Still Suicidal and Surreal
The Left's enthusiastic support for genocidal terrorists continues.
January 8, 2025 by Bruce Thornton 31 Comments

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Since the Democrats’ shellacking at the polls on November 5, the party has been undergoing a fractious discussion about what went wrong. A whole roster of the usual suspects has been mooted, including neglect of the working class. But that accurate assessment still doesn’t get that the problem is leftism per se, not bad candidates, polling, tactics, or whatever, no more than New Coke failed for those reasons. It was just a bad product.

Take Vermont Socialist, er, Independent Bernie Sanders’s scolding of his party: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. . . .  And they’re right.”

We know what Sanders means: “changing” to a full socialist planned economy managed by the state, rather than the over-regulated hybrid we now have. But those features of our dirigiste economy have created conditions, dysfunctions, and moral hazards––the tax, spend, print, borrow, hyper-regulate, and redistribute money that during the Biden-Harris administration unleashed inflation and wage stagnation that drove voters, including traditional Democrat constituencies, to vote for Trump.

Nor is the problem that “real” socialism has “never been tried.” History is littered with attempts to create a successful socialist or communist economy, and every one we know of has failed––not because it wasn’t properly managed or had a bad “messaging strategy,” but because unlike free-market capitalism, it has been predicated on unreal assumptions about human nature and motivation, as well as ignoring the power of freedom and choice.

Instead, “They believed,” as Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation writes, “with John Maynard Keynes, that ‘the state is wise and the market is stupid.’” Edwards refutes Keynes with this historical datum from a New York Times article: “Singapore, an Asian city-state of only 2 million people, exported 20 percent more machinery to the West in 1987 than all of Eastern Europe.”

Whatever the motives that have inflicted these assaults on our economy, socialism has serially failed for more than a century. Whether from sincere if flawed convictions, or selfish greed for pelf and power–– in the end, socialism is a form of slow-motion suicide. No nation––let alone one with living standards as high as ours––can survive such insults to our productivity, innovation, and economic growth, especially when these policies are accompanied by the redistribution of money to the unproductive. Character is eroded and virtues lost when people grow accustomed to getting something for nothing, for they soon come to see such feckless largess as an unalienable right to which they are permanently entitled.

Twenty-five centuries has given us copious evidence that civilizations can be destroyed by this malign dynamic. In the 18th century, Edward Gibbon chronicled dangers as it unfolded in ancient Athens: “In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”

Such policies and ideas of today’s progressive left aren’t just suicidal. They are so extreme and preposterous that they are surreal, so incredible that they are beyond even the “big lie” made famous by Adolf Hitler, one so huge that “It would never come into [people’s] heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Obvious examples include the economically destructive “green energy” policies based on a shaky hypothesis that ignores how much we don’t know factually about how global climate has functioned over billions of years. For now, it lies beyond what mathematician John Allen Paulos calls the “complexity horizon,” “that limit or edge beyond which social laws, events, and regularities are so complex as to be unfathomable, seemingly random.” Yet despite our incomplete understanding, we have embarked on a wildly expensive project to eliminate––without a proven, economical and reliable available substitute––the abundant, cheap fossil fuel energy that has created nearly every dimension of our rich modern world.

Or consider transgenderism, the anti-scientific idea that biological sex is due not to DNA or God, but to some private intuition or fever dream selected from a whole made-up suite of alternatives called “gender.” And from that nonsense has come an obsession with pronouns that callow or neurotic children think should reflect their subjective feelings rather than the rules of the English language. More heinous than that imposition of society from a tiny minority, medical doctors perform irreversible, mutilating surgeries to create a creepy simulacrum of a man or woman.

Finally, as the New Year’s Day terrorist murders in New Orleans––by a jihadist displaying the flag of ISIS––remind us, the worst example of surreal and suicidal leftist “activism” has arisen from the willful blindness that our cognitive elites have indulged towards Islam since the Iranian Islamic Revolution turbocharged the revival of jihad against the West.

One of the most shameless and morally moronic examples of that blindness has been the support for Hamas’s genocidal atrocities against Israel by university students, professors, and administrators. These disgusting displays of support for vicious murderers, antisemitic chants like “Death to Jews,” and acts of violence targeting Jews students––all have been committed with impunity, and are acts of appeasement that have encouraged jihadists that the West is a decaying civilization. What else would you call a people whose young, affluent, free, privileged cognitive elites celebrate a faith diametrically opposed to every tenet that these “woke” poseurs profess?

The Middle Eastern Muslims who have sworn genocidal jihad against Israel, the U.S., and the secularized Western democracies, certainly see an opportunity for undermining the “Great Satan,” as Iran calls the U.S., by exploiting these protestors. Recently, “very grateful Uncle Als—al Qaeda and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,” as the Wall Street Journal put it, have reached out to these Fifth Columnists.

Al Qaeda’s leadership announced, “As we support the assassination and beheading of Zionist unbelievers, so also we value and appreciate the movement of Western protesters and occupiers from among the students of Western universities, who by their occupying and protests have expressed their rejection of the ongoing genocide in proud Gaza.”  Muslim students were reminded that jihad is a “legal and divine obligation.” A Columbia “protest leader” affirmed that “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and advised his colleagues “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”

At least not yet. And we might wonder how bougie American day-tripping protestors reacted to the casual reference to “beheadings,” and what sense they made of the term “unbelievers.” Another jihadist message to the protestors, from Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, raised similar questions: “Dear university students in the United States of America, this message is an expression of our empathy and solidarity with you. As the page of history is turning, you are standing on the right side of it. . . . You have now formed a branch of the Resistance Front.”

But what “empathy” could a cleric from an apocalyptic strain of traditional Islam have with secularized American students? And how effective for addressing lefty college students––steeped as they are in the juvenile romance of revolution––to be called a “branch of the Resistance”? Or is he really addressing the many Muslim foreign students participating in the protests? In any case, Khamenei’s direct exhortation to American students clarifies his purpose: “The Quran’s lesson for human relations is: ‘Do not oppress and do not be oppressed,’” he writes. “My advice to you is to become familiar with the Quran.”

The canny injunction about not being an oppressor is surreal, given that the Islamic Iranian Republic has been brutally oppressing its own people, including religious minorities like the Baha’is, for over 46 years, and has strictly adhered to the Koran concerning the treatment of infidels, and the oppressive precepts of sharia law regarding apostasy, blasphemy, heresy, the subjection of women, and homosexuality. But the most significant part of his message is his advice to American young elites “to become familiar with the Koran.”

This exhortation, moreover, is also the traditional “Dawa,” the summons to infidels to convert to Islam, issued before a jihadist battle in order to make it a legitimate holy war fighting to conquer the world.  As the Iranian Islamic Republic’s founder the Ayatollah Khomeini preached, “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the world, there will be jihad.”

The enthusiastic support both for genocidal terrorists murdering in order to cleanse Israel of “infidels,” and for the proxies who serve a radical jihadist regime that represents everything these posturing students claim to believe, is surreally ignorant. But it is also suicidal, given that for nearly half a century the U.S. has been infidel enemy No. 1 for Khomeinist Muslims, and that Iran is aligned with our geopolitical rivals Russia and China.

The Dems’ suicidal surrealism has been endangering our country and institutions for decades. Let’s hope that the new administration discredits and discards it, and restores our country to reality.