left-wing zealots

Recently in a social-media thread, I let myself get sucked into exactly the sort of seemingly unproductive “discourse” that I usually try to avoid, with a representative of the “progressive” left. As usual, it involved a lot of backtracking, goalpost-moving and several ad hominems on his part.

This occurred without my using any name-calling against him, though I did honestly question his reading comprehension after he misstated two positions I clearly had made to the contrary. Yes, I called those out. One was that Trump is my “dear leader,” though I already stated having voted against him (third party) and why. [Truly a ridiculous assertion for anyone who knows me, even superficially.] His other falsehood was to claim I don’t think racism exists, after I clearly and plainly said the opposite. It was as if, in his zeal to apply gotchas and (mis)characterize me, he forgot to actually read the words I wrote, and instead responded from spoonfed progressive talking points and emotion, instead of knowledge, reason and original thought.

To many others outside the left, and me if I must admit, that sort of reaction is no surprise, and follows a very familiar pattern. The whole time I’m laughing at the pathetic nature of his replies one minute, and in the other, asking myself why I stooped down to trying to deal rationally with a person in a patently irrational state (a lesson I learned long ago from a failed relationship with a particular woman, but apparently must relearn on smaller scales sometimes).

Still frustrating him emotionally in what should have been an argument of logic, facts and reason, I deconstructed one house of sand foundation after another. For example, after bringing up the notion I was being “unscientific” somehow, he tried to lecture me that science is about proof. No, it decidedly is not! Then when he found out my name is on over 100 scientific papers (didn’t even mention also being a longtime reviewer and journal editor), the goalpost shifted. “All of your papers have nothing to do with this issue!” So why bring up science to begin with, bud…then try to lecture a longtime scientist about it, using a completely off-base concept of “proof”?

The original comment to which I responded was about supposedly “marginalized groups” in a racial context. This is a concept I did and do dispute; it’s a mass-victimhood excuse, outdated in 2025 with every one being equal under the law, discrimination disallowed based on skin color, and amplifying racial divides accomplishes nothing but needless further division. [It also makes a lot of money for the Democratic Party and affiliated gaggles of professional race hustlers and highly paid industrial “diversity” consultants, but that’s another issue.]

Besides, race is itself an artifice. It has no mathematically analytic, consistently reproducible, biological basis, nor objective, empirically based classification standards. Speaking of positivist science! Yet extremes on right and left love to group people by skin color, equate that with race (never mind that most people are what most would call “mixed race” anyway, and that multiple “races” can have the same skin color, etc.), and completely ignore the fundamental conceptual illegitimacy of race itself.

At one point, I told him that by completely misrepresenting my points to be the opposite, he either failed to comprehend what I wrote, or was misrepresenting it on purpose — either way, a bad look, and embarrassing. “You should stop here before you bury yourself in the dirt you’re throwing straight up from the hole you’re digging ever deeper.” I tried to give this guy a chance to back out, but…on a silver platter, he then handed me the nuke needed to finish the whole thing off.

He told me, of all people, to learn understand what it’s like to be poor, and to go to the inner city and live for a week, like “they” do in “one of these communities.”

Whoa. Go to the inner city…for a whole week! Does two decades count instead?

Anyone who knows me knew this was an invitation to absolutely implode the final argument, which of course I forthrightly did, verbatim:

That’s a good suggestion. I’ve done it. Base already covered.

Grew up inner-city poor, amid broken families, drugs, gangbangers, alcohol abuse, violent and property crimes of every kind. I know the streets because I lived the streets. I dare say I’ve seen more poverty than you by factors of hundreds.

I’ve seen and learned more about what we call poverty or “marginalization” in any given week of my youth than most people will in a lifetime. How long would you last on the corner of Beacon and Columbia in east Dallas during the crack wars in 1985?

Did you know that these problems are mostly the result of bad decisions by individuals? That everyone who huffs glue, smokes crack or meth, beats up his girlfriend, abuses her child, or deals heroin, *chose* to do that? No big bad racist bogeyman made them. Especially since most poor people are white.

No “racist system” made one kid I knew beat a teacher bloody. No “racism” caused another to steal radar detectors, or another to sell food stamps for sex, or to wrap a chain around another kid’s throat and swing him around by it, or another to sell herself on the corner of Ross and Haskell to pay for her bennies, or another to lead a street gang into a fight with Mongols bikers off east I-30 (which they won, amazingly), or another to light his pregnant girlfriend’s apartment on fire, or the woman driver on one of my school buses to accidentally shoot herself in the leg with a .22 pistol in her purse, or a dude I knew to rob a 7-11 and still be in prison for it today. Some (not all) of both the criminals and their victims here were not “people of color”. Many of the worst racists I knew against black folks were Asian. Or Mexican. Wow, can you imagine?
Individual responsibility, bud. That applies to all those crimes, and all racist acts. That’s because they are chosen.

I suspect it was his first exposure to a conservative/libertarian, multiply published physical scientist who grew up poor in the inner city. Hah! To hell with skin color. I am diversity!

Once it became apparent that I knew a whole lot more than this person, from first-hand experience, about science, and poverty, and the inner city, he deleted all his comments. Of course. Take the checked king off that board, bud.

The wildest part of an interaction like that isn’t necessarily the disagreement, it’s watching someone tell you they understand your own lived experience better than you do. Progressives in particular have become contagiously frequent with it. Brings to mind a tweet from a guy I follow who is a multinational author, rapper, speaker and all-around great guy, and whose presentation at OU I attended (Zuby).

There’s this strange moment where you realize the debate stopped being about reality, and turned into their defensively clinging to a rote, spoon-fed script handed down for recitation by secular, hyper-partisan viewpoint authorities in media and academia. [And yes, it can and sometimes does happen on the right too, but far less, since media (see item 9, page 11 here) and academia as a whole tilt strong left by every polling measure, and the academic left strongly tends authoritarian.]

Independent thought be damned! And honestly, it’s actually hilarious, in a pathetic way, because what else remains but to laugh, when someone insists you try to experience the stories you’ve already experienced immersively, and known better, for longer.

I’ve plied the grounds of my childhood trying to find even a corn kernel of this mythical “privilege,” and there’s no corn there. Were I a deer trying to eat from the feeder of privilege, I’d have starved. Blessings sometimes? Yes, as my friend who made the original post (and agrees with me) rightly differentiated…but not privilege.

What is the “privelege” of poverty? Avoiding being shot by the gunfire heard at night, or only being stabbed once, or seeing a guy’s brains sprayed across a roadway? Actually having a father at home, whichever drafty, roach-infested, rundown duplex was “home” was any given year? Blessing, yes…but not “privilege.” Fatherhood is supposed to be the norm in every home.

But in the end, all else of what may seemed a curse also becomes a blessing, as it imparted valuable perspective. I’m now glad for it. No regrets. And it taught me what MLK tried to teach everyone, but it appears far too few have learned: It’s about the content of one’s character, not the color of one’s skin.

So I assess and respect the former, and treat the latter as irrelevant. Why? Because Jesus himself did. Nowhere did He say, “Pity and favor thine dark skinned people,” nor, “I love all, but I love some skin colors more than others,” nor, “Go and sin no more, except if you’re the head of a BLM organization committing embezzlement and money laundering, or looting a store in Ferguson, or wearing a white hooded sheet burning crosses, or in a Mexican gang beating up blacks or vice versa, or being a white supremacist, or a black supremacist, or sending millions of dollars overseas illegally from Minneapolis.”

No, Jesus’ ideals apply the same to everyone. I approach race as impertinent, because He made no big deal about it either.

Part 2 of this series covered the Electoral College and how important it is. Now we switch to the fallout for conservatives.

On several fronts, conservatism is in great danger from a Trump administration. Yes, you read right. First of all, this is an urgent and important message to fellow conservatives, especially those Christians who (unlike me) held their noses and voted for Trump despite his own egregious personal immorality and lack of bonafide conservative credentials.

Watch your back. Trump can turn on us! He could do this by wavering and waffling on issues, as he has done in the past, and changing back to (for example) being pro-abortion. He has favored and unfavored the slaughter of the unborn, and not having much of a moral underpinning, can flip back to the dark side at any given millisecond. He has championed the “rights” of sexual deviants. He has mocked the disabled and poor, who we are taught by the Lord to love and assist. He has made sexist and demeaning “locker room” comments at ladies — grotesque and crass utterances that I shall neither repeat nor link here, and that are decidedly unhelpful and unbecoming the dignity of the office he is about to hold. We cannot trust Trump to support us and to further conservatism when he has been so outwardly hostile to conservative causes (and personally vile toward conservative Christian people, such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) in the recent past.

Furthermore, cafeteria Christians wielding a rhetorically convenient mixture of true and false theologies (such as the so-called “Christian left”) will leverage this situation, and Trump’s violations of mores we all hold dear, in their heretical attempts to redefine Biblical truths to fit their Bolshevik agendas. “Love trumps hate” is a fine example, catering to the thoroughly ridiculous, ignorant and untrue notion that we “hate” those whose immoral sexual behavior or desire to strip us of our right to armed self-defense we simply and rightfully disapprove of. We know that disapproval is not the same as “hate” or “racism” or “bigotry” or “sexism”. But that means nothing to zealous foamers on the secular and “Christian” (yes, I put that in quotes, quite deliberately) left who seek every opportunity to divide and conquer, straight out of Satan’s playbook.

Trump may (likely will!) betray us through his own governmental naivete and ignorance-derived gullibilities, falling prey to advisers who convince him that, for security’s sake, NSA and CIA need to further ratchet up domestic spying on Americans, even beyond the horrifying levels that Obama did, which itself was a big uptick from Bush 43’s own violations of the Fourth Amendment.

The Republican Party, much of which has abandoned conservatism, has no room to gloat. It allowed this Trump takeover to happen through its own smug, ivory-tower, pseudo-intellectual, Goldman Sachs-sellout, globalist, “We know what’s best for you” arrogance that, at times, matched that of the left wing. The elevation of Trump as standard-bearer is an excessive and extreme backlash to the Dole-Bush-Romney axis of distant, detached elitism. Rightly or not, as a result, Republicans of all stripes will be tarred and feathered by the left as the Party of Trump, a curse it will carry for ever and ever. Be ready. While some temporary satisfaction may exist at the electoral triumph, like a hit of heroin, long-term damage is virtually certain and sure.

Fortunately the Democrat Party has been damaged heavily too, by their abject failure to muster a candidate competent, moderate, and ethically clean enough to defeat someone as loathsome as Trump. Republicans and Democrats alike: a pox on both your houses! We need either more robust alternative parties to better represent the spectrum of voter ideals than the horridly outdated and over-simplistic dichotomy presented to them today, or as I have advocated, an absolute end to political parties and a fresh start to voting strictly on candidates and issues.

Unfortunately, respect for morals and ethics has been damaged by both parties in this campaign, as I’ve enumerated ad nauseam in BLOG posts here already. Now that one of those parties has won the electoral vote, the lesson here to our children is, among others, that one can become President despite having egregious, deep and profound character flaws as manifest in:
* Extramarital affairs (and he’s not the first, I know);
* Promotion and operation of massive gambling operations;
* Support (whether currently or not, the record is there) for genocide of the unborn;
* Crass, crude, misogynistic public insults of women, whom God has decreed are to be loved, cherished and protected, not abused;
* Insulting name-calling directed at all manner of people opposing him;
* Stiffing creditors and contractors (theft, forbidden outright by one of our Commandments);
* Flaunting of wealth (ever heard of the allegory of the camel and the eye of the needle?)
* Abject ignorance of issues, which is abdication of moral and professional responsibility to be the most excellent possible at one’s work.

Will character and personal integrity ever matter again in the highest office of our nation and the most influential in the free world? If not, as it appears by the choices presented to us in this election, it is ridiculously easy to see how we are, as a “civilization”, hurtling at frightening velocity straight toward Biblical prophesies of the end times. And we as a nation and a civilization will deserve exactly what is coming to us, even as individuals who had nothing to do with putting such a depraved charlatan (either one, but we’ll refer to Trump as such, since he won) in office will suffer because of this.

You know what, though? So will we conservatives, because we all will be labeled as having “put him in office”–even though many of us did not vote for him precisely because of his unrepentant and open sinfulness. This is going to be a well-coordinated attack on all of our values held dear, whether in the next national election in four years, or in any impeachment proceedings he brings upon himself by his own nefariousness and corruption in the interim; so be prepared.

We conservatives also are at risk from a numerically small but disproportionately painful bur of stupidity within. Isolated but fanatically publicized incidents have occurred of election-related bullying, violence, and racism by Trump supporters, whether or not they claim to be conservatives, will tarnish us all with an unfair brush, and will continue to be propagandized by left-wing zealots hell-bent on discrediting all who do not think exactly like them on hot-button social issues that the left uses as a divide-and-conquer tactic. To the idiots on the right who are breaking stuff and being mean to individuals, I say, go home and dig boogers out of your noses, or some other endeavor more fitting of your ignorance. You are not welcome in the world of thinking conservatism.

Just as awful are false-flag hate crimes by left-wingers, which have taken place as well. More “hate crimes” under false pretense are likely to occur, because they succeed at fomenting left-wing rage. Emotional reactionaries on the left jump on these as rallying cries, without first taking due time to verify the nature and motivations of the criminals, then say, “See, Trump supporters need to speak out against these evils!” Fine. Many of them are. Now leftists also need to call out and police the false-flag crimes and hate originated in their own realm. I hold out little hope they will, because the false-flag leftists still are convenient to the cause for the ten seconds that most people pay attention. Rage sells — even if the rage is generated through duplicitous behavior.

The danger to conservatives here is tangible and physical, in terms of criminal retaliation for either real, or perceived or even falsely attributed, bad behavior by a very few.

This segues to the next installment of this series, where I’ll address the overly melodramatic, emotional, and sometimes violent reactions of the left wing to this election.