This was posted to my comments by someone I honestly believe means well –
This is a beautiful fisking of someone who *earned* that fisking. Thank you.
That having been said–and I say this with all respect intended–I note that when it comes to conservatives, you have a tendency to (rightfully!) argue in favor of individual accountability; you acknowledge that some people on the right are assholes but correctly point out that the vast majority are NOT. And you have little tolerance when it is implied that the assholes should be taken as representative of the whole.
When it comes to the left, though, it sometimes feels to me as though you paint with a remarkably broad brush. Speaking as someone who lives in a blue state and who has a fair number of Democrat/Liberal family and friends…’the left’ is not nearly so monolithic as you paint them.
It’s a mistake to imagine all Democrats to be mustache-twirling-evil monsters, IMO. Are there some assholes on the left? Absolutely! But the vast majority are people that I hope you’d get along with just fine if you were chatting across a table with a beer in hand. In my experience, most are genuinely moral people whose greatest flaw is that their idealism is not tempered by realism. And, yes, that flaw can sometimes present in ugly ways…but I like to believe that such conflicts can be better resolved with conversation rather than condemnation.
The assholes on the left might be your enemy, but I don’t think that the entirety of ‘the left’ needs to be.
This was my response, and then afterwards I’m going to expound the hell out of it.
If the majority of the left aren’t my enemy, the burden of proof is on them, because frankly I haven’t seen jack shit from most of them beyond paying lip service to principles, as the rest of their fellows go about doing whatever horrible thing they feel like, and the ones who claim to be moral sit there silently and let them.
I do paint with a broad brush about the left, because democrats who stand up against leftist insanity are a tiny minority.
Then I get to listen to people like you, who are probably honestly decent people, tell me that you’re not all insane… Great. SHOW ME.
My liberal friends (and yes, I do have a few still, though most tossed me under the bus as soon as there was any societal pressure to do so) will constantly chide me about my words, or my attitude, and go tsk tsk, how rude! But then when people on their side go bat shit fucking insane, they sit there meekly and stand for nothing, because they know the beast they fed will just as easily turn and eat them too.
Besides, as soon as a democrat stands for principle outside of the narrative, they get tossed. Pick any of them in media, punditry, or academia. Any at all. Glenn Greenwald. Tim Pool. Jordan Peterson. Those were all mushy moderates, until they say hey wait, the left is going nuts, and boom, now the left thinks they are the second coming of Satan-Hitler. The party is currently enraged at Sinema and Manchin.
And I’m not alone in this. Most politically alert non-leftists will tell you the same thing. You belong to a cult which will not abide heresy. You want to show us that you aren’t all authoritarian statist trash, DO SOMETHING.
Okay. Now for some expounding. Of course not everyone on the left is the same. It’s a big tent. There’s old fashioned liberals, who though they believe in stupid backwards policies, usually tend to have good but naïve intentions. Then there are the progressives, who are basically communist puritans who are actively trying to destroy America. Then there’s the news media, which is just pure Satanic evil. There are also useful idiot NPCs who don’t really have any belief system at all, who just repeat whatever script they are fed that day.
I can say equally insulting things about the right. We’re a big dumb tent too. It ranges from liberty minded people to authoritarians. We even let stupid Mitt Romney in it for some baffling and inexplicable reason. Many in the GOP are trash grifters or NRO cruise ship snobs. However, even though the most loathsome of republicans are corrupt, lazy, shiftless, and stupid, they usually aren’t trying to actively destroy the country.
The worst of both sides are the proverbial swamp creatures. And whether you loved Trump or hated him, there’s no denying that there’s a bloated, elitist, co-dependent bureaucrat/academic/pundit class whose primary motivation is getting and keeping more power for themselves.
So of these various competing factions, why do I typically paint the left with a broad brush?
Because you fucking deserve it.
I see the right fight with itself constantly. The right is its own worst enemy in that respect. That’s why there’s always the joke about republicans snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Too many of them are passive wusses who wish to maintain the status quo. Their ultimate achievement is to lose with dignity.
The left however gets shit done, because they always put aside their differences and work toward whatever goal their elite wants. This is effective, but also what makes them despicable.
For this next part I’m not talking about the politicians or the punditry. Those guys pick a narrative, no matter how false it may be, and they fucking PUSH. They run with that narrative until it absolutely collapses, then they make up a new narrative and run with it instead.
No. I’m talking about YOU. Regular people. Voters. The guy next door. The masses on the internet. Just average joes. Democrats. Libs. Whatever you call yourself. Anybody who identifies as being on the left.
When your leaders pick a narrative, you drink that Kool-Aid. Even if it’s shit flavored Kool-Aid, most of you smile and tell us it’s the best fucking Kool-Aid you’ve ever tasted. It’s milk from the teat of a magic cherry flavored Unicorn. Nope. It’s shit. You all know it’s shit. But you go along with the narrative anyway.
When the insane progs among you lie their asses off, I’m talking blatant, easily disproven, painfully ham-fisted, fucking LIES… Do you call them out? Do you say, “hang on guys, that’s a little nuts”. Because if you do, the rest of us sure as fuck don’t ever see it. Pick a topic, any topic. It’s always the same.
When people nominally on your side are saying crazy, vile, violent, wacky shit on the internet… do you jump in? When I go out on Twitter yesterday and I find hundreds of posts from fucking scumbags dancing in blood, how come I didn’t see comments from Caring Liberals condemning them? (hell when some prog wrote that an evil motherfucker running over 50 people was karma and that Wisconsin DESERVED it, and I condemned them for it, Facebook banned me for “bullying and hate speech”. Fucking good. That was my 9th 30 day. One more I think I get a free yogurt.)
Anytime there is a breaking news story, there will be legions of howling leftists, and blue check mark idiots, lying their asses off and saying the most horrific things imaginable. And since they literally own social media, they get an official pass while the uppity on the right get officially squashed. We’ve all seen it. From trending hash tags that mysterious vanish, shadow bans, to ultra-biased fact checkers, to Youtube demonetizing wrong thinkers or even getting rid of the thumbs down button.
Yet as your fellow travelers are saying all this horrid shit, where are you? You’re supposedly sane. You claim to have a voice of moderation, but it must be a whisper because we certainly can’t hear it.
Social media is a constant barrage of Common Internet Shit Gibbons popping in and screaming at everybody who diverges from the accepted leftist narrative. They work off a standardized playbook and repetitive talking points, sneering derision, and passive aggressive insults designed to get around algorithms, and it is all designed to shame people into silence.
Yet many people on the right are slowly waking up to this game, and they’re beginning to fight back, skipping the false civility, and getting right to the meat of things, and returning insult for insult… Oh THEN I can count on the Caring Liberals to show up! Inevitably, every fucking time. Whenever someone on the right fights back, that’s when the real-life liberals you know magically appear to cry about “civility” and “tone” and such rudeness!
Gee whiz, Aunt Margaret/coworker #7/guy from the gym. Where the fuck were you when the leftist assholes were screeching at me and wiping their diseased anus on my carpet? Nowhere. Oh yeah, that’s right. It’s because you voices of reason don’t actually care about civility, you just care about shaming your wrong thinking friends and family into compliance. You emotionally manipulative motherfuckers.
Why do I have such scorn and derision for the so-called reasonable voices on the left? A. I don’t believe most of you. B. If you do exist, you’re cowards, who do nothing, say nothing, and then maybe show up after the dust settles to chide the rest of us about our tone.
Anybody with the courage to speak up on the left is swiftly set upon by the rest and devoured. They’re the cow and social justice warriors are the piranhas.
Sad part is I know many liberals in real life who will admit that they helped create a monster, and its now gone out of control, and the beast will eat them if they draw its ire. Oh, they’ll tell me this in person, but they won’t say shit in public. Because they know they’ll get cancelled, boycotted, fired, mocked, threatened, and kicked out of the Goodthinkers Club.
Basically, when it comes to social interaction progs are the abusive trailer park husband. He sets the rules. He beats his family. He’s irrational and petty. The “rules” are arbitrary and capricious. If you know anything about abusive family relationships, you know there’s also co-dependents and enablers. That’s you fuckers. “It’s your fault he hit you.” “Maybe if you’re quiet he won’t get so mad.” “You brought this on yourself.” Note, this also describes the squish wing of the republicans. Just like the co-dependents, they get upset at any member of the family who challenges the abuser’s rules.
So yeah, I paint with a broad brush, because you do nothing, say nothing, and are basically fucking useless. “Oh, I agree that defunding the police is crazy.” Great. Go tell them that… Fucking crickets. Because you know your trailer park husband will punch you in the face and then order you to fetch him another beer.
You so-called moderates know I’m telling the truth. Watch, you’ll get super personally butt hurt in the comments, and act all offended, like how dare Correia say such cruel and untrue things? But it’s the struck dog that yelps. How many of your friends have you tossed under the bus? How many times have you been forced to disavow someone when the mob came for them? How many times have you kept your mouth shut, head down, or eyes closed while bad awful shit was being said? How many times have you been tempted to stand for something you believe in, but didn’t? I’m betting it’s too damned many.
I bet that wears on your soul.
Authoritarians of both stripes hate the nail which sticks up. It must be hammered down. Only my side’s authoritarians are a bunch of fucking dumbasses armed with Fisher Price squeaky hammers, so my side is littered with nails. We can actually talk shit about each other and our ideas. Your side’s authoritarians are a band of statist thugs, allied with the most powerful big tech corporations, and the most lock step media conglomerate in human history. When one of you stick up, you’re going to get hit with the hammer of Thor.
Doesn’t that suck? How can you bear it?
Joe Biden is utter shit. His administration is utter shit. This is an obvious truth. I have the ability to say it. Do you? Can you go out on social media in left wing circles and admit the super obvious? Can you say that the emperor has no clothes? (or the emperor is a corrupt doddering dementia patient with a long history of groping little girls on video?)
And before you try the moral equivalence argument that both sides are the same, no, they clearly aren’t. Because I, a well-known novelist, talked mad shit about Trump in 2016, and I’ve still got a career. I thought he was conning the right and he was going to govern like a New York democrat (i.e. an authoritarian asshole). Yet the right didn’t destroy me for it. (full disclosure, I was wrong, he was way better than I expected, and I supported him in 2020). The difference was many on the right disagreed with me, we fought, called each other names, argued, and then moved on. As long as you are honest about what you believe and why, most people on the right don’t give a fuck. The right didn’t try to cancel me or get me fired. They didn’t organize boycotts. They didn’t black ball me and kick me out of events.
The only people the right “cancels” (we are crap at it) are the ones who pretend to be something they aren’t and lie about it to sabotage (i.e. The Lincoln Project) and even then, those dishonest fucks don’t get cancelled. The right doesn’t know how to cancel for shit. They still have jobs and a platform. They just get mocked for being dishonest losers.
However, you cross the left? You’re fucking toast. They will destroy you. We’ve all seen it. Repeatedly. Over and over and over and over and over again. The left will build a narrative about how you are ultimate evil and must be shunned forever and kicked from polite society.
Look at Jordan Peterson. If you actually listen to the guy he’s a fairly innocuous little Canadian academic. His message isn’t shocking. There’s nothing lurid or sensational about the guy. The stuff he states is kind of no-brainer stuff for most people. Except then he diverged from the narrative, and holy shit, according to the left he is LITERALLY the Red Skull (and that’s two blog posts in a row I mentioned that character, which means the left will go REEEEE NAZI!!!!)
Actors, writers, musicians, athletes, business leaders… if they’re on the right they keep their heads down so they can keep their jobs. If they are on the left they can say the most inane fucking bullshit imaginable, even pretending that pedophile serial rapists are heroes with cute nicknames, and they get a pass… and you alleged moderates fucking sit there, not saying shit, like that’s perfectly okay.
Cowards, the lot of you.
I learned this personally the hard way, several years ago when I was once the nail that stuck up and annoyed the left. They came at me every which way. They got me kicked out of everything. They tried to ruin my career (and failed, because they are morons who don’t understand my audience). They said the most fake, vile, disgusting fucking lies you can imagine, and while they were making all this outlandish shit up, do you know what the vast majority of my liberal friends did?
Nothing.
And back then I was naïve and still had more liberal friends, hard not to, if you’re in the writing business. But they did fucking nothing. They kept their mouths shut. They let obvious lies pass. To be fair a couple of them stood up and said, “no, I know Larry in real life, that’s simply not true.” And they got smacked down hard. The wolf turned on them, snarled, and my liberal friends promptly pissed themselves in fear, cowered, and begged for mercy.
I’ve since learned that I simply can’t trust you, because regardless of whatever you claim your principles to be, you will promptly abandon them in the instant they are needed most. Caring Liberals who looked me in the eye before I annoyed the left told me “I support you.” “I agree with you.” “This must be said.” But then when the heat came, they wilted.
You always fucking wilt. Liberal “friends” will sell you out in a heartbeat. Your lofty claims of courage are meaningless because your courage only extends in one direction. You will stand up against your ideological opponents, but you’ll never stand up against your allies. Because your allies are far scarier.
Oh, but that’s not quite correct. There is one time that liberals will stand up against their own. Once an abuser reaches a critical mass of having been too awful, and there’s enough of you allied together, and most importantly the abuser is no longer valuable to the overall leftist narrative, then and only then, will you do something. That’s why Governor Cuomo can go from Emmy award winning, book deal having, America’s Governor, hero of the hour who can do no wrong… to utter fucking shit in the space of a few days. There’s a multitude of other examples of this as well.
That’s because your side has no principles. You have political expediency.
Except that behavior of throwing your own to the wolves isn’t a good thing. It’s actually the worst thing of all about your side. If you are an asset to the narrative, then you are protected. Should you become a liability, you will be quickly liquidated. Thus, liberals walk around on egg-shells, constantly scared they will violate some shibboleth, cross some new arbitrary line, and then get devoured in a cannibal feeding frenzy.
But my gosh, liberals… isn’t living like that exhausting?
I’ll say this behavior has been super fun to watch in the writing world, as liberal heroes of old fail to keep up with whatever the latest commandment is, and all the little jealous writers who worshipped them yesterday turn on them today. I enjoy watching people tell me there’s no such thing as cancel culture five years ago get cancelled. Schadenfreude is a hell of a drug.
I paint you with a broad brush because you deserve it. You are no longer a coherent political philosophy. You are a church. You’ve got clergy, prophecies, and you are expected to act on faith. You must make sacrifices to your idols in public, or the others will doubt your conviction. Your commandments change hourly, but no sin is tolerated. And if you fail to live up to their demands, your church sure does burn a lot of heretics!
The guy who made the comment is right about one thing. In person, in real life, you Caring Liberals are super nice. But let’s be honest, that’s because if you talked the way you talk on the internet to someone’s face, you’d probably get your ass kicked. On the flip side I’ve seen liberals say about me “Larry is much nicer in person than he is on the internet.” Indeed, because none of you assholes would ever say to my face the stuff you say to me online a few hundred times a day. (I’ve had a couple of you step up over the years, but you had to get pretty drunk first).
Even then, that mask is slipping, as the left now has violent gangs of rioting hoodlums ready to loot and burn shit on command. 2020 saw insane amounts of chaos and destruction across America’s cities. This was clearly awful and hurt most the very communities you claimed you wanted to help. And what did you reasonable sane Caring Liberals say during that? Either nothing, or some mumbly-mouthed meaningless platitudes about justice. Or you actively rooted for maniacs to tear apart society.
I can count on my fingers the liberals who had the fucking audacity to stand up and say “Whoa! This is bad! This does not help!” And in the year since you drove most of them out of your party.
Like I said, you don’t have principles, you have political expediency. I’ve watched sane and rational liberals rationalize the most asinine things imaginable, things which I know are against that person’s fundamental belief system. A really sad one is watching devoutly religious Christians cheer on abortion, because that’s required of them. How do you sleep at night? This post isn’t even about any specific political topic, but how do you profess to believe one thing religiously, but then go against your God because your idols demand it?
I’ve also watched you “sane and rational” liberals buy guns this year because you got terrified of mob violence, all while you still post about how rioters are good, guns should be banned, and let’s defund the police. Hell, I helped a few of you learn to shoot! You fucking know who you are.
Hypocrisy sucks.
All that said, I don’t hate you. I pity you. I feel bad for the mental gymnastics you have to perform. I feel bad that you can’t say what you really mean. I wish that you could get out of your abusive relationship. Quit lying. Repeating things that are clearly not true is bad for your mental health. Cognitive dissonance is bad for you. If you believe something, stand up. Say what you really mean. Mean what you say. They can’t cancel you all.
You want respect? Break the cycle.
