The Left's Addiction to Extremism
It’s no secret that conservatives and liberals don’t agree on much of anything.
Conservatives love capitalism, and liberals extol the virtues of socialism. Conservatives believe it’s wrong to murder babies in the womb, while liberals think it’s okay to kill them for any reason, including inconvenience. The Right wants to move toward a free-market healthcare system while the Left wants government to control the whole thing. Conservatives are serious about law and order, having a border, discouraging people from living off of their fellow citizens, and think we should have a merit-based world, while liberals do not.
These are not small differences, and two societies that follow the principles of each side to their logical conclusions will look radically different when all is said and done.
Still, somehow, some way, America has managed to navigate these seemingly irrevocable differences for a long time. We live in a country where big government liberals like FDR and Lyndon Johnson have each been president along with conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, and yet we’ve always somehow made it work. It’s not always smooth sailing, but if JUST THE IDEOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES were the problem, we probably wouldn’t need to worry much about continuing to do so.
The problem we have today is that liberalism in America is increasingly intertwined with absolutely batsh*t crazy extremism to such an extent that we often don’t know where the mental illness stops and the politics begins. In other words, we’ve increasingly moved past ideological differences that can be papered over to trying to find some middle ground with some of the most deranged beliefs on planet earth.
This is really what makes our political system today so untenable and unsustainable.
Let’s take one that most people don’t think about in these terms: Our debt. Our country is 39 trillion dollars in debt, and our projected deficit this year is 2 trillion dollars. Realistically, the only way to get this under control is to cut spending, and we can’t because liberals absolutely, unconditionally, refuse to do it. Republicans have tried doing it many times, but when we do, liberals go nuts, use it as a campaign issue, and it ends up failing.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t even ideological. Liberals embrace Keynesian economics, which is a popular, though deeply flawed, way of looking at economic policy, but even John Keynes didn’t believe you could run up endless debt with no consequences:
In other words, the absolute refusal of liberals to cut govenrment spending is just irrational. It’s refusing to recognize an obvious (and important!) fact because it isn’t what liberals want to hear (you’re going to see this pattern repeated a lot in this column).
Conservatives and liberals generally don’t agree on how to deal with criminals. Conservatives believe in being tough on crime. Liberals tend to blame society, the police, poverty – pretty much anything other than the criminal for what the criminal does. Still, what’s the reasonable explanation for this?
At a certain point, you’d think even liberals would go, “Poverty, police, society, whatever, there’s no way someone with 30 arrests should be walking the streets,” but no, that point doesn’t come up for them in a lot of left-wing cities. Even after repeated high-profile incidents involving criminals who should have been in prison, not on the streets, nothing changes in their attitude.
The same thing goes for homeless people. Conservatives tend to be less tolerant of chronic homelessness, while liberals cater to the homeless to the point of enabling them. The mind-blowing thing with the Left is that they allow the homeless to do things like crap in the street, use drugs publicly (I’ve literally seen a homeless guy shooting up what I assume was fentanyl in NYC), and perhaps worst of all, set up tents on public sidewalks. Why would you put the people who are paying taxes to support the homeless in a position where they have to walk through homeless encampments to get to work, dodge needles and human feces, or endure crazy bums screaming or punching the air (also things I have seen in NYC)?
Liberals don’t just want to bring in more immigrants than conservatives; they believe in open borders to such an extent that they refuse to hand over illegal alien wife beaters and rapists to ICE. Liberals believe anybody can cross into our country at will, regardless of what American citizens think of it, and shouldn’t be deported, even if they diddle kids. It’s not an ideological position, it’s MADNESS.
Similarly, liberals see no danger in bringing in hordes of Third World immigrants, a large percentage of whom end up on welfare or large numbers of Muslims, even though it inevitably leads to more terrorist attacks, antisemitism, and toxic culture clashes between the more backward aspects of Islam and Western culture, which it seems to be largely incompatible with. In California, they’re even bringing illegal aliens with AIDS to America.
Most of the debate over immigration has less to do with immigration and more to do with the fact that the Left insists on trying to bring many of the worst, least compatible people on earth to our country followed by giving them welfare or letting them get away with breaking our laws at will.
The whole trans issue also revolves around this kind of insanity. At a certain point, liberals just decided for no good reason that men could be women if they decided to be, that it was okay to surgically mutilate small children to make it easier for them to “change sexes,” and that it was fine for deviant men in dresses to wave their penises at women in the bathrooms and locker rooms, take women’s positions in sporting events, and room with women in prison.
All of this is utter lunacy and just doesn’t stop.
”Hey, let’s put kids around drag queens doing sex shows. Let’s give gay porn comics to kids in schools. Let’s actively celebrate Charlie Kirk being murdered by the millions, burn Tesla dealerships down for disagreeing with us, chase ICE agents around in our cars, allow rioters to burn, loot, and attack ICE agents at will as long as they agree with us, and reward liberals who call for violence against conservatives.”
Even Paul Krugman, a 73-year-old economist who was considered a mainstream voice on the Left for decades, is essentially calling for prison camps, jail, and society-wide discrimination against more than half of all voters who didn’t support his party in 2024:
The things that have been talked about in this column are treated like political differences between the Left and Right, but it’s more like the differences between the therapists and the patients in an asylum. So much of what the Left is advocating isn’t normal, it’s not politics as usual, it’s a DANGEROUS level of radicalism that is putting the future of our country at risk. At some point, if liberals don’t decide to police themselves and demand a certain basic level of sanity, both they and all the rest of us are going to pay a terrible price for it.
The progressive liberals are blaming Trump and other conservatives of things that the progressive liberals are promoting to be used against the conservatives.
The No Kings protest pushed the narrative that Trump was actively working towards becoming a dictator.
The Federal response to the attacks on ICE agents doing their jobs in Minnesota gave Trump the perfect opportunity to respond with near dictator powers by invoking the insurrection act. Declaring an insurrection is immune to judicial review. Then he could have federalized the Minnesota National Guard and ordered them to stand down when Waltz called them up in an attempt to stop the ICE enforcement actions. That is how JFK handled the many southern states that refused to integrate their schools. When the Governor called up the National Guard to prevent blacks from entering white schools, JFK nationalized the National Guard and ordered them to stand down from enforcing the directives of the Governor. Then other federal officers were sent to prevent the state from interfering with the desegregation process.
With a declaration of an insurrection in response to the riots, Trump could have suspended Habeas Corpus and arrested the rioters and held them in custody until the insurrection was declared to be over.
Trump took the hard road and worked within our Constitutional process even though he lost some rulings and encountered many roadblocks from the progressives. Trump missed the perfect opportunity to become the dictator the progressives tell us he is.
The progressives though are the one advocating for one party rule with the democrats in control and enforcing their mandates with concentration camps, loss of personal rights, and even death towards those that oppose them. The conservatives are the ones fighting to maintain our Constitutional Republic. The progressives want to eliminate it and take total control. That is how the Nazis came into power.
Our Founding Fathers made it clear, when the government becomes tyrannical, the people have the Right to take up arms to oust the government and replace it with one that respect the Rights of the People.
Today, we call this a civil war. The Conservatives are still operating inside out system and not advocating taking away rights from progressives. My question is, at what point is the red line crossed and we take up arms to stop the dems from enforcing their will on everyone?
That is the point when we will have to use violence to stop the progressives from using violence against us. At that point, we will need to do what the progressives are advocating now, treat their political opponents as the enemy to be destroyed so we can have the political system we want.
Personally, I believe we are close to point when we will need to take up arms to stop the progressives from
Right now, conservatives are not promoting the death of their opponents. Most see this as normal political rhetoric that we tolerate because of the sacred right of free speech. If we wait until it is too late, then the US will cease to exist as a Constitutional Republic that values the rights of all and become the next dictatorship that harshly suppresses all dissent.
Take up arms too soon, and we become the same as the progressives, using force as a means to the end of the complete elimination of our political enemies.r
On a personal level, at what point do I transition from working within the system peaceably to actively working towards the death of my political opponents.
Today, I doubt there will be enough willing to make the great sacrifices previous generations made to defend our Republic. We will go the way of every great civilization in history, everything that they ever built will be destroyed and forgotten.
TRVTH. So sad, yet so true. I think that when you turn away from God, you destroy the link to Truth, and you just make s*it up and if it gives you an excuse to act irresponsibly, so much the better. This insane cancer spreads/metastasizes and will kill the body. "Coexist" is one of their bumper stickers, yet it's such BS. Just look at the birth rate and ask how is that working for ya? Fine if you hate America and want it destroyed or "taken down a peg," Thanks for posting this column, John.