Whenever the Left is running a caper or pulling shenanigans, there is a tendency to examine the event in isolation. Pundits and analysts will look for why the Left is doing the narrow thing they are doing, usually searching for the sort of causes that would motivate normal people. Money and power are the two most popular explanations from the conventional Right, as those are the things that matter to them. This sort of analysis misses the mark, because it obscures the commonalities.
For example, the left-wing censorship phenomenon on social media is discussed only within the context of the platforms. The on-going impeachment circus is narrowly examined within the partisan framework of imperial politics. Other than to notice the people behind these efforts have certain similarities, these events are treated as discrete efforts with their own peculiar motivations. Yet, it is what they have in common that tells us much more about the current crisis.
In the case of impeachment, it is an outgrowth of the “resistance” movement that started on-line immediately after the 2016 election. This was launched initially on Twitter by the sorts of women that have become a feature of modern life. These are the bitter, childless types, who have reached middle years without having fulfilled their purpose as women, so they are in a perpetual state of rage. Some are crazy for other reasons, but these female rage heads are a stock character now.
The word “resist” is an important clue. When one is on attack, resist is not the word you use to describe your efforts. The word “resist” is always used in the context of defending something from an aggressor. That’s how they came to view the 2016 election. It was an assault on their ideological worldview. Since their sense of self is deeply entangled with that worldview, 2016 was felt like an assault on their person. They feel that they are resisting an intrusion into their most personal of space.
It is this sense of being a victim, that their person has been violated by Trump, that is behind the impeachment rage. These people look at Trump entering Washington in the same way they view a rapist violating them. Since there is no way to make it whole, they can never forgive the violation. Their vengeance is perfectly justified, as they are infinity aggrieved. Trump entered into a zone they view as exclusively theirs, as if he violated their personal space, so he must be resisted at all costs.
Something similar has been happening with social media. The first social media platforms were message boards and comment sections on sites. The first heavy handed moderation happened on the left-wing sites like Daily Kos, which was popular in the Bush years. Anything that deviated from official dogma was removed and the poster was banned. That was their space and you dirty right-wing extremists had no right to enter their space with your filthy racist ideas.
This sense of ownership and entitlement took over the big social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The same sorts of screeching harpies behind the “resist” campaign are policing social media for heretics. Those are their platform and they determine the community standards. The use of the word “community” is a big clue as to how these people think of these sites. They are not public platforms, but communities in the same way your town is a community.
It is this hive minded view of politics that is behind the fanatical purging of heretics and blasphemers from social media. The people behind it have conflated these platforms with their own sense of themselves. Just as Trump penetrating Washington is seen as the most egregious personal violation, bad thinkers on YouTube are imagined to be spiritual rapists, victimizing the community with their bad ideas. Purging these monsters from the community is now a sacred duty.
This is why there is no reasoning with these people over things like terms of service or the particulars of impeachment. It would be like trying to talk a female grizzly out of defending her cubs. Her instinct to defend is not a rational reaction. It is not the end point of a decision tree. That’s the same thing going on with the impeachment stuff, the subversion, the purging on-line, all of it. This is the reaction of an organism to what it sees as a threat to its integrity. This is how The Hive defends itself.
It is why any analysis of the Left in isolation tends to miss the point. Everything these people do has to be examined within the larger context of the hive mind. The blue-haired lesbian at Google issuing strikes to your channel is not a person, but a node within the larger network of the hive mind. These are people who have no agency, because what defines them is their relations with the other nodes in the Progressive hive mind. When you deal with one, you are dealing with all of them.
At the height of the French Revolution, Robespierre tried to impose a secular religion on the French people. The cult of the Supreme Being would be the official religion of the French people. In his speech announcing this new religion to the people, Robespierre said of the new deity, “He created the universe to proclaim His power. He created men to help each other, to love each other mutually, and to attain to happiness by the way of virtue.” Other than the pronouns, this is a modern liberal creed.
Instead of a supernatural supreme being, the god at the center of the Progressive consciousness is the hive mind. Instead of a name, they use names of its manifestation, like “democracy” and “community.” Yet, it is the same sense of devotion and ownership that drives them to defend it. The Left views themselves as defenders of the faith. It is why they are so ruthless and vengeful in defending that which is inside their mental space, like official politics and social media. They belong to The Hive.
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My liberal Canadian wife has been quite outraged lately by the firings in the NHL. While I’m glad she has finally noticed a couple of the injustices committed by the progressive left, she refuses to see the overall pattern. For some reason she thought hockey, that great lifeblood of Canadian identity, would be safe.
So I just laugh and ask her, “Do you really think they’re done?”