LIBERAL IDIOCY

GLENN GREENWALD—The advent of the internet has empowered the riff-raff, the peasants, the unlicensed and the uncredentialed — those who in the past were blissfully silent and invisible — to be heard, often with irreverence and even contempt for those who wield the greatest societal privileges, such as a star New York Times reporter. By recasting themselves as oppressed, abused and powerless rather than what they are (powerful oppressors who sometimes abuse their power), elite political and media luminaries seek to completely reverse the dynamic.

Not even Glenn Greenwald is safe from attack by the censorship brigade flooding social media. Says Glenn: “I had the privilege of having my name trend on Twitter for a good part of Wednesday and into Thursday morning because journalists in the liberal sector of media along with left/liberal activists accused me of transphobia and bi-phobia (with half-hearted accusations of misogyny tossed in) so many times that Twitter’s algorithm catapulted my name onto its sacred most-discussed list…”

RAMIN MAZAHERI—How leftist or righteous or non-fascist can Democrats be when since the 1960s they have morphed into being pro-war, pro-FBI, pro-conformity, pro-censorship and many other “pro-“ things which are historically rightly associated with fascists? Democrats want me to believe that Republicans are the fascists because they are all racists, but the November 4th realisation that 26% of Trump’s voters cannot be non-White White Supremacists should have ended this gross exaggeration and obvious diversion. But in the US my journalism and my personal discussions simply go nowhere with many Biden supporters.

JIM KAVANAGH—For the U.S. left to build a working-class socialist movement, it must become what it decidedly is not, and hasn’t evinced much interest in being—a pole of attraction for millions of people who are not socialists, do not agree with many of the motley commandments that have become the dogma of the “woke” American left, and are still largely held as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” (Steinbeck actually said “capitalists”) in capitalist ideology. Given the enormous ideological work done by the Fox-MSBNC, Breitbart-NYT media universe, which is the primary source of political education in this country, what else could you expect?

DAVID WALSH—There has not been a single work in recent decades that one could point to, and say, “This sums up the period, or life in the US, or any country. This is a picture of life that will endure for decades. This provides the whole, or important parts of the whole.” Not one. The postmodernists and identity politicians have had several decades to show what they can do. And there is very little artistically to come out of it. This has been the worst period in the modern epoch, in my view, from the artistic point of view.