Whatever Happened to the “Left”?

And whatever happened to me?

If the caricature of the ‘left’ above doesn’t annoy a few people, this article probably will. But hopefully I’m not going to forsake the human for the ad hominem as we go along.

The “stand-up philosopher” Robert Anton Wilson was keenly aware of the power of language to dehumanize:

“In other words, because we can say “the Jews” or “the New World order” or “the patriarchy,” we can believe, or almost believe, but these grammatical obstructions have the same kind of reality as basketballs, barking dogs, and baked beans. Individuals, with all their hair and fingernails and ideals and delusions and funky smells, disappear, as it we’re in the world becomes haunted by collective nouns.”

Important to remember. Individuals of all shapes, sizes and colours can be quite lovely. People in tribes, cliques, political parties or warring nations, feeding off collective nouns demonizing their fellow primates, not so much.

Okay, the proviso out is of the way! A few subscribers have taken me to task recently for my Woke Kovid Kitties and the article on the Canadian convoy movement. Apparently I’ve gone off the approved script of the liberal left, and is now consorting - mentally, digitally, and perhaps even physically - with knuckle-dragging deplorables wearing MAGA hats or the Canadian equivalent, the maple leaf.

Truth is, nothing has changed greatly in my point of view over the years. I’m still big on representitive democracy, and believe the fairest, freest societies are those with mixed economies. That is, where free enterprise, government regulation, and social programs are held in balance for an optimal outcome to the people as a whole, with free speech meaning all speech short of threats of violence. I believe in decentralized networks - probably because I’m well versed on the abuses of concentrated corporate and political power, which sometimes require nonviolent civil resistance in response.

In other words, I’m all for a soft, squishy socialism - not much different than from what the majority of Canadians believe and desire, according to past polls.

Beyond that, my lefty credentials include being appalled at Donald Trump’s reign, fearing for the environment, and insisting no one should be discriminated against on the basis of race or gender. That said, I have no great enthusiasm for the extremes of identity politics, which fracture people into smaller and smaller fiefdoms of grievance.

Liberal, left, progressive: these diffuse, abstract nouns have meanings that vary from person to person. If this helps for the purpose of this article, here’s where I would provisionally locate myself on this graph. While there’s a right and left on this, I don’t think there’s a right and wrong. But I do think some areas are sketchier than others. Anyway, this is just me.

Let’s talk about trains

Not trans, trains. Have you ever been on a train waiting to depart, and looked out the window to see a slowing moving parallel train, mistaking its motion for your own? Or the other way around? It’s slightly disorienting.

Similarly, although I think I’ve held the same libertarian-left position in my beliefs and ideas, over the past few years I’ve watched a fair number of people of my approximate political position leave the station. And as on any train, relativism holds. They would say they haven’t moved an inch, but insist I have. You may have experienced this yourself.

This anonymous graphic is clever, but doesn’t read quite right to me. Wokeness certainly contains leftish elements, but it’s not extreme left in the sense of straight-up communism (unfortunately, the derogatory term “cultural Marxism” has only added to the confusion).

I wouldn’t say the progressive left has simply shot off on the x-axis. It’s gone orthogonal. To go back to the train metaphor, it’s like the woke choo-choo has left the tracks entirely, rose to the skies and flew off to The Land That Facts Forgot.

As author Kim Goldberg put it,

Out of all possible political demographics, the Left (including Greens) would seem the least likely to embrace mandatory segregation, coerced medical procedures, government surveillance, and the censoring of scientists. The Left would seem the least likely to give pharmaceutical corporations a free pass on multi-billion-dollar investigational injections that are suspected in 9,476 deaths to date in the United States alone, according to the VAERS database for reporting vaccine adverse events. An additional 11,045 recipients of Covid vaccines are now permanently disabled, with a vaccine link suspected. In total, there have now been more than 700,000 reports of adverse events in the US filed with VAERS in which someone suspects a link to a Covid vaccine. For comparison, the swine flu vaccine of 1976 was pulled from the market after just 10 weeks in which 25 deaths and 500 cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome were noted, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.

One would expect the Left to lead the charge in a consumer protection crusade against a new and still experimental pharmaceutical product with a higher than expected body count. Instead, the Left is leading the charge against those who decline to consume.

Thank you, Duke L’Orange

Things were pretty wokish even before the entry of a TV personality and six-time bankruptee into the US presidential race. I knew enough of Trump that I could dismiss him as blustering, bilious clown. But sitting in a barstool on Salt Spring Island on a December night in 2016, watching districts in Pennsylvania bleed red with Republican wins, I feared things were about to go seriously pear-shaped down south.

Which they did, of course. The 2016 election exposed the fissures in American society, with the red-blue divide degenerating into a toxic tribalism that set couples and families against one another over the reign of Agent Orange. Even before Trump took the oval office, strange things began to happen at the political fringes, as when hordes of Bernie Sanders supporters were crestfallen when their socialist candidate threw in the towel and tossed his support behind the hated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. In response, many of them voted instead in protest for the man who promised to “drain the swamp” - even though he proved to be just a more colourful alligator from a different watering hole.

The ‘Bernie Bros’ shift in allegiance - from far left to far right - was an early indicator that traditional labels of Democrat and Republican were breaking down.

Let’s go back a bit. In 2003, many in the liberal left were rightly unconvinced of the vapourous claims of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” from media outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, et al. They participated in some of the largest protests the world had ever seen (upwards of a million in the streets of London). That all changed after the election of Barack Obama in 2008. They simply didn’t care, or didn’t care to know, that the first African-American president, and a Democrat, was expanding the Bush/Cheney wars from two to seven countries and midwiving the greatest refugee crisis in Europe since World War 2, primarily through the destruction of Libya.

What remained of the US “left” was shading into a tribe of war-endorsing centrists, whose favourite corporate portals offering a rare moment of praise for Trump when he launched missiles at a Syrian airfield in 2017.  “On Syria attack, Trump’s heart came first,” read a New York Times headline. “Donald Trump became president of the United States last night,” declared Fareed Zakaria on CNN.

By 2019 the flip was complete. The American progressive left now believed Russians had fixed the election for Trump, in part by hacking Democrat servers and leaking Hillary’s emails to WikiLeaks whistleblower Julian Assange. The evidence for any of this was essentially was essentially nil, but that made no difference. The ‘left’ began lapping up claims made by retired spooks from the letter agencies on woke-friendly channels like CNN and MSNBC, to the point of believing that Trump was taking direct orders from puppet master Putin.

Checkers vs. chess

Up in Canada we figured we’d forever be free of the political insanity of our neighbours - we’re Canadians after all. But a global pandemic left us all stranded at the station, with our tickets punched for strange destinations.

By summer of 2020, contrarian doctors and scientists from universities around the world (immunologists, epidemiologists, virologists, vaccinologists, microbiologists, etc.) began to question the narrative on social distancing and the threat from COVID. They soon found themselves cancelled, deplatformed, disciplined or fired. The censoring from big tech platforms, their own governing bodies, and legacy media sharpened with the rollout of mRNA vaccines.

Was it my friends and I in motion, or was it other lefties? I watched a “hardening of the categories” among the news-watching supporters of the official narrative. Many of those who knew of the scientist/doctor censoring and cheered it on included activists and commentators from the far left. These were people who previously had a healthy suspicion of three primary organizations. It was well understood by lefties you could never take anything from their spokesunits on faith:

1) Big media

2) Big government

3) Big pharma

Yet when these three bodies came together in a unified front with the pandemic, the progressive left across the world fell in formation like high school cheerleaders, doing splits and cartwheels for monopoly capitalism, plutocrat-funded news neteworks, and government edicts. Not very “left” of them at all, it seemed.

Certainly much of this seemed defensible at first. Like most everyone else, I believed the health ‘experts’ rotated on corporate news outlets that the promise of vaccines would end martial law-like lockdowns. There was little evidence at the time to think otherwise.

But even with the narrative slowly detaching itself over time from common sense and peer-reviewed science, the ‘left’ fell into ever more contorted cheerleading positions. They began to endorse forced medical procedures without informed consent on all men, women and children. More than a negation of the foundational statement of seventies feminism, “my body my choice,” it’s a direct violation of the Nuremberg Code of the postwar Nazi trials, and the international medical agreement that followed.

In just over a year, millions of calm, sensible people worldwide disembarked at a Munich train station in 1933. ( I’m still astounded the Nuremberg Code argument has no stickiness with progressives, particularly for experimental gene therapies that don’t offer protection from either infection or transmission).

So is the left now the ‘right’? Well, in the spirit of moving trains they would precisely say the reverse: anyone opposing the health narrative were in the thrall of Trump, who famously endorsed hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic for COVID-19 and battled with NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci. In other words, the whole read of the situation became politicized early on. There could be no reliable data questioning lockdowns, vaccine safety, green passes or the origins of the Sars-COV-2 virus for the simple reason that this is exactly what the enemy would say anyway, regardless of the facts.

Even with Trump bounced out of office, his spectre shadowed the entire debate. The majority of intelligent adults continued to pour COVID-related information into two containers, one coloured blue and one coloured red, saving them from the bother of inspecting the contents with a sharp eye. The legacy media guided the liberal left along in narrative-supporting lockstep.

Some on the medical freedom side cited God as their rock rather than Fauci. Meanwhile, some worshipping at the alter of legacy media (backed by unimpeachable if unexamined fact checkers) felt they were on the side of the angels, or at least the FDA. In their view they were playing competitive chess, while the faith-based community were playing church basement checkers. There was no actual science to support their resistance to mandates: that was a given to the woke folk. Confirmation bias is always something for the other guy.

(Social psychologists will tell you that tribalism is more powerful for people than truth. But hey, we are primates after all - social animals with a deep and abiding fear of ostracism, which in prehistoric times meant death.)

Anyway, if you’re opposed to most of what I’ve written here, but have followed me this far, great. I assume you’re also coming from a place of good faith, and believe in science and independent journalism. So try this out. The book below has 2000-some footnotes, most of them from peer-reviewed scientific papers and interviews with investigative journalists and government whistleblowers. It’s hard to find, and you may find it hard to read, but I think you’ll be rewarded if you can get past the cognitive dissonance. If you’re open to it, this is a book that may well change your mind. Hell, it changed my mind.

A few words from RFK Jr. himself, who I remember as being a darling of the progressive left back when he limited himself to prosecuting corporations for environmental crimes. He once delivered over 200 speeches a year, and was widely published in newspapers and magazines around the world.

All that changed in 2005, after I published an article, "Deadly Immunity," about corruption in CDC's vaccine branch, simultaneously in Rolling Stone and Salon.

Newspapers thereafter generally refused to publish my articles on vaccine safety and ultimately banned me from publishing on any issues. In 2008, without consulting me or citing a specific reason, Salon retracted and removed my 2005 article. Salon's founder, David Talbot, faulted Salon for caving in to Pharma. Rolling Stone finally removed the article without explanation in February 202I, and Huff Post purged all half-dozen of my vaccine articles. The editors of those online journals had thoroughly fact-checked my pieces prior to publication. They removed them without notice to me, and without ever explaining their decisions. It was the beginning of the mass censorship of any vaccine information that departs from official narratives. That year, universities and corporate hosts and municipal speakers' forums suddenly cancelled my scheduled speeches in droves. My bookings dropped from sixty paid speeches per year down to one or two. My speakers' bureau told me that floods of telephone calls from powerful members of the medical community had prompted the cancellations. They deluged the offices of presidents and board members of the colleges, businesses and community groups that were hosting me, protesting my appearances. The callers were public health officials and leading doctors from local hospitals, university medical schools, and influential research centers in those locales. Using similar language, they offered dire warnings that I was anti-vaccine, anti-science, a "baby killer," and that my appearance would jeopardize public health and vital funding to university medical school programs.

-Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Real Athony Fauci

Bear in mind, this was all well before the COVID-era witch hunt of contrarian scientists, doctors, lawyers, constitutional experts and independent journalists. With his investigations of COVID, the son of an assassinated Democratic presidential candidate became identified in the press as a full-blown “conspiracy theorist.” In March of 2021 the “Center for Countering Digital Hate” named him as one of the 12 “disinformation dozen” polluting the Internet with health-related distortions and lies.

And this is the fate of someone with the profile of a lifelong lefty.

Truck Trust Fund Kids

With our thirty-second attention spans, the “Freedom Convoy” is already shading into ancient history. There’s there’s no need to revisit the topic here in any depth - I’ve said what I’ve had to say on this, beyond making some final points.

From the beginning, the organizers, members and truckers of the convoy were explicit in embracing peaceful protest in defense of medical freedom. I haven’t seen any figures on this, but as above, it’s safe to say there was a demographic skew to Christian faith in the convoy movement, as well as an associated skew to the right. But it’s also a near-certainty that among the protesting truckers there’s been plenty of voters for the NDP, the party of the Canadian left that mouths support for the working class.

I don’t have to believe everything some truckers and their supporters believe to accept a specific issue they are agitating for - an end to mandates - anymore than I have to buy everything from Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Naomi Klein, Tucker Carlson, Jimmy Dore, JP Sears or Prime Monster Justin Trudeau. As the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once observed, “so much truth rides into history on the back of error.”

Here’s the ultimate irony. Truckers were a big portion of the “front-line workers” lionized in 2020 for exposing themselves to the dread microbe. Now, like health care workers fired for refusal mandated injections, the portion of them agitating for medical freedom were finding themselves cancelled by wine moms, censorious snowflakes, and the bourgeois educated class in general, with the Canadian press leading the condemnation.  (“The people most dickishly insisting on the necessity of lockdowns or mandates have tended to be Zoomer professionals spending the pandemic in pyjamas,” notes former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi.)

Here is an excellent essay on how the progressive left abandoned the protesting truckers and the working class in general. I emailed it to well-educated, quite sharp subscriber who had objected to my convoy article. He responded that he “does not assume there is some homogeneous entity called the working class” and that “the trucks making life hell for Ottawa residents are mostly contracted out to trucking companies but are actually owned by their drivers. How much does one of those trucks cost? How can anyone reasonably compare those owners with office cleaners or baristas?”

Fair enough, but the suggestion that truckers can’t be considered true working class strikes me as a bit rich. I was going to respond with a remark about kids raised on eighteen-wheeler trust funds, but simply wrote, “normally I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.”

Uh oh. I feel another irresponsible pussycat image coming on…

Hey, at least it’s not another Woke Kovid Kitty!

Beyond labels

The fabrication and distortions about the Canadian truckers - including the Nazi flag meme (see below) were completely predictable. A year into the pandemic, the Canadian press, along with woke portals of the US legacy media, pivoted from dissembling and prevaricating on COVID, mandates and vaccinations to pitching outright lies. As many protest signs put it, “the real virus is the media.”

So to wind this up, I’m wary of the risks of slotting people into groups and reducing them to collective nouns. But this whole topic still makes me angry, so excuse me if the human gets lost in the ad hominem here.

The way I see it, the progressive left has shaped themselves from being critics and opponents to concentrated wealth and power to being its apologists and protectors. They are dominated by passive aggressive types who speak the language of inclusion, diversity and equity even while cheering for the discrimination, segregation, and silencing of a large fraction of the population. They parrot a syncophantic, scientifically illiterate press that regurgitates health policy press releases from governments under regulatory capture. And as this entire COVID fraud continues to unravel, with more information coming out daily on both the ineffectiveness of remaining mandates beyond social, psychological and somatic destruction, these folks will be left to face the lengthening shadow of their own poor choices, and the Wrongthink they projected onto others, including cutting off friends and family by word and deed.

The information/ managerial class has managed to convince themselves, but not quite enough of the rest of the population, of their own bullshit. (Thankfully, a large swath of society seems to have had a preexistent natural immunity to the “mass formation” cited by Belgian psychologist Dr. Mattias Desmet.)

So what is left of the ‘left’ now in its whistleblower-condemning, Big Pharma-loving, war-endorsing incarnation? And what am I? I can no longer claim any political fellowship with the people I used to break bread with. It’s like I occupy a different planet, and they would agree with that point, surely. Yet people like myself are not a very good placeholders for their concept of right wingers either, what with our viewpoints on a past president, race relations and the environment.

The new form of ‘left’ feels right-wing in a lot of ways, though its embrace of identity politics has a weird echo of Stalinist collectivism and shunning. In its failure to address issues of income and class disparities it sure isn’t left in the traditional sense. (If you were to locate it in the graph at the top of this article, it would probably be at the apex, on the very border of red and blue and authoritarian all the way.)

I’m sure this demographic-attitudinal shift is just peachy with the architects of the Great Reset, who are aiming for the sweet spot between Chinese state capitalism and the western monopoly market. A sweet spot which, by the way, will be found in a universal digital ID being talked up from Mumbai to Montreal. (The difference between a conspiracy theory and conspiracy fact these days is about six months.)

As a scientist friend likes to say, the foundational social problem isn’t so much right versus left but up versus down. The plutocrats are perfectly happy with society distracted and divided into two warring camps - in the words of a recent Netflix comedy film, “Don’t Look Up!”

In any case, at their extremes left and right meet around the opposite side of the circle (or in the middle top of the square) as full tyranny. This was summed up in a joke that made the rounds of East Bloc countries before the fall of the Berlin Wall:

What is the definition of capitalism?
The exploitation of man by man, comrade.
What is the definition of communism?
The reverse, comrade.

Ticking toward midnight

With the extremities of left and right faltering as useful labels, perhaps there’s a growing space to understand, if not embrace, individuals with all their ideals and delusions and funky smells. I’d like to think, in the spirit of some of those brave souls who graced the streets of Ottawa a few weeks ago, we can hazard the idea - as terribly unlikely as it might seem at the moment - that the boundary-shattering “love revolution” pitched by the comic Russell Brand isn’t a pipe dream. Especially with the hour getting late and the nuclear clock ticking toward midnight, we have to guard against our persistent human habit of othering. And that goes for the kitty-obsessed Geoff Olson as much as anyone else.