have about sexuality and gender itself. I can’t imagine being with someone who is transphobic; as a feminist and woman of color, it would be a betrayal of what I stand for. Ignoring trans-misogynoir would be to deny one of the biggest, most despicable problems that we face.

3. How do you work to dismantle sexism and misogyny in your life?

I’ve met cisgender heteronormative (cishet) men who hate women. They say they love women, but that love is conditional on not having their toxic masculinity questioned or threatened in any way. And they love us as a monolith, they love what women have to offer, whether it is sex, food, love, care, emotional labor: they love us for what we can do for them, not because of who we are for ourselves. It is crucial for cishet men to learn how to decenter their male privilege in order for them to understand the multitudes of interpretations of femininity and womanhood.

Beyond Misogyny 101, does the person you are with understand rape culture, systemic sexism, and misogynoir? Are they willing to learn if they don’t? Misogyny is more than the pay gap. Walk away from anyone who believes that “boys will be boys” and that women are supposed to be mothers because we’re nothing but ambulatory incubators.

4. What are your thoughts on sex work?

You may scratch your head at this one, but much like racism and misogynoir, being pro-sex worker is a necessary pillar of dismantling the patriarchy. I don’t mean pro-sex worker in the sense where non-sex workers write op-eds and think pieces about how sex work is amazing and feminist.

You must read the whole thing and you must share it with the less radicalized Leftists in your life. Don’t shove it in their faces, because they’ll start defending that lunacy. Offer it to them as an exampled of how much more complicated dating is now than it was in your days. Let them draw their own conclusions about the crazy. By the way, just so you know what your daughters and granddaughters are reading, Witt frequently contributes to Teen Vogue.

Bonus: Are Leftists turning on each other? Oh, yes they are, and it’s wonderful in a schadenfreude kind of way:

It used to be that when someone called me an abomination, I was in the presence of a homophobe.

But a recent opinion column in Texas State University’s main newspaper damned me for a different reason. I’m abominable because I’m white.

The column wasn’t aimed at me personally but at my kind, and the Hispanic student who wrote it began by saying that “of all the white people” he had ever encountered, there were a dozen or so who rose to the level of “decent.”

The allowance that 12 of us passed muster was perhaps the most generous passage in a screed that had an unambiguous message for white people, be they “good-hearted liberals” or “right-wing extremists.”

“I hate you,” he wrote, “because you shouldn’t exist. You are both the dominant apparatus on the planet and the void in which all other cultures, upon meeting you, die.”

The headline: “Your DNA Is an Abomination.”

Yes, this was deliberate provocation. By a college student. And he’s obviously right that people of color have been systematically oppressed.

But what college newspaper would have published a column by a white student telling his black peers that they’re a wretched lot? What, beyond catharsis, did the column’s author accomplish?

And what has happened to our discourse — and how we do we make necessary progress — when hate is answered by hate, prejudice is echoed by prejudice, extremism begets extremism and ostensible liberalism practices abject illiberalism? Isn’t that how Donald Trump wins?

This wasn’t just one student or one campus or college campuses in general. This was a manner of thinking and language too prevalent among those who correctly call out racial inequities and social injustices but wrongly fall prey themselves to the bigotry behind those ills.

Of course, because the above is written by Frank Bruni, as the reference to Trump makes clear, Bruni thinks that it’s conservatives who set the tone. I’m not going to fight that nonsense. It is enough for me that they are turning on each other. As The Incredibles might have said, “When everybody is a victim, then nobody is a victim” — and a world without victims is not a world in which Leftists can long survive.

Finally, to as a palate cleanser, a nice essay about the fact that socialism is not a nice ideology.

*****

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