Posted on 02/13/2020 2:54:07 AM PST by a little elbow grease
Normally when I publish content online, I focus on the world of work. I hope you’ll forgive this brief departure, but I think that those of us on the left need to take a long look in the mirror and have an honest conversation about what’s going on.
If you had told me 3 years ago that I would ever attend a Donald Trump rally, I would have laughed while assuring you that was never going to happen. Heck, if you had told me I would do it 3 months ago, I probably would have done the same thing. So, how did I find myself among 11,000+ Trump supporters in Manchester NH? Believe it or not, it all started with knitting. You might not think of the knitting world as a particularly political community, but you’d be wrong. Many knitters are particularly active in social justice communities and love to discuss the revolutionary role that knitters have played in our culture.
As a casual knitter, I never really paid attention to this. I knit as a way to relax and escape the drama of real life, not to further engage with it, but for anyone who is active in the knitting world on Instagram, it became almost impossible to avoid it. It started about a year ago when roving gangs of online social justice warriors started going after anyone who was not lockstep in their ideology. People were bullied and mobbed by hundreds of people for such offenses as publishing an article expressing excitement about going on a trip to India, posting a video saying they were leaving IG because they were uncomfortable, and posting a poem asking for kindness. Katherine Jepsen Moore has documented the full stories extensively and the BBC recently covered it as well
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
Some people will never wake up. But I do think a fair number of people will come to realize how much they’ve been lied to and will have a strong reaction in the direction of freedom and less government. If you know that the political elitists are corrupt liars why would you want to look to them to solve your problems?
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LOL
Oh, she does? GREAT! I hope she becomes active in it.
They now have formed a PAC and plan to have a March in Washington in October 2020 for the unsilent majority. October 3.
https://www.unsilentmarch.com/
I read the whole thing. What she stated could have been written in three short paragraphs. Like my first mother-in-law, she likes to hear herself write. Nevertheless, if she actually has changed her mind welcome aboard.
Really? She didn't see the potential Trump offered 3 years ago or even 3 months ago. Three months ago the economy was rocking about like it is now, the crisis on the border has been brought more or less under some control, deadbeat NATO members are paying up, 194 Federal Judges have been appointed, trade deals with Mexico, Canada and China have been signed, a trade agreement with the UK is in the works, EU goons like Merkel have been put in their place, and the list goes on and on and on. How could she ignore all that achievement for so long? Cognitive dissonance? Willful ignorance? Blind party loyalty? I suppose I would give her some credit for finally opening her eyes, but from this engineer's eyes, a profession that has the absolute requirement that you have excellent observational skills, she's way late to the party. The signs were beating her upside the head and she chose to ignore it.
She did not like the histrionics from the Democrats at all. She did not like the accusations against the sitting Senators themselves. She did not like the accusations that all Republicans are racists and did not think that was fair.
She asked herself about Hunter Biden and what his Dad had done in getting the Prosecutor fired. She didn't like that at all. Her thoughts of voting for Biden went up in smoke. She reexamined her thoughts of Bernie - that he sounded like the house managers and did not sound reasonable anymore. Thinking about the rest she asked herself if they are even Americans anymore.
Then she woke up. She called me and told me what she thought and I simply said 'That's good that you are thinking about what is going on' and to 'Keep your eyes open'. I think she will from now on."
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Your post made my day.
The fact that your daughter made those observations and came to those conclusions (by herself) speaks very highly of her intelligence and of your fatherhood.
May I ask how old she is? Does she read a lot?
Good read. Her description of a Trump rally was dead on accurate. It’s like a rock concert, not a political rally.
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Yes indeed. --- (Conservatives seem to have absorbed the benefits of a good education.)
“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
I gotta say, that didn't help.
Good for your daughter. Sometimes it takes time on the dark side to to really see the truth.
Liberals want to shackle and control the populace.
I could never understand why any age group would find that attractive.
Big deal, she ended up voting for Mayor Pete the butt boy.
Democrat=Liberal
Republican=Conservative
Independent=Republican who swore he would never be a Republican
libertarian=Independent who smokes pot
I’ll go out on a limb here and say you probably didn’t read the article. Am I right? She mentioned that movement towards the top.
You need only read the article without a chip on your shoulder and hear her descriptions of the people and their behaviors. Remember that she has been presented with the narrative, watching CNN and MSNBC, listening to the DNC.
Remember also that “Wisdom too often never comes, so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.” Felix Frankfurter
“Woke. Almost.”
Correction: “Unwoke. Almost.”
Being ‘woke’ is properly toeing the Democrat line, which is to hate Republicans and everything associated with them (i.e., traditional American values).
Fauxahontas to the courtesy phone...
One of the key things I read in this story was a quote from this woman:
"I started to question everything. How many stories had I been sold that weren’t true? What if my perception of the other side is wrong? "
I found this to be a crucial passage, because this highlights a stark cleavage line between Conservatives and Leftists.
Conservatives live this every day. Granted, many of us have gone through this phase of genuine introspection, asking ourselves those very same questions, and once having explored the depths of what we believe coupled with what reality presents, came to our conclusions and don't revisit those questions in depth.
After all, if you have solved a problem once, and it comes up again, if the conditions haven't changed, you don't need to revisit the in-depth introspection required to understand how you will approach the problem.
That said, we are constantly presented with new questions, issues, and problems, or the conditions have changed, so we do that analysis.
We are forced (as Conservatives) to do that self-analysis, when you are bombarded every single day from every single angle by people and entities telling you that you are not just wrong, you are both evil and wrong. We Conservatives have a culture of introspection, to examine the fidelity, accuracy, and consistency of our views, simply because we often have a lifetime of being forced to do so. This has two outright benefits: It allows us to build a strong logical foundation to our beliefs that withstand inspection, onto which we can build other ideas that will benefit from that strong foundation, but it also allows us to be tolerant of those who may disagree with us in some aspect or another. There are certain fundamental beliefs built into that foundation that we guard jealously (such as the right to property, the right to self defense, freedom of speech, etc.) but we allow deviation on many views built on that foundation. In other words, we are generally not monolithic in our beliefs.
The Left not only does not have that culture of introspection, they actively discourage it.
The left is generally a monolithic, hive mentality culture that demands abject obeisance to its principles, and any deviation from those principles will brand you a heretic and an outsider. Leftism has much in common with many religions, and the mindset is pervasive at all levels in Leftism. Reading Whitaker Chambers' work in Witness, he describes how the Communist party leverages that groupthink mentality to not only weed out those whose "flawed" views differ from the officially accepted views, but to punish them. They know well that banishment of someone who has subscribed to that groupthink, to remove them from the support of others who think like them, is one of the most effective threats or punishments they have at their disposal, and they cynically use it to control people.
This woman eventually voted for one of the Democratic candidates, which shows her political views are not well thought out or formed. It is clear that she has put her toe into the waters of introspection and subsequent doubt, which is a massive step.
What she has not yet done is to make the intellectual leap from Leftism, which abhors that introspection and prohibits it. She does not yet understand that every candidate on the Left must (by definition) be antithetical to her newfound realization of the necessity of introspection, and that is introspection is a necessity for a fundamentally sound foundation on top of which ideas that are are both consistent with that foundation and flawed ideas that do not may coexist without damaging the solid foundation.
When she reaches that point of understanding that there is no crime in introspection, and that by decriminalizing introspection it will allow her to analyze her belief system and change her views to be more consistent with a strong foundation of principles, something that Leftism actually discourages and punishes.
As conservatives, we should help people who are willing to find their way. This was her first step, entering the environment at that rally where it became impossible for her to ignore or discount some of the Leftist precepts she had wholly swallowed. The next step is for her to begin building that foundation of solid principles that bring the things built on top of it into a truthful realignment.
Excellent comment.
While people on both sides of the field can avoid introspection I do think it is much more of a problem with people on the Left. I try not to argue with those people because they really get their back up. They do not want to consider opposing views. They seem very threatened by the idea.
All I ever try to do is to seem reasonable and to emphasize thinking and questioning. People need to come to their own conclusions, but if they become open to actually thinking about this stuff, it is a major step.
An excellent post. But I’ll make it simpler:
The Left hates you and wants you dead; govern yourself accordingly.
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