Posted on 12/20/2018 4:25:20 AM PST by RoosterRedux
Careful scrutiny of how the left operates reveals a tiered hierarchy. There is a small cadre of elite leftist leaders who know the true nature of the evil that they perpetrate. This leadership is utterly self-serving and utterly cynical. This is where you find the true psychopaths, racial eugenicists, etc. Examples include Vladimir Lenin, Lavrentiy Beria, Heinrich Himmler, and George Soros.
They have a praetorian guard of similarly elite true believers in the causes trundled out for consumption by the leadership. These are intelligent, motivated, and charismatic champions of causes like environmentalism, multiculturalism, Malthusianism, etc. These are the people who cannot psychologically afford to accept that they might be serving an untrue belief system, so they will readily and casually reveal their cognitive dissonance to others without being able to see it in themselves.
And finally, the foot soldiers: These are the ones who march to the tune of whichever drummer promises the brightest utopia for the least amount of personal effort and investment. It is these that have been cultivated to be emotionally infantile adults incapable of critical thought. It is these who hold simplistic worldviews and decide with their emotions instead of their intellects. They tend to believe the caricature of their enemies that has been painted for them by their leadership, but their relative proximity to actual circumstances at ground level causes them to see through the ruse occasionally. These foot soldiers are perpetually subdivided into smaller and smaller special interest groups. They aren't especially evil; their chief problem is unquestioning loyalty to the left's leadership.
It is these foot soldiers that you frequently see acting out.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I have some friends and family who are under the influence of the far Left and I think they each would experience a nervous breakdown if they came to see the truth.
The only hope for them is a religious catharsis (a "come to Jesus moment").
Pied Pipers are all around.
Yes you’re right. If I may add that they maybe searching for order and truth but they took that left turn at Albuquerque. Spiritual regeneration. The only hope for any of us is the savior Jesus Christ
People forget, or willfully obfuscate, the reality that both Fascism, as practiced in Spain and Italy in the 1930’s, and the National Socialism of Adolf Hitler, commonly known by its German acronym, Nazism, were both LEFTIST regimes, that took the logical development of their socialist ideology to its extremes.
In a similar way, Islam is also a crude form of socialism (Ba’athist), as was practiced under the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, not far removed from the rather stern sort of paternalism that is exercised in just about every Muslim-majority country in the world and a very real threat wherever Islamic colonialism is taking place, as it is here on the North American continent, and to perhaps an even greater degree, in South America.
At this point, incidentally, the Islamic brand of socialistic organization is beginning to butt heads with the more conventional kind as practiced by the Red Chinese People’s Republic, an expansionist regime that is being organized into the ranks of world superpowers.
That is precisely the kind of contentious behavior that led to the death match between National Socialism/Fascism and International Socialism in the period 1941-1945. Nobody won that one.
The last paragraph “the foot soldiers” is spot on
One final note: I have long since entered the camp of labeling the people who are "Leftist Foot Soldiers" and "The Evil Ones" as "Leftists". I still often refer to people who are in the "Good-Hearted Liberal" category as "Liberals" but I no longer use "Leftist" and "Liberal" interchangeably. I do think there is a distinction.
I find this three-tiered categorization valuable, since I don't have to refer to all on the Left as "Leftists" which has a very negative connotation. I know some "Good-Hearted Liberals" who are good people who can be talked to, and I cannot call them independents, they have elements of their outlook that are indisputably Leftist, and they often believe fervently in those, but I can easily see it is simply because they have not thought things through.
As a result, I am not willing to lump those people in with the other categories, and I believe many conservatives transition through that "Good-Hearted Liberal" stage as part of a life journey.
As you can see from my post, I view the foot soldiers of Leftism as being “the pratorean guard” that the author describes, and his foot soldiers as “Good-Hearted Liberals”, “the sheep”, or in a “war”, the people who ally with the left because that is the only way they can understand to keep from really taking a side or thinking about an issue.
In a larger sense, they don't even traffic in truth/untruth; they don't acknowledge either. Only expediency counts to them, and there are no rules except theirs. Their ultimate twin objectives in their continual perfidious pursuits? Shredding the Constitution and the Bible. They see those as the dual obstacles to their glorious aspirations. It's real Tower of Babel stuff.
. . . little imagining that they are keeping themselves in the dark and systematically listening to malarky.The difference between a Democrat and an “objective journalist” is that the Democrat is slightly more candid. Only slightly, but . . .
Sigh. I admit to looking disfavorably at anyone who watches the news and accepts it at face value. If someone has the news on, I leave the room. It isn’t that I can’t watch the news as they present it, it is more that I can’t handle the fact that so many people unthinkingly swallow it whole.
Most liberals I know are of the Good-Hearted Liberal group.
But things have gotten murky since Obama was elected and dragged the Democratic Party to the Hard Left.
Some of the previously good-hearted liberals that I know have become surly and some have become downright angry.
For example, I was chatting with a Methodist minister at my health club back before Trump was elected and the subject of taxes came up.
I said we needed to cut taxes to stimulate the economy and he disagreed. I asked him why (he actually wanted to raise taxes) and he said "charity."
I raised a couple of points with him at that point.
First, I asked him if he defines charity not as giving from the goodness of your heart, but having money taken from you by the government in the name of "charity."
His back went up a bit.
Next, I asked him if he understood the difference between "tax rates" and "tax revenues raised"?
He was completely lost.
I explained that there was a sweet spot in the "rates of taxation" such that lowering tax rates of citizens and companies had the affect of increasing the amount of taxes taken in.
He was still dumbfounded. He said, that just doesn't make sense.
I explained that it is similar to paying salesmen commissions on how much they sell. It looks like paying the salesmen more money would just reduce profits. But what it actually does is encourage them to work harder and sell more. Same for reduced tax rates. It encourages people and companies to work harder and produce more...hence increasing GDP (he: "what is GDP"?), raising incomes being taxes, and thereby increasing tax revenues.
He heard me but was perplex because I made a tiny crack in his liberal world view.
The next time I saw him, he was noticeable cold toward me.
As an aside, since Trump's election, I have several friends and family members I would call Good-Hearted Liberals who have cut themselves off from Trump supporters.
I'm not sure just how good-hearted they really are.
I suspect they are stewing over the issue of conservatism in general.
It appears that since distinct battle lines have been drawn between liberalism and conservatism by Hard Core Lefties, these folks are in the difficult position of whether to decide to stay with their liberal beliefs (and thereby become useful idiots) or start rethinking their positions re: politics.
As I heard recently, some marriages are even on the rocks over the political divide.
If a Brownshirt and a Bolshevik had sex you’d get the antifa(rt) slugs of today. Dangerously unhinged.
"...Most liberals I know are of the Good-Hearted Liberal group..." That's probably true of most conservatives. We know other Leftists besides the good-hearted ones, but don't interact with them!
"...First, I asked him if he defines charity not as giving from the goodness of your heart, but having money taken from you by the government in the name of "charity." His back went up a bit...." Yes! That is a key distinction and it was quite astute of you to go right for it...there is a large chasm between "charity" and having money taken from you at the point of a gun to finance things that are anathema to you.
"...I explained that there was a sweet spot in the "rates of taxation" such that lowering tax rates of citizens and companies had the affect of increasing the amount of taxes taken in...." Hahaha! Good for you, discussing the Laffer Curve with a Lefty...that is another core thing they cannot seem to comprehend...taxing something too much reduces the amount of tax revenue you can raise from it. That is beyond their ken!
I will say, my brother's family is EXTEMELY leftist...and they raised one of their sons as such. If I didn't know for certain because they don't discuss politics with me (a wise move) it was confirmed when they accidentally included me on an email group they sent out after Trump won the election discussing ways to "Resist"...which by reading, means sabotage, not putting up ideas of your own that would work. We are still on good terms, but I admit I don't feel like visiting often.
BTW, check out the Democratic Socialists of America website. Lot's of good information in there.
I like your division of people into 3 tiers. Years ago, I divided leftist/liberal professors into 3 groups: Activists, Actives and Inactives. The Activists are maybe 5% and their belligerence sets the tone in the departments. Actives actively follow the lead of the Activists and make up probably 85-90% of profs who spew leftist garbage. They believe in the stuff, but are followers. Finally, maybe 5-10% of profs don’t do anything. They simply want to teach the kids, get their paycheck, and do some research. Also in this last group are the 2-3% who are conservatives who lay low so they don’t catch grief from the others.
. . . but such was I, until the Carter era when I began to understand the situation.Do you mean to imply that you were raised distrustful of “objective journalism?"
Yes, Islam, especially when sharia is implemented, is a leftist scheme of governance. Look at Iran and Saudi Arabia. The mullahs want total control. It is similar to the Middle Ages when the Roman Catholic Church was the undisputed power of Europe. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Only Christianity provided for a separation of church and state in terms of power: give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and give to God what belongs to God.
When I was growing up, I never thought I was being misled or lied to. The Media was a trusted "Authority" and I, who had a great deal of respect for "Authority" imbued in me by my parents, unthinkingly swallowed it.
Why would they ever lie to me?
My first inkling that the government or media might not be fully truthful was during Nixon administration, and by the time I read Whitaker Chambers' "Witness" after several decades of watching the Left at work, the worm turned completely for me, and was solidified by reading M. Stanton Evans' book "Blacklisted by History".
Reading "Blacklisted by History" and seeing the tactics of the media today used to full effect against Joseph McCarthy simply scorched me.
The last time I watched the news at all was 9/11 and the aftermath leading up to Gulf War II. I stopped watching shortly after it started, and have never watched television news or read a newspaper or periodical like Time or Newsweek since then.
The bottom line is that I was one of those who thought the media was in business to tell us what was going on. I found out to my dismay that while that was true to a degree, the evil in what they do, forming and shaping the delivery of the news to not only bring in more viewers, but to promote the narrative they wanted, and it wasn't the narrative I believed to be true.
And I found out that all those people talking to me growing up as I went to school, where I trusted them to tell me truth, outright lied to me about something as important as Joseph McCarthy. The man is a hero, and should be celebrated as such...instead, due to the Media, government, and education system, he is vilified. People today have a lot of things I never had growing up, and an Internet that can provide and alternative view (that must still be taken with skepticism) is available to everyone. When I was a kid, to hear someone say that Cronkite was lying to the public would have been a real shock, but to find out what a sack of Leftist crap that man was is still jarring to me.
And I must say, it was extremely disillusioning to me, to realize what had been parroted to me by teachers, professors, government, and the media...never mind the entire left.
Bottom line: There is plenty of evidence, irrefutable evidence (Look at CNN's coverage of Trump) that the media is not a purveyor of truth, nor do they wish to be. I didn't have that when I was young, very few did.
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