Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 167th episode. Okay so something a little different for you today. In this episode I want to explain why far-left political ideology is senseless, inaccurate, and dangerous. The first thing I want you to keep in mind is that I’m not attacking the people who hold to Leftist ideas. I believe these people are made in the image of God and have infinite value just like everyone else. I’m attacking the ideas of Leftism – not the Leftists themselves – even though sometimes the distinction will be hard to notice. It’s also important to note this polemic is not targeted at classic liberalism – as I don’t think classic liberalism is necessarily wrong and I actually hold many classically liberal positions. But Leftism is a whole different worldview. Leftism has more in common with fundamentalist religious extremism than it does classical political persuasions. It is a cult which is founded on lies. These lies aren’t your average everyday lies either – they’re more like opposite-truths or anti-truths. That’s the main reason why Leftism is so dangerous: it demands strict faith-based adherence to a worldview which in so many ways is the opposite of reality. It’s like everyone in the group agrees to pretend the cup of poison is actually water and then forces each other to drink it. I’m not going to ask you to abandon Leftism in this episode, rather I want to sketch out the major ways in which it operates on falsehoods then let you decide what to do with that information.
The spirit which motivates Leftism can be chased all the way back to the ancient days of Cain and Abel. Cain was among the first human actors to manifest a rejection of basic truth, a feigned sacrifice, a hatred of competence, and the murder of his own ideal. Cain pretended to give his best sacrifice to God and when God rejected it Cain doubled-down on the lie. Cain lied to himself about himself, about God, and about Abel. He lied about himself because he believed he wasn’t responsible for his sacrifice being rejected. He lied about God because he believed only a tyrant could reject the sacrifice of a virtuous person like Cain. He lied about Abel because he believed Abel stole God’s favor away from him.
The delusional spirit which moved Cain to defy God and murder Abel is the same spirit which moves Leftism today. Leftists pretend to contribute their best to society and scream oppression when their mediocrity is rejected. Leftists refuse to entertain the possibility their failures are a consequence of themselves being insufficient the way they are. They refuse to believe that the quality of their sacrifice could be the reason for their privation. Asking a Leftist to change and further develop him or herself to become more competent is functionally equivalent to bigotry. Leftists convince themselves the system is the reason why they are rejected and therefore conclude anyone who succeeds in such an oppressive system must be an oppressor him or herself. This demonizing of competence results in Leftists seeking to excommunicate and ultimately murder any individual who achieves more than them. It never occurs to the Leftist that a person’s success results from the value he or she contributes to society, rather they insist anyone with wealth must have stolen it by way of unjust economic practices or inherited it through birthright privilege.
That kind of spirit goes all the way back to Cain, but Leftism was given its most recent trappings by the French intellectuals Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. They did this by suggesting language itself could be deconstructed such that it no longer corresponds to objective reality. This is the anti-truth which makes up the beating heart of postmodernism. They claim there is no such thing as objective truth so all speech is a form of posturing to advance the power of your group. The postmodernist would listen to this episode and say I’m jockeying for power on behalf of heterosexual white males. They would refuse to accept my reasoning – not on the merits of the reasoning – but by an a priori belief that my reasoning cannot possibly be motivated by a desire to understand truth because truth doesn’t exist. The weird thing about the postmodernist is that they disbelieve in the objective nature of truth while presupposing the objective nature of power. I think this betrays their core motivation. The postmodernist is willing to give power the privilege of objectivity because power is what they are seeking. The postmodernist believes all conversation is an effort to garner power because the lust for power is what motivates their own deconstructionist viewpoint. It’s a form of psychological projection.
At best the postmodernists are wrong. At worst they know they’re wrong and they’re lying about it. You can tell this about them because they don’t treat their own lives as if objective reality is an illusion. You don’t see them jumping off of buildings on the faith-based presupposition that gravity is merely a social construction. They claim there are an infinite number of valid ways to walk through life but most of them don’t walk through their own lives as if this is true. Most of them approach life as if there are a set of objective rules which exist outside of social construction which must be conformed to in order to maintain well-being. They understand the objective reality that we all need food, water, shelter, and relationships in order to thrive. They accept that we need to maintain these things across time in order to ground our well-being on a stable foundation.
In order to accept these claims, the postmodernist is forced to walk a very narrow path through life and abandon the near-infinite number of paths which would undermine these needs. The fact that they capitulate on this point and are willing to walk this path is proof-positive that they either know their philosophy is wrong and are lying about it or they’re just badly confused about the nature of reality. The postmodernist acts as if there are objective truths about reality which they must conform to in order to maintain their own well-being and the well-being of their loved ones across time, all the while repeating the pablum of a philosophy which claims objective truth doesn’t exist. Deconstructing language and pretending to ignore necessary context while not actually ignoring it in their own lives is one of the anti-truths of Leftism.
The next anti-truth of Leftism is the idea that each individual is fundamentally associated with his or her group identity. In the eyes of the Leftist I’m not Michael Baun, a unique individual made in the image of God with my own unique thoughts, free will, and opinions, rather I’m a straight white male who is merely a mouthpiece for my group identity. We see this falsehood most commonly manifested in identity politics. You can observe identity politics at play when a person is elevated on the basis of his or her group identity rather than the merits of him or her as an individual. So when you see the media fawning over a non-white female being the first one to accomplish whatever goal – that’s identity politics. Leftism suggests your skin color is preeminent over your character, experience, personality, opinions, and all the other rich elements which make up who you are as a person. Your person-hood is subordinate to your group identity in the Leftist worldview. This means you could be an exceptional individual in terms of your talent, wisdom, and integrity but if you’re a white male then none of that matters because super-ordinate to all those good qualities is the fact that you belong to the oppressor group.
The inverse is also true in Leftism. You could be a chronic failure who lies, steals, and rapes women but if you’re black then none of those negative traits matter because super-ordinate to your wickedness is the fact that you belong to an oppressed group. In a culture which commends those who are perceived to be oppressed, the terrible person described here would be (and commonly is) heralded as a hero who is both brave and beautiful. But if a white male was guilty of all those same things they would be lashed and paraded as all that is ugly with society. In Leftism your group matters more than who you are as a person. This isn’t such a bad deal when you belong to one of the groups who make up the flavor of the month in the culture’s worship of the oppressed, but what happens when this flavor changes and you become stuck in a group considered the public enemy? No amount of pleading or referencing your innocence as an individual will save you. If you live by the machinations of group identity you will die by them as well.
The reason group identity is so dangerous, and also the reason it constitutes an anti-truth, is because of what is called intersectionality. Intersectionality is a social constructionist term which describes the multidimensional analysis of yourself in order to categorize which groups you belong to. The intersectionalist would say I’m a heterosexual, white, cisgendered male. For those who aren’t up on their social justice warrior vocabulary cisgendered simply means my gender identity matches my biological sex. In Leftism, intersectionality is used to determine your status in the hierarchy of oppressed people. You’re given some accolades if you’re non-white, but it’s even better if you can be non-white and homosexual. Better yet is to be non-white, homosexual, and gender non-conforming. Even better is to be non-white, homosexual, gender non-conforming, the child of immigrants, and disabled. You can see where this is going. There’s a near-infinite number of dimensions along which to categorize yourself as an oppressed person.
You might think that’s worth taking advantage of until you realize there’s also a near-infinite number of ways for them to categorize you as an oppressor. And that’s exactly what happens in the Leftist worldview. Fifty years ago activists were advocating for the perceived oppression of women, but today – because of the forced logic of intersectional group identity – these same activists are stripping away the rights of biological women in order to assuage the grievances of men who identify as women. If you’re tempted to support the culture of Leftism because it benefits or protects you today, take some time to reflect on yourself and imagine all the ways in which the culture might betray you and target you as an oppressor. Are you considered an attractive person? Because that will be a privilege worth hunting you over. Did your parents or grandparents own property? Because that makes you an enemy of the disadvantaged renters.
The crazy thing about intersectionality and proof that it’s false is the fact that once you add enough categories of group identity to a person they become a unique individual again. There’s no one on earth who matches you exactly down to your DNA, personality profile, and historical experience. And most of the Leftists who practice identity politics realize that it’s nonsense yet they deceptively hold to it anyway. That’s why they elected a heterosexual white male with a history segregationist policies in their professed effort to virtuously purge our society of bigotry. And really, what more bigoted way to view the world than to assume that the most important thing about you is your skin color simply because it denotes which group you belong to? They only care about group identity when it’s advantageous for them to care about it. This intellectual inconsistency is yet further evidence that group identity is antithetical to the truth that you are a unique individual. This inconsistency proves that Leftists understand viewing your group identity as paramount doesn’t make any sense in reality.
As if we haven’t devastated this argument enough, just ask yourself what an identity politics acolyte would do in the event he or she needed heart surgery. Imagine a situation where this person has to choose between two surgeons to perform the surgery. One surgeon has a track record of 10,000 successful operations. But he’s white and he voted for Trump. The other surgeon is fresh out of med school but he ticks all the intersectional boxes of oppressed virtue. Which one do you think the Leftist will choose? Because I think in this moment they would let go of their identity politics and go with the doctor who is most likely able to help them successfully. That’s because deep down they know intersectional group identity is an anti-truth which can’t be sustained in reality.
The next anti-truth peddled by the Leftist worldview is that all human problems are a consequence of economic class struggle. So if you have difficulties in your life the source of these difficulties must be traced to economic disparity and the only way to address them is to rise to a higher economic class. The Leftist assumes if economic inequality were solved life would begin to resemble a Utopian ideal. But this idea seems to completely ignore the fact that nature is trying to kill us from the moment we are conceived in the womb. The economic prowess of Steve Jobs wasn’t able to spare him an early death from cancer. The amount of money in your bank won’t save you from the psychological trauma which comes from encountering the evil of a rapist. The bodies of rich people decompose just the same as those of the poor. People of tremendous wealth are still guaranteed death and are likely to endure the loss of loved ones just the same as the poor. A viral infection doesn’t discriminate on the basis of income inequality. Predators and natural disasters care nothing of which economic class you belong to.
The Leftist idea that income inequality is humanity’s greatest problem is oversimplified, incorrect, and ignorant of the data. Not to mention the fact it completely misses how capitalist, free societies have done more to ameliorate human problems than any system of governance that’s ever existed anywhere – and that these human problems are being solved at a rate faster than ever recorded in documented history. I’ve shared this data set before, but I’m going to share it again just to show how badly wrong the Leftists are when they claim capitalism exacerbates human difficulties through income inequality. This data comes from Dr. Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now:
“In 2017, Americans killed each other at a rate of 5.3 per hundred thousand, had seven percent of their citizens in poverty and emitted 21 million tons of particulate matter and four million tons of sulfur dioxide. But 30 years ago, the homicide rate was 8.5 per hundred thousand, poverty rate was 12 percent and we emitted 35 million tons of particulate matter and 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide.”
“In 2017, the world had 12 ongoing wars, 60 autocracies, 10 percent of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 10,000 nuclear weapons. But 30 years ago, there were 23 wars, 85 autocracies, 37 percent of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 60,000 nuclear weapons.”
“In 2017 there were 238 deaths attributed to terrorism in Western Europe, but 1988 was worse with 440 deaths.”
“For most of human history, life expectancy at birth was around 30. Today, worldwide, it is more than 70, and in the developed parts of the world, more than 80.”
“250 years ago, in the richest countries of the world, a third of the children did not live to see their fifth birthday, before the risk was brought down a hundredfold. Today, that fate befalls less than six percent of children in the poorest countries of the world.”
“Famine is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It could bring devastation to any part of the world. Today, famine has been banished to the most remote and war-ravaged regions.”
“200 years ago, 90 percent of the world’s population subsisted in extreme poverty. Today, fewer than 10 percent of people do.”
“For most of human history, the powerful states and empires were pretty much always at war with each other, and peace was a mere interlude between wars. Today, they are never at war with each other. The last great power war pitted the United States against China 67 years ago.”
“More recently, wars of all kinds have become fewer and less deadly. The annual rate of war has fallen from about 22 per hundred thousand per year in the early ’50s to 1.2 today.”
“Democracy has suffered obvious setbacks in Venezuela, in Russia, in Turkey and is threatened by the rise of authoritarian populism in Eastern Europe and the United States. Yet the world has never been more democratic than it has been in the past decade, with two-thirds of the world’s people living in democracies.”
“Homicide rates plunge whenever anarchy and the code of vendetta are replaced by the rule of law. It happened when feudal Europe was brought under the control of centralized kingdoms, so that today a Western European has 1/35th the chance of being murdered compared to his medieval ancestors. It happened again in colonial New England, [again] in the American Wild West when the sheriffs moved to town, and [again] in Mexico.”
“Over the last century, we’ve become 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car crash, 88 percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash, 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job, 89 percent less likely to be killed by a drought, flood, wildfire, storm, volcano, landslide, earthquake or meteor strike because of improvements in the resilience of our infrastructure. We are also 97 percent less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning.”
“Before the 17th century, no more than 15 percent of Europeans could read or write. Europe and the United States achieved universal literacy by the middle of the 20th century, and the rest of the world is catching up. Today, more than 90 percent of the world’s population under the age of 25 can read and write.”
“In the 19th century, Westerners worked more than 60 hours per week. Today, they work fewer than 40.”
“Thanks to the universal penetration of running water and electricity in the developed world and the widespread adoption of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, dishwashers, stoves and microwaves, the amount of our lives that we forfeit to housework has fallen from 60 hours per week to fewer than 15 hours per week.”
“According to the IZA Institute for the Study of Labor, the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, the Washington Pew Research Center, Social Indicators Research, and Perspectives in Psychological Science: In 86 percent of the world’s countries, happiness has increased in recent decades.”
“A tabulation of positive and negative emotion words in news stories has shown that during the decades in which humanity has gotten healthier, wealthier, wiser, safer and happier, the New York Times has become increasingly morose and the world’s broadcasts have gotten steadily glummer.”
“Why don’t people appreciate progress? Part of the answer comes from our cognitive psychology. We estimate risk using a mental shortcut called the “availability heuristic.” The easier it is to recall something from memory, the more probable we judge it to be.”
A combination of ignorance and deception has blinded many citizens to the truth that America is the most prosperous, most free, least racist society on earth and in all of human history. History is in fact humanity’s bloody struggle against entropy and scarcity. Nature is constantly trying to kill us. Prior to 1895 most people lived on less than $1.00 per day – and that figure is adjusted for inflation. It didn’t matter whether you were black, white, or yellow – everyone was poor. The painstaking sacrifices of our ancestors managed to produce the western world. The western world is curing poverty faster than any society that’s ever existed. Since 1950 the number of people living in poverty around the world has been cut in half. The measure of prosperity we’ve been able to produce by way of free market capitalism is nothing short of miraculous. It really can’t be more obvious that American society is marvelous in comparison to virtually every civilization which has come before it. This data thoroughly destroys the idea that capitalism is a zero-sum game. This zero-sum game struggle is another anti-truth of the Leftist worldview. Not only is capitalism not a zero-sum game, but it’s actually the greatest example of a rising tide lifting all boats the world has ever witnessed.
Is income inequality a real problem? Yes, it’s a real problem. But it’s not a problem caused by American social construction. It’s a problem caused by the reality of hierarchy itself. And hierarchies exist all over the universe even in places where human beings have never been. The Pareto Distribution, which describes how 80% of the creative resource will collect around the top 20% of performers in any given hierarchy, is true everywhere – not just in western societies. It’s true in the animal kingdom and it’s true in the rain forests. The tallest trees reach above the canopy to collect even more sunlight and grow taller still. High-mass planets have a strong gravitational pull which causes them to gain even more mass. Hierarchies are unavoidable in all human societies – the difference between capitalism and communism is that in capitalism the hierarchies are predicated on competence and not corruption. Hierarchies tend to dispossess people at the bottom and so poverty is found both in capitalism and in communism, the difference between capitalism and communism is that capitalism produces wealth plus poverty while communism only produces poverty.
It’s impossible to avoid the advent of a hierarchy because as human beings we have problems to solve. We need to stay warm enough and cool enough, we need food and water, we need security, emotional stability, and peace of mind. Needing these things means we have problems we must solve on a daily basis or else we will die. The moment we set out to solve any problem we’re going to discover that a minority of people are far better at solving the problems than everyone else. And boom, there your hierarchy. It’s not optional. Even though hierarchies in western society dispossess people at the bottom, the hierarchies themselves are not fundamentally predicated on corrupt power-grabs. They’re predicated on competence and how much value you add to society. This is the only game we know of which produces safe, peaceful living conditions and the Leftists are doing all they can to convince young people there’s no way they themselves can add value and ascend their own respective hierarchies – so they might as well tear them all down. This is why we have a whole generation of people who have never taken the time to learn a marketable skill because they’ve been deceived into thinking their only hope for economic class mobility is to destroy the competent people above them. There’s no attitude more dangerous to civil society than that, and it’s a mirror image of the demonic spirit which possessed Cain in the Cain and Abel story.
If huge swaths of the population are possessed by a murderous hatred of the rich, then why aren’t they easy to identify and why does the black hole of Leftism pull in so many otherwise decent people? Well there’s the obvious abandonment of truth in exchange for power but this happens on both sides of the aisle. An easy way to reconcile our population and heal the division in America would be to simply commit to speaking the truth as best you understand it. It’s common practice for conservatives to downplay or spin an event if the truth of the event makes the Left look good. The same thing happens on the Left. There were perhaps no better examples of this than the riots during the summer of 2020 and during January of 2021. The Left downplayed the riots which terrorized dozens of American cities all summer long. Some elements of the Right downplayed the riot which happened at the U.S. Capitol building in January. The truthful way of looking at these events would be to say both were unlawful riots and both occurrences have no justification and no place in civil society. But for many people their loyalty to party runs deeper than their loyalty to the truth.
The motivation for this kind of deceptive attitude is the prioritization of what will bring you power over what is actually true. This Satanic practice is at the heart of Leftism and it is corrosive to civil discourse. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn thought this kind of lying was one of the worst elements which characterized the Russian Revolution and the U.S.S.R. He thought that if enough people had chosen to commit to the truth then they could have preserved their society. He’s quoted as saying: The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. Both sides of the political spectrum would do well to learn from his advice.
But what makes Leftism so dangerous is the infinitesimally small likelihood that they will ever do this. That’s because their cultural Marxism is intermingled with the postmodern viewpoint which denies the reality of objective truth. How can you preserve your society by refusing to lie when there’s no such thing as the truth? How can you even know when you’re lying? It might be impossible to pull people out of this psychopathic haze until objective truth reasserts itself and causes their facade of lies to crumble down into ruins. Part of the reason Leftists care so little for the truth is that they don’t believe there’s consequences for missing it. That’s another huge problem for the Leftist viewpoint and it most recently revealed itself in the form of police brutality against black men.
During the Jim Crow era it was a demonstrable fact that police treated black men unfairly and brutality was not uncommon. But the Leftists have taken this traumatic history and asserted that it’s still happening right now. They’ve convinced a large part of the black community that police officers are hunting them and desiring to hurt them. Not only are these assertions not true, but they are the opposite of the truth. I shared the data on this point in MHB 139 but I’m going to share it again here to show just how egregious this lie really is.
In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.
If that’s not enough for you, I invite you to research police brutality yourself. The most egregious display of police brutality in recent memory occurred on January 18th, 2016 in a hotel hallway in Mesa, Arizona. A man wearing gym shorts and a t-shirt crawled on his knees while he begged and sobbed for his life before being summarily executed. You can watch the body-cam footage online. His name was Daniel Shaver, and he was white. The Leftist worldview is built on lies. As Pinker explained with devastating clarity – the world, especially the United States, has never been better than it is right now. And yet more and more people are falling into this pathological cult because they’ve been tricked into thinking they’re oppressed. The only system of governance in history that’s been able to produce unprecedented prosperity, equality, and freedom is the same system these unthinking people are revolting against. Instead of humble gratitude for the civilization others have sacrificed to build, mobs of angry rioters are possessed by ideological arrogance.
And if you think these lies about police brutality are beneficial to the black community – think again. Imagine what it’s like to be a black male and to already be profiled by police. It’s true that black males are profiled by police officers because of racial stereotypes. The black community is justifiably angry about these stereotypes. But their righteous anger needs to be directed at the proper source of the problem. If next week blonde white women began committing the majority of violent crime then police would start profiling blonde white women. If you’re a black man and you’ve been taught that police officers want to hurt or kill you, what do you think is going to happen when you undergo a routine traffic stop? Your misapprehended belief that the officer hates you is going to make you more likely to experience a fight or flight response. Fight or flight behavior during a routine stop or arrest is going to dramatically increase the real danger during each police interaction. So the Leftist lie that police are racist is actually promoting the threat of police harming or killing black men.
If you think America is fundamentally characterized by racism then ask yourself why so many people are terrified of being labeled a racist. Why does being labeled a racist turn you into a pariah within a society that’s supposed to be racist to the core? If America were so racist then wouldn’t being a racist win you status and a badge of honor? If America is systemically racist then why is it culturally acceptable to disparage white people but not people of color? If America is racist why have there been multiple documented cases of fake hate crimes and of white people presenting themselves as people of color? Why do we have Affirmative Action laws written with the express purpose of benefiting people of color and not white people? Also which end of the political spectrum has created a power-platform the existence of which is fueled by the so-called fight against racism? How would the Left justify their vehicles of power if tomorrow America was no longer racist? Can’t you see how they have a vested interest in spawning as much racism as they can all over the country? The Left loves racism. Perceived racism is a boon for priests of the Leftist cult like Ibram X. Kendi, Nicole Hannah Jones, and Robin DiAngelo, all of whom make huge sums of money peddling their anti-racist propaganda. Would they be happy if tomorrow there was no longer any need for their work? And no longer any money to be made from it?
Critical race theory is another anti-truth of the Leftist worldview and it’s not supported by the data at all. The critical race theorists point to black neighborhoods where chronic poverty is suffered at levels not seen in nearby communities and suggest this proves systemic racism. But it proves nothing in the way of systemic racism. To suggest black well-being is a one-to-one function of systemic racism is to say black people are a monolithic community with no free will, no opinions of their own, and no personal agency. I can hardly think of a perspective more racist than this denial of person-hood the Left advantageously adopts in view of black people. This attitude became painfully obvious when President Joe Biden suggested if you didn’t vote for him then “you ain’t black.”
The suffering neighborhoods do not prove systemic racism, but they do prove the existence of negative feedback loops which are a consequence of historical systemic racism which was made illegal as far back as the 1970s. Postmodern neo-Marxists are using the suffering of black people who live in these negative feedback loops as a chess piece of virtue signaling to justify demonizing their political opposition, waging war on free society, and undermining the American system of governance. In today’s America there’s not a single law on the books which discriminates against people of color.
The Left refuses to define systemic racism because doing so would require them to point to the legislation and the legislation doesn’t exist. We do need to solve the negative feedback loops which plague black communities, but destroying the American system will do nothing to solve them and will only make things worse for everyone. There is no sympathy for the black community in the Leftist worldview, their suffering is being used as a means to an end in the Left’s efforts to restructure American power dynamics.
In reality the most prevalent form of racism in American culture right now is racism against white people. White people are being commanded to repent of their so-called white privilege before any attempts are made to understand whether the individual actually lives a privileged life. Just a few days into the Biden presidency the CDC was discussing whether or not to prioritize people of color with COVID vaccinations. Can you imagine if the races were reversed here? Biden himself promised to prioritize non-white businesses with financial relief despite the fact that white-owned businesses suffered just as much from the pandemic mitigation efforts. Can you imagine if the races were reversed here as well? The truth is America is not racist and most Americans hold the black community in high regard and want to help them, the difference is the Left casts aspersions against white people solely on the basis of their skin color – which is the definition of racism. They do this because they are given over to identity politics which we discussed earlier in the episode.
So I think there’s a fair amount of psychological projection happening in the Leftist worldview. Undoubtedly their projection of racism stems from their passionate adherence to group identity. The primacy of power over truth is also a projection the Left puts on their opponents. All of this results in a strange form of repressive tolerance. The Left claims tolerance as one of their core ideals yet seeks to cancel anyone who holds dissenting views to their own. They claim the mantle of tolerance as a way of attempting to box their opponents in on indefensible ground. If you disagree with the pablum of the Left then you must be a bigoted racist. Not surprisingly there isn’t a whole lot of mercy or forgiveness found in the Leftist worldview. Cancel culture mandates that once you do anything the woke institutions determine is a mistake then you become irredeemable and must be excommunicated from the public square. The Left doesn’t supply a pathway to redemption because in reality they don’t actually care about solving social ills like racism. They’re just using these issues as a virtue signal in order to imbue their political maneuvers with moral authority.
So why on earth would anyone get sucked into such a pathological way of viewing the world? I think it’s because the woke system of belief explains the sense of guilt that all individuals feel in their hearts. All human beings are saddled with the guilt of unrepentant sin until they turn to Jesus Christ for forgiveness. This sense of guilt, this feeling of not being enough, and the notion that there’s something wrong with the world follows people everywhere they go. Woke ideology explains the guilt by telling you you’re a racist. It’s also why so many young people are drawn to the virtue signaling associated with environmental causes. It’s obvious that environmental policies such as the Paris Climate Accords aren’t worth the paper they’re written on – mostly because there’s no enforcement of the policy. But it still feels good to say that you’re trying to do something about it. It’s an amelioration of the guilt. The same goes for the woke virtue signaling in response to cases like the George Floyd incident. There was very little discussion of sensible policy reform targeted specifically at the Minneapolis police department. There was no insistence on the value of maintaining the precedent of due process. In other words there was little at all in the way of making sure something like this wouldn’t happen again in the future – there was just mindless rioting and protesting.
Repeating the dictum of the woke cult and practicing pointless rituals in the name of defending those the culture determines to be oppressed is a fallacious attempt at atoning for the guilt of unrepentant sin. Otherwise well-meaning people feel guilty and the woke priests tell them it’s because they are racist and privileged. This explanation introduces a new generation of people to the doctrines of the radical Left and before long they are demonizing half the population in the name of compassion, love, and tolerance. There’s no way of avoiding this kind of thing so long as people continue deprived of a meaningful worldview to give them purpose and explain the guilt they feel. Who they really need is Jesus. Jesus opens their eyes and sets them free from the harsh rule of the woke cult. If you’re attracted to the Leftist viewpoint, I hope you consider the case I made here and reevaluate what it is you’re looking for. There exists a true and living God who loves you and wants relationship with you. To settle for Leftism in place of this relationship is to miss out on a blessed life filled with love, laughter, and peace of mind. You can have all of that right now, you need only ask God to show you the way.
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