Jordan Peterson addresses students at The Cambridge Union in 2018 (Photo by Chris Williamson/Getty Images)
We were first properly introduced to the Intellectual Dark Web in 2018, when the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss published a long essay on the loose alliance of thinkers and commentators who rose to prominence by kicking back against the Left-wing shibboleths of the college campus and the liberal dinner party. Weiss noted that its members “share three distinct qualities”: a willingness to “disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject” along with a resistance to “parroting what’s politically convenient” — which, she argued, some had paid for “by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought”.
A new book on the IDW takes a dimmer view of these above-the-fray intellectuals who claim to be motivated by hostility to ideological orthodoxy. Indeed, Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right is the most substantial critique of the IDW and its brand of ‘classical liberalism’ to date.
The book’s author is Michael Brooks, an American political YouTuber and a socialist. For Brooks, the IDW use a veneer of ‘reason’ and ‘science’ to justify prevailing inequalities. In a context where Donald Trump is the occupant of the White House and neo-liberal capitalism remains dominant (Jeff Bezos is forecast to become the world’s first trillionaire by 2026), the IDW’s cringeworthy posturing as a “persecuted minority” is glib and largely vacuous, in Brooks’s telling. As Brooks writes, the IDW “brand themselves as unclassifiable renegades even as they all share elements of an unmistakable anti-left agenda”.
The IDW’s lodestar is Jordan Peterson, the Canadian clinical psychologist and self-help guru who likes to talk about hierarchies and gender differences while dissecting Left-wing totalitarianism for the YouTube generation. Peterson has been preaching the same material for years. Yet he only truly gained prominence in 2016 following a campus row over pronouns for transgender students. The campus Left went berserk and Peterson started getting invited onto popular talk shows to rail earnestly against “post-modern Neo-Marxists”.
Yet as time went on, what the ‘renegades’ of the Intellectual Dark Web were really reneging on was their previous commitment to the Left. As Brooks writes, “[the IDW] generate their audience by publishing a neverending stream of ‘oh my God, look at these leftists being crazy’ articles”.
Aside from Ben Shapiro, a religious conservative who refers to abortion as “killing babies”, the IDW is largely made up of former liberals who have been “mugged by reality”, in Irving Kristol’s famous phrase, even if they nowadays often sound indistinguishable from what Brooks describes as “old school reactionaries”. Dave Rubin was once a member of the progressive Young Turks network who today decries “oppression Olympics”. Sam Harris is a fellow New Atheist ‘Horseman’ and one-time supporter of Hillary Clinton who conducts thought experiments on torture and a nuclear first strike against Iran. Meanwhile Jordan Peterson implores readers of his bestselling book, 12 Rules for Life, to “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world”.
Underlying much of this, Brooks argues, is an acceptance of prevailing inequalities — economic, gender, and racial — as natural. The IDW’s leading lights uncritically defend capitalism while drawing on biology and the dreary science of ‘IQ’ to bolster the status quo. They aim to “naturalize or mythologize historically contingent power relations”, as Brooks puts it. Behind every one of Peterson’s self-help homilies is an unbending fealty to the status quo. Hierarchies are hard-wired because lobsters follow them. Gender differences are real because women gravitate towards people and men towards things. Envy and resentment at the success of others will rot your soul. Oh, and stand up straight and make your damn bed.
The Left takes a dim view of the self-help movement — related, I suspect, to its own paternalistic preference for people who are on their way down rather than on their way up. Sinecured academics and privately educated scribblers make a handsome living telling poor people that they should “rise with their class, not out of it”. The sort of self-betterment promoted by the likes of Dr Peterson — so the argument goes — would be better channelled into a focus on structural change. Ironically, much like the Petersonian self-help mantras they disparage, large sections of the Left also want the poor to defer gratification — albeit until after the Revolution.
But self-actualisation has its obvious limitations. As Brooks notes, “sometimes people’s houses aren’t in order precisely because of the condition of the world”. In contrast to many of his comrades on the Left, however, Brooks argues that, rather than dismissing Jordan Peterson’s fanbase — largely white, male and self-taught — as ‘deplorables’, the Left should try to win them over to a more substantive programme. “One of the most dangerous things the Left can do is to write off the demographic to which Peterson appeals because of its relative racial and gender privilege,” Brooks writes.
Brooks’ critique of the IDW is at its best when he pulls apart the latter’s penchant for “naturalising instead of historicising”. Much IDW thought seeks in effect to depolitisise politics. We cannot fundamentally change the world therefore we should only try to describe it. Particularly absurd, as Brooks points out, is the way in which ideology is portrayed among members of the IDW as something other people subscribe to, whereas they are merely disinterested, above-the-fray intellectuals. Thus Peterson launches tirades against the principle of absolute equality, which few people believe in anyway, while earnestly drinking the meritocratic Kool-Aid, which is as much an ideological mirage as anything Peterson opposes. Meritocracy, as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once put it, is an imaginary world in which “every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything”.
The belief in actually existing equality of opportunity is particularly credulous when it comes to accounting for racial injustices in the contemporary United States. Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, whose work is frequently cited by members of the IDW, made the astonishing claim during a 2007 debate that “most of the juice” had gone out of environmental explanations for racial inequality “by the 1970s”. This too is an ideological point of view. As Brooks notes with incredulity, this was “a single decade after the ‘Whites Only’ signs came out of the restaurant windows and black people started to be allowed to vote”.
Of course, one needn’t be affiliated with the IDW to understand that the movement’s popularity — Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson can easily pack-out auditoriums — is partly a backlash against the excesses of the Left. It was once said that the Bolsheviks sought to politicise sleep. Their successors on today’s social justice scene deploy the truism that everything is political as a licence to shut down opposing opinions as ‘phobias’ and ‘microaggressions’. Peterson is not entirely wrong when he compares the campus activist who vibrates with rage at some minor rhetorical transgression to the Cheka officer whose gloved-hand raps on the door in the middle of the night. The difference is one has political power while the other does not.
This remains an important distinction, however, especially in Donald Trump’s America. The cloying self-regard of much IDW debate is bad enough, but it seems especially self-serving to pose as a purveyor of ‘unorthodox thought’ when taking on the comic turbulence of campus politics — all the while saying very little about the moral abominations of the Trump Presidency. Flattering the likes of Charles Murray may constitute subversive opinion in some quarters, but it’s hardly Charter 77.
Despite his opposition to Peterson and company, Brooks is of the Marxist-influenced Left, which has little time for the hair-splitting narcissism of identity politics and what he refers to contemptuously as the “shallow analysis” of the “ultra-woke”. Brooks calls instead for a return to universalism because “good and liberating ideas, like bad and reactionary ones, have thrived in a variety of cultural settings”.
This is a welcome blast against the dominant fetish for what Brooks describes as “drawing artificial lines between cultures”. Campus-driven heresy hunts are a distraction and a turn-off for ordinary people, as Brooks notes. Damning someone for being male or having a white skin may provide some cheap and ephemeral thrill, but it is not a serious approach to winning political power. As Brooks writes, “comradeship and solidarity across racial and national lines… is going to have to be central to any kind of viable movement to achieve a better world”.
Moreover, by the time Peterson and co appeared on the scene, many liberals had apparently forgotten how to argue for the things they believe in — thinking that moral indignation alone was enough. The brass standard here is Cathy Newman’s flailing attempt to interrogate Peterson in a 2018 interview for Channel 4 News. The interview went viral on the back of his running rings around her. Newman’s subsequent attempt to blame the humiliation on “men with an agenda” was as fatuous and complacent as her interview style.
But the Intellectual Dark Web — Peterson in particular — have thrived off the back of an overblown fear, particularly prevalent in the United States, of a resurgent Socialism. This would probably find a less substantial audience if people like Michael Brooks stopped trying to resuscitate Marxism-Leninism. Brooks contrasts the reactionary Left-baiting of the IDW with his own fruitless search – encapsulated in the pages of the socialist magazine Jacobin — for a “rejuvenated, humane, internationalist, and appealing version of the politics of the Finland station”[1].
In setting out what he believes in (as opposed to the IDW), Brooks evokes St Petersburg’s Finland Station to convey his sympathy for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Brooks concedes that one should not be an “uncritical apologist for everything that happened in the years after Lenin arrived at the Finland Station” — which is big of him — but he contrasts the reactionary politics of the IDW with his own dream of Communism with a human face. This reader wasn’t persuaded. Indeed, this sort of Socialist wish-thinking was once likened by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski to trying to cook a “dish of fried snowballs”. Leninism leads to famine, terror and forced labour camps — even if Jordan Peterson and the IDW say so.
Anti-Communism comes in a variety of hues though, some of which are more interesting than others. One irony of the ongoing culture war is the sense — to those of us standing on the sidelines at least — that one extreme sustains its opposite, and vice-versa. Christopher Hitchens briefly appears in Brooks’s book — only to be showered with abuse about his “failing liver”. Once upon a time Hitchens cautioned his friend the novelist Martin Amis to be careful about the type of anti-Communist he turned into. Brooks similarly reprimands the IDW for “obsessing about ‘freedom’ while getting chummy with authoritarians like Viktor Orban”. The IDW might here be reminded of Peterson’s Rule #6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the World.
One should also look at the material reasons why, historically, socialism has gained traction, but this doesn’t seem to interest the IDW. This might after all indicate that something was rotten with the status quo. Indeed, one can imagine Ben Shapiro or Dave Rubin reading Dickens’s classic revolutionary drama, A Tale of Two Cities, and coming away looking for Jacobins under the bed — while entirely missing the line which warns: “Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.”
The Whiggish liberalism of the Intellectual Dark Web sometimes feels like an ideology for affluent and comfortable times — in common with the narcissistic culture of identity politics it defines itself against. In this sense the IDW bring to mind an older generation of 19th-century liberals and conservatives who, in the words of Czesław Miłosz — a far more interesting anti-Stalinist than anyone the Intellectual Dark Web has produced — continued to “mouth 19th-century phrases about respect for man” — while all around them the world burned.
But the culture wars haven’t gone away. As we’ve seen with the recent Black Lives Matter protests: Covid-19, stagnant economies and mass unemployment are lighting a fire beneath ongoing ideological battles over history and social justice. One therefore imagines that the IDW will go on having the “important conversations that the mainstream won’t”, as Dave Rubin portentously phrased it. For Brooks, however, those seeking answers to the big questions of our time be better off looking elsewhere.
[1] Jordan Peterson may call Lenin “an ideologue & mass murderer”, yet the hero in Lenin’s favourite novel — Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? — is a man called Rakhmetev who eschews sex and alcohol and eats only raw steak while following a rigorous exercise programme. Which sounds an awful lot like Jordan Peterson.
James Bloodworth is a journalist and author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain, which was longlisted for the Orwell Prize 2019.
J_Bloodworth 
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SubscribeThe existential threat to our democracy is the putrefaction of our media.
The rot set in when the so-called progressives decided that anything at all, the suspension of disbelief, dispensing with objective reality, outright lying, and the suppression of debate, was somehow worth it to ‘protect democracy’ from the Evil Trump, and other populists (=politicians offering policies that people actually want).
But that’s the point of the article. The “E-Z Pass” of the American liberals.
You can be dishonest, lie, distort, misrepresent,… all in the name of “fighting for the defense of democracy”.
They will even rig elections in defense of democracy
The ‘Noble Lie’ has a long history (ever since Plato) – a myth or a lie knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony.
The only difference in today’s debate is that the ‘Noble’ element is amplified at the cost of minimising the ‘Lie’. But it is still a lie.
“Since 2016, Trump has provided a moral E-Z pass for the American liberal establishment.”
Brilliant.
This is the best part of the piece for sure. I have to admit the rest of it didn’t seem to have a coherent point.
Hypocrites both in the US and the UK have taken over the ostensibly left wing parties and used their perfect orthodoxy on cultural issues in order to defame those who would enact any policy which might actually address the concerns of voters in their respective countries.
Alas, perhaps the problem is so much worse than Siegel lets on. Why do they so want their E-Z pass in the first place? Is it because (as James Carville says of the Democratic power structure): “There are actually people who don’t mind losing elections because it makes them feel better and superior”? The Democrats could have decided they want to win. Now it seems clear they are going to lose, so they might start bracing for impact or develop some ways to counteract the Republicans’ very elaborate 2025 plan. (During the first Trump term, the Republicans were so surprised to have won that they foundered at first — though at last they managed their big achievement, destroying Roe v Wade. During the second Trump term, they will not make the same initial mistake. They are actively planning to impound Congressionally allocated funds, to expand the pool of Federal employees who are deemed at-will [political] hires rather than career civil service, etc.) I don’t think any Democrats are trying to counter-maneuver, and if not this may well be because their entire game is that E-Z moral pass.
Trump broke them because there had to be some other explanation for why the American public would go with a boorish loud jerk from New York over their sophisticated and credentialed butts. I mean if it wasn’t the Russians then it would mean that the public had decided that they just sucked that much.
For ‘credentialed’ read ‘upper caste’. Caste, as opposed to class, is all about what you are NOT – in this case a loud TV reality show celeb. The rest is caste hatred, known as TDS.
Yes, I feel sorry for the author, who apparently was living in an alternative reality for the last 8 years.
?
In the pantomime that is now American politics both the Ugly Sisters are inveterate liars and Cinderella has vanished.
Cinderella is now a “they”
All of this is self-evident within the sphere of foreign policy alone before the Democrats’ Maoist cultural policy once again comes into belief. Simply that on the evidence of the last four years, the world will not survive another terms of the Democrats in the White House. Trump is there because the Americans feared a neocon RINO just as much.
This is a great article. And this line
Was it all for naught then? The enormous effort to adapt to a world where you had to tolerate and endure mediocrity, incompetence and sometimes outright malevolence and venality all because the person embodying such qualities belonged to a protected group
may be the best description of What Life Is Like, Now, Everywhere I am yet to read.
Are females a protected group? It doesn’t seem like it.
I just can’t watch it any more. As a non-American, I don’t have any skin in the game and, after having just been through all the Brexit vitriol where I’ve watched people who claim to be the great and the good and the intellectual and the democratic turn out to be anything but. I can’t take anymore of the delusion.
The situation in the States has become completely unmoored from anything that I recognise as reality, it’s like some sort of mass psychosis.
Bitterly ironic that I’m reading John Ferling’s “A Leap Into The Dark – The Struggle To Create The American Republic” when we’re literally watching the struggle to destroy it.
Unless you believe that a World War III won’t impact you, you have skin in this game.
If there is a WW3 , no one will have any skin left anyways. So who cares. She is right, there is mass psychosis.
Enjoy the muslim takeover of your society. Europeans killed God and they will suffer greatly for it.
Let’s be positive. America’s problems can be fixed with some fairly simple reforms.
The first, and most obvious, is to make it possible to get elected to every kind of office without the help of George Soros or Larry Fink. Ban campaign advertising – or at least place strict limits on the amount that can be spent.
Q: Why did Obama, despite all his promises, do nothing about the malfeasance of the bankers in the wake of the 2008 crash? A: because they put him in the White House.
This is SO right. Since the Citizens United decision — thanks, Mitch! — both sides have become bottom feeders to their richest and most venal contributors. As one debate viewer put the choice Americans face, perfectly: It’s down to “Hell, no!” vs “Oh, no!”
You appear to argue that the solution to a distorted information system, that is, a corrupt and dishonest press, is less information. Unless I’m failing to grasp that you are being sarcastic, how do you propose that leaving the public more ignorant of what is happening will improve results?
Really?! When was the last time you actually learned anything from a campaign ad?
Disagree. The only way to correct wrong speech is more speech, not less. What is needed in the highly charged cauldron of political speech is a set of fair rules of free debate. Instead of moderators / regulators censoring “disinformation”, they should objectively censor (or flag) speech which breaks standard debating contest rules: No ad hominem attacks, No argument by credentialism, mis-definitions, strawman arguments, misquoting, mind-reading, etc etc. An AI could do the moderating.
Example: every time you type a slogan like “destroy democracy” you should have to defend your reasoning, or else your comment is rejected.
Hear, hear. There will not be “one person, one vote” so long as outlandish money remains such an enormous force multiplier. Campaign finance reform has to happen before we can ever figure out if parliamentary democracy can produce anything like distributive justice.
In my opinion, a major reform need to be made in the media. Too many articles represented as “news” are intentionally biassed, and inflame the polarisation of the people. I’d suggest a simple change, that preserves press freedom: require that every article be labelled as “Intentionally Biased”, unless it meets TBD standards of objectivity.
The great lie of the ‘progressive’ left is that everyone, except them, is stupid. Brexit? If only you’d been smart like us you would have voted to remain. Trump? If only you weren’t so deplorable you would have voted for Hillary. The only way they can imagine that someone has a different opinion to them is some mental aberration – racism, islamophobia, transphobia, deniers, cultists. From this viewpoint, the building wave of anti-progressive-ism means more and more people are declaring themselves to be stupid, and the volume of political ‘stupidity’ keeps going up.
Perhaps, with a little bit of introspection, they might consider that if they are so smart, how come they didn’t even notice when they were being lied to and manipulated from media hoax to media hoax?
Gruel tastes like steak in the gulags. There is just not enough of them.
No – the “stupid” slur is focused on one individual or demographic (e.g. MAGA). The Left makes everyone associated with that individual or demographic to be evil by association. They create such a disgust for the hated class, that they no longer even try to say why. It’s a classic Marxist strategy that was written into Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” and is the all-time successful playbook of revolutionaries. MAGA isn’t just misguided, it’s “evil”; it will “destroy democracy”, and vile insults of bigotry against MAGA is quite acceptable because the Left projects its own bigotry onto the enemy. That’s the strategy. A Sun Tsu strategy. It’s not accidental, it’s cynical and deliberate and it is evil because it is based on seizing and keeping power by any means necessary.
Always accuse your opponent of what you yourself are doing.
“I could ‘plain, and yet be in the guilt;
Else, often time, had I been spilt.”
Chaucer’s Wife of Bath was an early Democrat too.
Ad hominem has become not so much a logical offence as a positive way of life. An opponent is not someone with whom one might disagree honestly, but instead an enemy (whether knave, or villain; someone inadequate mentally, or morally, or both). But this is the default mode everywhere, not merely limited to the progressive left. The right sneers: “brainwashed cretin!” (mental) or “godless secular humanist!” (moral). The progressives sneer: “inbred mouth-breather!” (mental) or “callous privileged greedy pig!” (moral). As both groups of instances rest on a common assumption of total depravity, this takes on an evangelical flavor; unsurprising perhaps for the right but very curious for a left which styles itself the voice of even-handed secular calm.
“to be honest, many of the people I dislike most in the world happen to be unqualified, untalented, unintelligent, overbearingly powerful and super-privileged white males.”
So far as the author is concerned a case of kettle and pot I think
It was good the middle class parents and kids had cold water hit their faces in Montclair. It’s the asset – owner, stupid.
Yet another piece in which the Biden/Clinton wing of the Democratic party is inexplicably conflated with the “left”.
Biden is not of the left. Neither was Obama, nor Clinton. All of those figures used (and abused) the platitudes of the cultural left in order to provide cover for the absence of any leftism in their political programme.
The archetype of this in the US was Sanders’ campaign (well to the left of Clinton but still social democratic rather than socialist) being hammered by Clintonite talking heads for its dogged insistance on putting economic issues ahead of cultural ones.
Obama famously said that in most countries he’d be considered centre right.
The worst aspect of Trump’s immigration policies turned out to be essentially the continuation of (hitherto unreported) Obama-era policy.
Biden didn’t reverse the Trump era tax cuts.
Etc
Americans want sensibly priced healthcare. Obama and Trump at least had the decency to promise reform in order to get elected. But Obama-care was actually warmed over Romney-care rather than the public option that people wanted and Trump didn’t even bother to set out a model.
Biden, of course, has not offered any healthcare reform at all.
” You stick the Trump E-Z pass on your conscience, as it were, and you can betray your obligations as a journalist, artist, teacher, politician or just about any position that requires you to approach a situation without bias, or the baggage of an ideological presumption.”
Its ridiculous to blame the Trump for the loss of objectivity, honesty and integrity of journalists, artists, teachers, politicians and academics on Trump. This all started 30 years ago, not in 2016. Apparently, the author of this tortured piece just didn’t notice it.
“Trump lied again and again at the debate, we are told, and he indeed lied, again and again, shamelessly”
Imprecise and even factually incorrect statements are not necessarily lies. Intent to deceive (allowing that almost every statement by any politician is an attempt to deceive at some level) is the key.
That is why I would not vote for a serial adulterer such as Boris Johnson – I assume he is also a serial liar.
The main difference between Boris and Trump seems to be that Boris has no comb.
I also could not identify any “lies” that Mr Trump spoke.
All topics have arguments for and against. To be able to answer quickly, politicians must prepare a canned response: a simplified list of the best arguments that support their desired conclusion. These are necessarily incomplete and biased, but are not lies.
As the liberals conceive of it, let the Right have the political institutions anyway. Generations of post-structuralist thinkers have shown how impoverished they are — the “deep state” is a Left-wing construction. Culture and civil society are what matter. Behind the cover of anti-Trump defiance, they are yours for the taking.
This can be said about the fight against Trump, but it is a longer development that is described with the term: The long walk through the institutions – as it was formulated by the German Rudi Dutschke. The neo-Marxist tactic employing Trotskyist entrism. They started in ’68 by going after the teaching positions at the universities and from there neo-Marxism has seeped down through the education system to the smallest nursery school child.
Therefore, it makes sense for the left to increasingly see politics as irrelevant. It has been ensured that the population is already on track to realize the dismantling of culture, which is the goal of neo-Marxism/cultural Marxism/Freudo-Marxism.
The one underrated moment of the debate was when Trump said, “Let’s not act like children.” Yes, THAT Trump, the one who used to have the hair-trigger Twitter account and a penchant for bestowing nicknames on people. Personalities aside, the most salient question the non-elites should ask themselves if, are you better off today than you were four years ago, followed up by asking the same question of the country.
If one can honestly answer “yes” in either case, then that is the only rationale for supporting Biden. Trump has been in the office before. None of the horrible that the left claimed would happen actually did. Some Dems are rightly worried that Trump might do to them what they’ve spent four years doing to him, but they caused that, not the orange man.
Biden is a well-documented liar, but his handicap is 8?? I would bet every dime I have that he couldn’t shoot par getting 28, let alone 8.
This guy’s son was repeatedly told by his teachers that, “because he was white, he was “inherently racist”.” and our middle schooler “came home from school asking if it was “okay” that she did not want to be a boy.”
This seems a little… I don’t know… a little suspect as a foundation for the rest of it.
The author goes out of his way to say how integrated his son’s friendship group is so we’re clear that his son isn’t a racist (and I have no reason to disbelieve him) but that implies that white teachers in this guy’s kids’ schools are constantly lecturing all the kids about their latent racism and earnestly enquiring whether they’re quite sure they’ve got the right genitals.
Really?
I just sort of wonder whether there might be some context missing here.
It all seems a bit unlikely – like those Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep stories which, on closer examination, always turn out to be about some nursery somewhere wanting a few extra verses of nursery rhyme to sing before the rugrats start tearing the place up again.
This depends a bit on the district, but it’s not unlikely. My son’s junior high class has 3 “non-binary” individuals in it, who were natal females. This was unheard of just a few years ago.
Friends of mine complain about their daughters having to share a restroom with transvestite natal males, leading meany of them to send their children to either private or religious (generally Roman Catholic) schools.
Insofar as racialism goes, this was our native city – we left ages ago, and didn’t attend the public (government-run) schools, but this is their current state today:
https://www.city-journal.org/article/failure-factory
I have no specific insight into the context either, but it is not hard to imagine someone spinning “his son isn’t a racist” like this: yeah he thinks he’s a White Saviour and THAT is just one more sort of racism. Nyah, nyah.
“Trump lied again and again at the debate.”
We’ve heard your fetishistic incantation and magical hymn over and over and over, ad nauseam. Yet, no one, not a single soul, can name one so-called “lie.” To paraphrase James Joyce in Ulysses, “For the love of Pete, tell us a lie!”
Recall hubris and hyperbole are not lies; they are hubris and hyperbole. They are the stock-in-trade of salesmanship. They are handy when selling $10m luxury apartments, Manhattan office space, or opulent country golf club memberships in Scotland and Ireland.
Remember, opinion and sentiment are not lies; they are opinion and sentiment! Western Civilization goes to great lengths to protect free opinion and sentiment as a core value. It is profoundly illegitimate to claim opinion and sentiment as a lie. At least since The Enlightenment, inquisitive opinion has been the very firmament of Western Values.
Now, what IS a disgusting lie is when Biden said, “No US soldiers died in his term.” He was coached to tell this objective lie about the savage terrorist attack Biden enabled at Abbey Gate at the Kabul Airport that killed 13 US service members.
Why don’t people crow about this disgraceful lie? Is it because you believe Biden is, “A sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”?
I wish I could upvote this more than once.
I’ve heard this statement too many times to count: Trump lied. It is never backed with what the “lie” was. Trump is dangerous. They never say how he is “dangerous”. These statements come from truly dishonest people.
Stuffing enough down someone’s throat will result in vomit.
My reason for switching party and voting for Trump.
Lets get it slightly more accurate, ” Trump poses an existential threat” to the anti-America cabal of the Democrat Left. The Democrats will do anything to gain and retain power. Their mantra is “The end justifies the means”. Lie, cheat, steal, and worse. I can’t elaborate on the “worse” or my comment will be deleted.
“the only Democrat who’s ever beaten Donald Trump is Joe Biden.” Well, not exactly. It was the “special” Democrat voting process that defeated President Trump. Remember the saying “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything. Biden made history on several fronts in 2020. He got the infamous 81 million. The deciding ballots being counted for Biden in the early morning hours after the polls closed.
“Following the debate, the liberal media turned, en masse, on a dime against Biden, after years of gingerly acknowledging Biden’s visible mental decline and then delicately refuting it: “ The Democrats are fine with Joe being mentally challenged as long as the cabal behind the curtain remains in power.
American Democracy is like two people who stay in an unhappy marriage for the sake of the children; the marriage (our democracy) is dead, but no one wants to tell the kiddies (us).
“has become” … not “is”. After 1994, when Clinton was President there was actually some working across the aisle. But then the success of Bush 2 in getting re-elected in 2004 triggered something on the Left so that Bush became a figure of extreme ridicule and hatred. Media mocked him mercilessly as a stupid monkey. That hadn’t happened before. Tempers flared. Then Obama told us that white America was inherently evil because it had never expunged itself of racism. “Hands up don’t shoot” was a lie. That lie has birthed all the others.
I’m astonished that someone as astute as Lee Siegel should glibly declare that “[Biden]he has been, for years, descending into dementia.” If so, how would Lee explain this: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/02/joe-biden-30-policy-things-you-might-have-missed-00139046 and this; https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-opinion-biden-accomplishment-data/? The fact is that, demented or not, Biden has been a more successful president than Carter, Clinton, or Obama.
How is that possible? It’s possible because, ever since the Radical Right took over the Republican Party in 1980, virtually any Democrat has been preferable in office to any Republican. The literature on the Republican Party’s ideological dementia is extensive; I’m sure Lee is familiar with it. Democrats may be awful, but Republicans are the Death Star.
By the way, the adjectival form of “Democrat” is “Democratic.”
By which you mean “socialism,” not “self rule.” Self rule requires an empowered middle class – a bourgeoise – which can only occur under free market capitalism.
Democrats always had a very radical left wing, from the Wobblies to the Weather Underground to Antifa, but this was balanced out somewhat by their liberal wing, who still believed in things like free speech, or private property.
Today’s Democrats are entirely driven by their “progressive” wing, who see both free markets and free speech as racist, sexist, and bad for the environment. They very much dislike the Bill of Rights – self defense, due process, equal protection, religious freedoms – which they feel gets in the way of their “multiracial democracy,” which is their nice word for authoritarian socialism.
“Free speech is a frippery that was burned away in the oven of Auschwitz” claims Antifa apologist and university professor Mark Bray.
Democrats like Biden are a bit more reticent. They call free speech “misinformation.”
You think the modern Dems represent the triumph of the Wobblies? Of the Weather Underground?
So, if I read you correctly, you think that Biden is a syndicalist? And Nancy Pelosi’s core animating philosphy is her opposition to US imperialism and her unwavering support for movements of National Liberation?
Love the BTL on this site
“Socialism” is a large question, which we should postpone for now. None of the Biden accomplishments described in the two links I offered have anything to do with socialism. I cited them only to show that Democrats actually care about ordinary people, while Republicans like Trump care only about shoveling billions in tax cuts to the rich. (Pretty much Trump’s only accomplishment in his four years.
‘Pretty much’ is not a scientific statement, and pretty much sums up your entire “analysis”, George. Try again.
Since Biden’s most memorable accomplishment has been the highest inflation in forty years, I think average people might be skeptical about his “caring.”
I notice that your comment is entirely free of any backing for the position which you are making. By the way, the moon is made of green cheese, did you know?
Boy, that’s a weird list of “accomplishments”. I’m not denying that there is some real stuff in there, there is. The investment in infrastructure is important, as well as the work to bring microchip production back on-shore. And the time may come when the “cancer moonshot” looks like a big deal.
But, in a nation up to its eyeballs in unfunded military spending, “greenlighting a drone army to confront China” sounds (and is) positively dystopian.
And cancelling the “Trump-era paintjob for Air Force One” isn’t even an achievement is it? It’s surely more of a dicreet phone call to Boeing type of thing, isn’t it?
And this is only a list of “achievements”. No room therefore, to list the assaults on Free Speech waged by the internet censorship regime he has enabled. No word on the reckless assault on the neutrality of the law enforcement bureaucracy entailed in pursuing Donald Trump on any and all charges that can be put. No space, for Biden’s reckless antagonism of Russia and his unwavering support for genocide in Gaza. Etc
Joe Biden will be a consequential president all right but his legacy will be a complex brew.
The brain starts to shrink in the 30s and 40s, the rate of shrinkage increases at 60. After age 70 the shrinkage increases even further. So both Trump and Biden are in trouble. If Biden didn’t have the stuttering problem, it wouldn’t look nearly so bad. They are both suffering from cognitive decline, however Trump also suffers from serious personality disorders including extreme narcissism, delusional thinking and sociopathic tendencies, bordering on psychosis with his obsession with revenge and his admiration for dictators. His fits of rage will be very dangerous for Americans and the world. Expect total chaos where anything can happen.
You’re not a psychiatrist, by any chance? If yes, when did you conduct your thorough and in-person examination of both individuals you mention? For your diagnosis is filled with such richness of detail, it must spring from personal knowledge, yes?
Mr Biden is definitely more dangerous than Mr Trump. The “loose cannon” nature of his impairment is an immediate serious danger to the World. And looking back, the many disastrous events in Mr Biden’s term may have been due to his impairment. It’s otherwise difficult to explain his awful decisions, such as spending $100B to increase death and devastation in Ukraine.
Great article! Hope you will check out RFK Jr’s response to the debate that happened that evening
»(T)he “deep state” is a Left-wing construction«?
What about COINTELPRO, what about JFK and RFK, what about the Iran-Contra affair and its subsequent coverup? All left-wing constructions? hmm…