Posted in Brownstone
October 4, 2021

The Corruption of My Liberal Tribe

I have always been a liberal, left-leaning in my politics, a devout adherent to principles such as liberty, free speech, tolerance, compassion, and personal autonomy over my body—a fierce defender of “My Body, My Choice.”

I have always considered my liberal friends to be open-minded, critical thinkers, compassionate, tolerant, educated and resourceful enough to know where to look up alternative information, capable of interpreting data and discerning facts from blatant propaganda; defenders of free speech, liberty and bodily autonomy—all of which are obviously the foundational principles of liberalism.

Now, every one of those paradigms has been shattered for me.

Every single one.

I am now ashamed to call myself a liberal.

Liberals get all their “news” from the most corrupt mainstream sources. They flock to Google University to confirm or deny anything that they agree or disagree with, oblivious to the fact that Google now censors everything that goes against the official narrative. It appears they don’t even know that alternative search engines exist. They despise Bezos, whose wealth “coincidentally” increased by $79.4 billion during the pandemic, rising from $113 billion in March 2020 to $192.4 billion on July 31, 2021, and yet they flock to his Washington Post and digest every spoon-fed piece of putrid propaganda without question, and then proudly regurgitate it as Undisputed Truth. 

Not to outdo their own hypocrisy, then they purchase everything from Amazon, gleefully praising the convenience, while small local businesses in their communities struggle to survive or have been permanently shuttered due to lockdowns that they supported. 

They’ve always rightly considered the Big Pharma companies to be among the most corrupt, untrustworthy, unscrupulous entities on earth, well aware that Pfizer and the rest have criminal rap sheets a mile long, with a well-documented history of lying, bribing doctors and scientists, capturing regulatory agencies like the FDA, covering up data, colluding and engaging in price fixing, paying billions in fines, ad infinitum ad nauseum. Now they view these companies as corporate saints and saviours of humanity, and will mock you, hate you, shame and ridicule you for pointing out their undeniable history of corruption.

Clearly, political tribalism and groupthink are a big part of this. Take a look at the politicians and celebrities who mask up when the cameras are on and then remove the masks the moment the cameras are off. “Follow the science,” right?  

The first red flag for me was long before the “pandemic”, when tech began censoring people like Alex Jones and others. I couldn’t believe my liberal friends—the defenders of free speech—were cheering for censorship; that was when I began to see something really alarming on the horizon. Obviously, whether you agree with or like Alex Jones or Trump isn’t the point. In an Orwellian twist of reality, truth is now censored under the guise of stopping the spread of “dangerous disinformation.” 

Censorship, as liberals have always understood, is the concrete foundation of fascism, a basic tenet of every totalitarian regime throughout history. “I may disagree with you but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it,” was a guiding principle of liberalism and free speech, and one that I fiercely defended. 

That was when I fully began to understand the intellectual collapse and moral bankruptcy of the left. Those of you who have been cheering for censorship while begging the government to protect you from the “undesirables”—what you now call the “unvaccinated”—are soon going to learn the same lesson Martin Niemöller did in Nazi Germany.

Talk about your freedom to a liberal now and they will mock you with “Your ‘freedumb’ doesn’t give you the right to endanger my life!”

“Freedumb”?

What did Benjamin Franklin say about your freedom and safety? “Those who would trade essential liberty for safety will have neither.” Fear of a microbe or “those people” does not change this historic fact.

Those who think their fear of a microbe gives them the right to destroy society have it backward; your fear (irrational or otherwise) doesn’t give you the right to take away everyone’s inalienable rights and essential liberties; if you want to live in fear then you are perfectly free to do so. 

Stay home, wear two masks, shut down your business, inject yourself with whatever concoction you feel will ease your psychosis, fondle your talisman and light your Saint Fauci prayer candle. Instead, they blame everyone trying to live a normal, free life, as the demons and scientifically illiterates responsible for all of their self-inflicted trauma. Living in a free society—life itself—is rife with risk. If you are terrified of a cold virus with a 99.8% survival rate then why aren’t you terrified of being struck by lightning, which is a far greater risk? 

According to the National Weather Service you have a 1 in 15,300 chance of being struck by lightning, and a 1 in 1,530 chance of being affected by someone else being struck. 

I wonder if a single liberal friend can tell me, according to the City’s own data, how many children in Houston have died of Covid since this “pandemic” began?

Anyone? 

And yet you want to force children to wear masks with no concern whatsoever for their psychological health and normal development, while ignoring the fact that they have a 99.999% chance of surviving this cold virus, and that more children died from the flu in 2019. If you are terrified of 99.999% odds, then why have you ever let your child leave your house? If two years ago someone made their child wear a helmet with a lightning rod for fear of a lightning strike you would have accused them of child abuse.

While they are constantly virtue-signaling about how much they care about Blacks and minorities—while blaming the “pandemic” on the “unvaccinated”—they somehow ignore the fact that it is not “Trumpers” or “right-wingers” who are mostly unvaccinated but Blacks and Hispanics. 

For example, overall, across 43 states, the percent of White people who have received at least one vaccine dose (53%) was 1.2 times higher than the rate for Black people (45%) and 1.1 times higher than the rate for Hispanic people (49%) as of September 20, 2021. In some states these numbers are even higher

They constantly talk about “systemic racism” and segregation in the past, completely oblivious to the fact that they are now the very people creating a two-tiered society—a medical apartheid—that will be even more segregated than in the ’50s; one which will now include multiple groups of people, not just a particular race, if so-called vaccine passports become a reality for everyone.

Right now, thousands of health care workers across the country are facing termination because they refuse to get vaccinated. Have you bothered to ask why so many health care professionals are refusing a vaccine they don’t want or need? Have you forgotten a year ago when you called these same people “the heroes working on the front lines to protect us?” Nurses are some of the most decent, caring people in society. Are you so brain-dead that you think they are all “Trumpers”? Now you are cheering for their termination. 

Shame on you.

Maybe some of my liberal friends have been the real racists and haters all along, and I was too blind to see it. I’ve always been suspicious of their nonstop virtue signaling about everything—particularly racism—when America is in fact the most diverse, integrated society in human history. How virtuous are you if you feel the need to display it everywhere? To the contrary, truly virtuous people don’t do that.

Since this “pandemic” began, is it any wonder that suicide rates are off the scale among young people who are isolated and “socially distanced” from everything that makes their lives worth living? Family, friends, proms, dating, weddings, sports, entertainment, you name it. Their hopes for any semblance of a bright future have been crushed, they feel they have no upward mobility and nothing to look forward to but a demeaning life in a dystopian future. 

In his classic text On Suicide, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim examined how individuals and societies are prone to personal and collective acts of self-destruction when social bonds are severed. What he called an essential “life-sustaining equilibrium”—a healthy balance between individual initiative and communal solidarity—could only be achieved when social bonds are strong. 

Conversely, he wrote, the individuals and societies most susceptible to self-destructive acts are those for whom these bonds, this equilibrium, have been destroyed. Can there be a more efficient method to destroy this crucial equilibrium than isolation and “social distancing?” In a cruel twist of irony we are told this is an act of solidarity, that “we are all in this together.”

As Sigmund Freud understood, nations in late-stage decline subconsciously embrace the death instinct. When they can no longer be soothed by the illusion of perpetual progress, their only antidote to nihilism is lost. They confuse oppression with liberty (witness for example, the ACLU’s recent statement regarding vaccine mandates: “. . .far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties.”) They confuse destruction with creation. “Build Back Better” is the slogan they are told to believe. 

Unaware, they descend gradually into primitive savagery, something Freud, Joseph Conrad and Primo Levi knew lurked behind the flimsy facade of civilized society. Reason no longer guides their lives. Reason, as Schopenhauer said, is the hard-pressed servant of the will.

I saw a well-known liberal politician’s Twitter page the other day. Below her name were the obligatory virtue-signaling “she/her/hers” gender pronouns. What is that about? Is anyone confused about whether or not she is a woman? All this bizarre nonsense about gender identity is indicative of a morally bankrupt, nihilistic, and spiritually dead society—and I am observing this from the perspective of someone who isn’t even religious. These people have completely lost their minds in the pursuit of appearing more virtuous than “those people.” Clearly this is political tribalism and groupthink. Ironically, it’s all signal and no virtue.

If, after the past eighteen months, you still think this is about public health, then you are going to be in for a nightmarish awakening when you find yourself living in a cold technocratic, totalitarian dystopia wherein you have no bodily autonomy, no free speech, no dissent, and are digitally tracked like cattle for the rest of your lives while being subjected to an endless regimen of booster shots and queuing in endless lines just to enter a restaurant.

Surely, many of you, over the past eighteen months have sensed that something isn’t right, that the “experts” are lying, the “science” makes no sense, and that something very profound is happening that has nothing to do with “public health.” The ruling parasites are losing control and now are trying to pull up the ladder, erase upward mobility for large segments of the population, cull political opponents and other “undesirables,” muzzle free speech, and put the remainder of humanity on a tight leash.

To paraphrase Frank Zappa, they will continue the illusion of freedom as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. Now the illusion has become too expensive to maintain, and they are taking down the scenery, pulling back the curtains, moving the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will be left staring at the brick wall at the back of the theater.

Take a look at the simple meme below. This illustrates how much of your humanity you have already given up for the illusion of safety. This is your future in a dehumanized technocratic totalitarian society.

Enjoy your “New Normal.”