Hi everyone,
If you spend most of your media time watching Fox News, Real America's Voice, getting your headlines from The Post Millennial, Human Events, and everyone spouting off on X, you may not be aware of the fact that the left still controls most of the media, social media, and our major institutions.
"One of the tragedies of the libs moving to bluesky is that we've lost track of the enemy, and since MAGA is temperamentally disagreeable and conflict-seeking, we end up just fighting with each other," said Passage Press' Jonathan Keeperman on X. "But never forget the immense and impenetrable darkness of the real opposition."
I responded, saying "Libs still have the institutions, marketshare, most of media, & are very willing to spend their billions to get their way. Conservatives have X, Fox, a smattering of good publications, and rich people who would rather stay rich than save the country."
And then I went on Bsky to check it out. And it turns out that yes, the divisions are getting deeper, the chasms are cavernous, and the gulf between the political right and left is so expansive that even echoes don't resonate. It's a problem when the center is gone and no one even believes in the good will of their opponents.
I remember distinctly a political climate where the right and left both wanted the same things for the country but disagreed on how to get there. But now, I don't think the political right and left want the same things at all, I think they want the opposite. The left wants a welfare state, open immigration, and an end to Israel. The right wants individual freedom, closed borders, and to support Israel against terrorism.
I think it's crazy that Israel is such a big issue for American politicians. No other nation rises to the kind of obsession that Israel does. I am not into a welfare state because total reliance on government means subservience to government. Open borders are an end to nationhood. One side wants America to thrive and remain American, the other side wants it to be an economic zone with excessive taxation and a class of bottom-feeding peasants.
So I'll leave you with one more tweet. At the Zohran Mamdani victory party, Mehdi Hassan, Jamal Bowman, and Hasan Piker all waxed poetic about the good old days of the Soviet Union. Matt Taibbi, who spent time living and working in Russia, said "I could fill a whole book with stories of horrible things I heard and saw from eyewitnesses to Soviet history. And to see people laughing about that shit, I can’t even describe the emotions." He went on to describe how "wealthy" peasants were killed: by making it illegal to house them and letting them and their families die in the cold.
The people you hear praising communism and communist or socialist nations do so because they think they would be the rulers, not the peasants. But under a welfare state and with open borders, there are no citizens, there's only a servant class.
Libby