Popping Crazy Pills
The Left has succumbed to pure ideological dementia.
Substack Notes is the gift that keeps on giving.
Yesterday, I published an article on the LA anti-ICE riots. In it I excoriated Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass, the idiots who have apparently decided that the Great Los Angeles Fire didn’t cause sufficient damage and are now letting radical leftie activists take their shot at the city.
Well, of course I received counterbattery fire from the Resistance. My commonsense observation that obstructing the enforcement of federal law is a bad idea offended the sensibilities of one junior Bolshevik who claims to believe that the evils of Donald Trump justify resistance by any means necessary. Here is his comment on my article:
“Obstructing the enforcement of federal law and assaulting federal law enforcement are felonies.” Except if you’re doing it at the behest of Donald Trump to try and steal an election and defraud 80 million people, in which case you’re a hero who gets a full pardon. The president takes an oath to ensure the laws are faithfully executed. He violated it on day one and is creating a praetorian presidency where his supporters have a green light to use extra-judicial violence on his behalf while the rest of us are expected to respect the law. Fuck that! This isn’t consent of the governed. It’s usurpation and turning the presidency into a monarchy that arbitrarily exercises state power in furtherance of an autocrat’s will. We fought a revolution to liberate ourselves from this grotesque form of government. Maybe we need another one. I don’t like our chances. But hopefully at least a lot of the people responsible for putting us here will die before it’s over.
Isn’t that precious? I was particularly struck by the term praetorian presidency, which though nicely alliterative doesn’t make much sense. Anyhow, my response to Josh of Arc was that he should be careful, because such revolutionary zeal could land him in jail. And he didn’t like that:
I respected the law in the past because the process at least had some impartiality and integrity to it. That’s gone. Now it’s just an instrument for Trump and his cult to wield arbitrarily to crush their enemies. I have no more obligation to respect them as legitimate authorities than I would a street gang who was trying to take over my neighborhood. I’ll do as I please, and others should as well. Better the entire nation burn than that we bow to a tyrant. If you weren’t a weak man who wanted to surrender his rights to a king, then you’d be up in arms also.
Now it’s certainly possible that Josh of Arc is a sad little revolutionary cosplayer who’s just blowing smoke. But the Left does have a romantic obsession of long standing with political violence. That mind virus can lead people to commit terrible crimes: The names Luigi Mangione, Elias Rodriguez, and Mohamed Sabry Soliman may ring a bell. So maybe Josh of Arc is down in his basement right now, making pipe bombs or Molotov cocktails. I don’t discount the possibility.
It was the evolution of the Omnicause that plunged the Left into its current state of ideological dementia. This is the idea that it’s all connected: Fighting climate change is believe women (but not Israeli women) is LGBLT rights is Palestine/Gaza is smashing capitalism is defending “our democracy” is fighting fascism, etc. and so forth. Viewed in proper perspective this is pure paranoia: the belief that nothing happens by accident, that history is a vast rightwing conspiracy.
The toxic influence of the Omnicause explains why the anti-ICE riots in LA features so many keffiyehs and Palestinian flags, why there exists such groups as Queers for Palestine, why fighting climate change and smashing capitalism go hand in hand with defending “our democracy.” And it requires a daily dose of crazy pills to support the mental gymnastics required to keep all that in one‘s head
The Omnicause has also implanted the “Yes, but…” mode of discourse in the minds of its devotees. Yes, it was wrong of Luigi Mangione to assassinate Brian Thompson, but you must realize that health insurance companies are evil. Yes, it was wrong of Mohamed Sabry Soliman to hurl firebombs of Jews, but Zionism is evil. Yes, the LA anti-ICE rioters are breaking the law, but no one has been killed or seriously injured and besides, ICE is evil. In each of those sentences, the second clause negates the first clause. It’s a neat trick.
And pure fantasy rules the day when it comes to President Donald J. Trump. The real guy, bad as he is, somehow fails to satisfy the Resistance’s need to vent its rage and shout out its hate. Trump has been elevated to the pinnacle of the Left’s demonology. He’s an amalgam of Hitler and Mussolini and Franco and, probably, Vlad the Impaler. He’s said to be plotting to destroy “our democracy” and institute the American Reich. He’s said to be preparing a genocide for BIPOCs and the LGBLT crowd. He’s said to be stockpiling Handmaid’s Tale garb in readiness for the day when women are stripped of their rights and reduced to chattel. And so on and so forth.
Whether the Resistance actually believes everything it says about Trump and MAGA is a doubtful question, but it seems safer to take the comrades at their word and proceed on the assumption that yes, they really are that loony. Watching their antics, reading and listening to their discourse, I’m increasingly reminded of that radical New Left group of the Sixties and early Seventies, the Weather Underground. Those radicals too succumbed to an ideological mind virus that detached them from reality and drove them crazy. “There's no way to be committed to non-violence in the most violent society that history has ever created. I'm not committed to non-violence in any way.” That was Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather Underground’s La Pasionaria, sounding quite up to date.
The Omnicause also compels its devotees to treat reality like Silly Putty: something to be pounded into whatever shape the need of the moment demands. For example, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times describes an angry mob preventing ICE agents from exiting a restaurant in San Diego restaurant after a raid as a “peaceful demonstration.” No, Michelle. That’s a mob of criminals, attempting to prevent the enforcement of federal immigration law. Over at National Review Online, Rich Lowry put it this way:
It’s perverse to consider such assemblages meant to stop the law from being enforced as acceptable and a president who wants to enforce the law—and prevent federal officers from being obstructed or attacked—as the threat to the democratic order.
In the telling of people like Goldberg, the Trump Administration’s reaction to the disorders in LA, now spreading across the country, constitute a “provocation” and a prelude to an authoritarian takeover. They pretend that the mob violence is “mostly peaceful.” They would have you believe that preventing law enforcement officers from doing their job is a legitimate method of protest, and that sanctuary cities like LA have the right to impose a ban on the enforcement of US immigration law. They strive to create the impression that Trump is the one who’s breaking the law. All of this, whether implied or plainly stated, is false. Whatever may be thought of the advisability of his actions, the President is acting within the law.
Another example of their Silly Putty approach to reality is the comrades’ attempt to erase the difference between legal and illegal immigrants. This, they hope, will fool people into believing that Trump wants to ethnically cleanse America by deporting all foreigners. The narrative that the Resistance constructed around the Maryland Dad, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was designed to give the impression that he was a poor, put-upon victim of MAGA xenophobia. In reality, of course, he’s a bad actor with a history of beating his wife and engaging in human trafficking. The fact that the Trump Administration was wrong to ship him off to El Salvador doesn’t change the fact that he’s a creep who never should have been allowed to remain in this country.
Similarly, the lamentable roster of violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants is waved away with the claim that the crime rate for immigrants is lower than the crime rate for native-born Americans: See this exchange on Substack Notes. This too conflates legal and illegal immigrants, and it’s deceptive for another reason: The friends and family of Laken Riley are unlikely to be comforted by statistics. Relative to the conflict’s length, America’s casualty rate during the Afghanistan War was very low. But as I’ve had occasion to remark on other occasions, for every military member killed or wounded in Afghanistan, the casualty rate was one hundred percent. And that’s true as well when the victims of criminal illegal immigrants are totaled up.
So it goes. Honestly, there’s no point in trying to reason with these people. It’s only worth engaging with them to tease out further examples of their doublethink—which they seem happy to provide. For their master delusion is that they are the normal ones, that only they perceive reality, that the facts are on their side, and that everybody else is afflicted with false consciousness.
But I do have to admit that the Resistance has brought off one miracle—by managing to make Donald J. Trump look like the avatar of adult behavior and common sense.
Michelle Goldberg should look up what happened in San Francisco earlier this week, when a Jewish-owned community center was vandalized and defaced with threats of violence and murder of Jews and Israel supporters. The owner admittedly supports leftist causes and the anti-I.C.E. protests. That didn't matter to the leftist thugs. To them, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew. I wonder if Michelle Goldberg will ever figure that out. Probably not, as the gig with the New York Times is just too attractive to give up.
Honestly, I'm MAGA because the alternative is terrifying.