A World Gone Mad
Imagine for a moment an America in which two in five people have sequestered themselves in a fantasy world full of fake problems and imagined anxieties. Imagine also that those who live in this mass delusion gaslight the rest of the population into believing we are in fact crazy for not joining in the delusion. Do not adjust your television set, you are not entering the Twilight Zone; this is America in the 21st Century.
In the aftermath of the Second World War George Orwell published 1984, an infamous book about what it is like to live under communism. His foray into the horrors of totalitarianism has passed into the vernacular for the ultimate incarnation of statism. Even those who do not know the origin of the phrase are familiar with the adage that “big brother is watching you.” In Orwell’s book, the people are told that Big Brother and the INGSOC Party represent every ideal and everything that is good and decent; they cannot be wrong. The enemies of the people, the scapegoats like the hated traitor Goldstein, represent everything vile and detestable; they can do no good. The people are bombarded with absurd propaganda that “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery.” There is an active effort against language itself with the dictionary being rewritten frequently to reduce the number of words in circulation. An entire bureaucracy is dedicated to “new-speak.” Even the most basic human pleasures are not safe in this story where there is an ongoing effort to “eliminate the orgasm.” Women are taking vows of celibacy and artificial insemination is becoming the norm for human reproduction. This fantastic horror story has slowly and quietly manifested itself in our world.
Public schools have dumbed down education. Youngers today use fewer words in their common speech than previous generations and far too many graduate high school while functionally illiterate. They have been taught that freedom is slavery, that America is bad and America’s enemies are good. I would not have believed it myself except that in my own college days on the central coast of California I watched it happening around me. My future wife and I were belittled because “possession is patriarchy;” serious long-term relationships had become a bad thing even if we were happy together. Today we are told free speech is hate speech, anyone who disagrees with the far left is racist and everything vile. Our society is consumed with the pursuit of fake problems invented to distract us from real problems. Even the recent epidemic and quarantine have not evaded politicization in this sick game of subconscious tyranny.
The Racist Virus
In a recent press conference, and on several occasions since, President Donald Trump referred to the Wuhan Flu (coronavirus/ COVID-19) as a “Chinese virus.” It was not long before the far left pounced. A statement released on March 20 by Doug Inoue, Executive Director of the Japanese American Citizen’s League, states “Asian People are not a Virus.” The assertion that the President was calling Chinese people a virus is so completely ridiculous that only a deluded person could conjure it.
There is a further attempt to blame the President for a small number of attacks on Asian people that have taken place across the country. These attacks, which curiously are more common in regions that are more heavily left-leaning, are obviously repugnant. What petty, ignorant person would attack a fellow American because they are Asian? The President’s remarks clearly have nothing to do with such attacks. President Trump, like all decent Americans, deplores violence and condemns such abuse. It is not clear how attacking the President and his supporters over the President’s entirely factual assertion that the late epidemic originated in China is going to help protect Americans of Asian descent. Perhaps a more positive message like “we are Americans too;” or “we are all equally victims of the coronavirus?”
A World Gone Mad
Why are American leftists engaging in this desperate attempt to demonize the President in this time of crisis? A time when even the left-biased NBC/Ipsos poll found 55% of Americans approve of the President’s handling of the crisis. About 40% disapprove, but in general about 40% of Americans disapprove of everything the President does or says; or that he even draws breath. These 2 in 5 Americans live in a world with problems like white privilege, climate change, and social inequality that are to them the greatest calamities in the world. Where everyone who even slightly disagrees with them is a racist, homophobic, misogynist, bigot: no one can disagree with the left. They act very much like the characters in Orwell’s decades old book. They don’t bother to think, they simply lash out with emotion, quoting slogans that have no meaning and redefining every word to align with their own opinions.
In a few social media debates that I entered, I tried to shine some rays of sanity into the dark delusional world in which these people live. I was attacked immediately as a “privileged white male,” the pariah of our society. Like the traitor Goldstein and the Eurasians of Orwell’s book, someone must be demonized, someone must be a scapegoat to ensure the people believe in the proper ideology. How is it they can assume so many things based upon a person’s skin colour, but still remain aloof of the label of racist? As yet, none of them have been able to explain to me how a person’s opinions or view of an issue can be deemed illegitimate based purely upon their skin colour; and this is not racism?
When you call out any of these deluded individuals and poke holes (which is easily done) in their crazy world view, they immediately fall back on insults. You are cast out of the cool crowd and singled out as a crazy person. They immediately attack everyone who dares to disagree with them, even just a little. It takes some courage and will power even to continue debating with them. How did we reach such a place? A place where one cannot even hold an intelligent conversation with this lot because they do not recognize the same facts, share the same reality, or offer any common ground to those who think differently from them? Yet, it is they who are the kind and tolerant people and the rest of us are cruel and insane.
The Sane World
Then there are the rest of us who live in the real world. In our world we are concerned about jobs, economic prosperity, national security, education, and the future prosperity of our children. In other words, normal and sane people who are just going about our lives. We are concerned about how to spread prosperity to all people. Uplifting people does not involve blaming or demonizing, it involves finding ways to help others gain access to the critical pathways for success. We are not concerned about “white privilege,” a fake problem that justifies the dehumanization of a group of people so as to deprive that group of their rights and steal from them (the result being tyranny). Many otherwise sane people are driven to near insanity as they try to jump through the hoops of virtue signaling in order to be part of the “solution,” to be one of the “good guys.” Only too late do they discover that there is no solution, they can never truly be one of the “good guys” where the far left is concerned. The sane, normal people are made to look like the “bad guys” and are made to question our own sanity by these quacks (a process called gaslighting).
If you have not been on a college campus recently you should also be aware of the slogan “white privilege begins with Jewish privilege.” As a Jew, I tell you exactly where that is going. Somehow the uber-tolerant left has now normalized antisemitism. Any Jew who lived in Germany in the 1930’s knows there is no salvation for the repentant person in the scapegoated group. No matter how much one begs and pleads of their socialist masters, they will be destroyed.
The recent attacks on Asians in America is an example of divisive tribalism. Here we see individuals grouping themselves and others into “us” and “them” and attacking the “them” group. How is spreading hate against any group of people going to create decency and tolerance? The left claims that intolerance is all the result of white men. Yet, white men cannot redeem ourselves, we must always be the scapegoat. So somehow making it okay to hate whites and Jews is supposed to uplift Asians and other victim groups? How is that supposed to work?
If you have a belief system, ideology, or world view that requires you to target any group of people for hate and disenfranchisement… Get away from it! All of this hate is unhealthy. The solution to intolerance is simple and elegant: we take individuals one at a time and treat all people with respect. In other words, as the Republican Civil Rights Activist Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. put it, each person should be “judged by the content of their character not by the color of their skin.” Prejudice against white men, prejudice against Jews, how is this any different than the intolerance of the racists in the 1960’s?
Freedom is the Answer
Americans need come together in the real world recognizing the same reality to resolve real problems. People do not have to live in poverty stricken, crime ridden slums ruled by left-wing politicians who seem to be for doing everything it takes to solve fake problems but can’t seem to find the time to try to uplift their constituents, for example. In this time of crisis we should be looking for ways to help our neighbors, to love each other American as we love ourselves. We should not be looking for opportunities to attack the President and his supporters for stating cold, hard truths. We can learn to love one another once again in spite of our differences of opinion. We can decide not to label those who disagree with us as racist bigots and spit hateful rhetoric at them. We can rise above the “us” and “them” and recognize that as human beings we are all “us.”
Freedom—the right to live and speak as your please, the opportunity to prosper regardless of your background—is good for everyone. It does not require us to group ourselves into victim groups with one hated scapegoat group. It does not require us to demonize or disenfranchise any group. The only “bad guy” is the corrupt politician who stands as an obstacle to our efforts as a society. No wonder they are obsessed with fake problems! We can end the hate. It starts with each individual person simply being kind and respectful to others.
While a respectful society is achievable, do not expect it to come to pass anytime soon. To the 2 in 5 Americans who live in that deluded world, “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and Goldstein is a traitor.” They are unable to see the world any other way than as they have been trained. Driven by feelings and slogans rather than rational thought, pursuing solutions to problems that do not exist, attacking basic human pleasures, trying to force everyone to accept their ideas, and lashing out at the scapegoats whom they hold to blame for their every angst; the American Left will soldier on. Remember, Big Brother is watching you…
