Whenever John McCain is trending on Twitter I like to try and float a reminder of what a disgusting warmonger he was on top of the trend to disrupt the worshipful hagiography within the mainstream liberal echo chamber.
John McCain was a bloodthirsty warmongering psychopath and the world is better off without him. Death is nature's cancel culture.
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) July 11, 2020
It’s a provocation. I freely admit this. But it’s a provocation with a fuse that should not exist (nobody should object to someone speaking ill of a killer with a body count like McCain’s), and the charge it sets off is just fascinatingly disproportionate to what’s being said.
I mean check out the hundreds of responses to my latest act of blasphemy where I said that McCain was a bloodthirsty warmongering psychopath and the world is better off without him. There are liberals on there saying I deserve to die for saying this, that there’s a special place in hell for people who say such things, that my parents should have aborted me, that karma is going to get me for this.
They always babble about “karma”. Before I was temporarily banned from Twitter in 2018 after outraged Democrats mass-reported me for comments I’d made about McCain, my mentions were full of people telling me over and over again that “karma” is going to give me cancer and kill me for saying the world will be better off without a psychopathic facilitator of mass murder.
And I just think that says so much about the way mainstream liberals tend to see the world. “Karma”, the way westerners tend to understand the word, would just mean that someone will say a mean thing about me someday, in the same way I said a mean thing about John McCain. That would be an equal and proportionate pushback from karma. Yet that’s not what they’re saying karma will do. They’re saying they believe karma punishing me with death (and in some cases hell) would be the appropriate response from the universe for uttering sacreligious words about one of their elite rulers. Because that’s how much more important, valuable and sacred some dead senator is to them than the life of an ordinary person.
Twitter has suspended Caitlin Johnstone, apparently over the McCain tweet below. She was told the offense was “abusive behavior,” which Twitter characterizes as an attempt to “harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.” pic.twitter.com/qy7No1KJVR
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) August 17, 2018
Liberals are such crazy idiots. They pretend to stand for truth and logic then spend years promoting the fact-free Trump-Russia collusion narrative. They pretend to stand for social justice then drop those values the second it becomes politically convenient, like making homophobic jokes about Trump and Putin, calling Lindsey Graham “Lady G” for being a closeted gay man, and lecturing black political leaders about how black people should think and vote. They pretend to stand for the little guy, then support austerity and war while literally worshipping John McCain.
Just last night on MSNBC Chris Hayes was talking about Trump’s controversial commuting of Roger Stone’s prison sentence and he parroted the completely false and utterly baseless claim that Stone was a “go between” for WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign.
“Roger Stone was what he looked like: a go-between between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, and then he lied about it, which is what he was convicted for,” Hayes said.
This is just completely untrue. The only communications between Stone and WikiLeaks prior to the November 2016 presidential election were WikiLeaks telling Stone to stop falsely claiming that he was in communication with the outlet and had been getting information from them. Stone told the Trump campaign to expect WikiLeaks to publish damning leaks after it was already public knowledge that this was to be expected. Everyone involved in the story has denied that there was ever any back channel to WikiLeaks, and there is no evidence that they are lying. Nothing in Stone’s conviction has anything to do with being “a go-between between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks”, because he wasn’t one.
It’s July 2020, and @chrislhayes is still peddling the conspiracy theory that Roger Stone “was a go-between between the Trump campaign and Wikileaks.” Does it matter that Mueller, Stone’s trial, & every person involved refuted this fantasy? pic.twitter.com/xAXze7RytR
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 11, 2020
But Hayes said it like it’s a fact anyway. One of the most popular reporters on on the most virulently pro-Democrat network in America told his audience an objectively false thing, will suffer no consequences for doing so, and will probably never even have to issue a correction, because lying about anything even remotely related to Russia is considered normal and acceptable in today’s liberal mainstream media.
Yet this same political faction will lament the “post-truth era” they claim Trump has ushered in.
Liberals (or “neoliberals” or “corporate liberals” or “centrists” or whatever word you think everyone should be using for this ideology that nobody can agree on a label for) are just a fake imitation of the thing that actual leftists are. Leftists actually fight for justice, equality, peace, truth and anti-authoritarianism, while liberals are cheerleading Joe Biden and sociopathic intelligence agencies and throwing endless inertia on any movement toward real change. Leftists are the thing that liberals pretend to be.
And that’s why liberals hate the true left: because leftists are a constant reminder that liberals aren’t what they pretend to be. That they are just conservatives wearing a fake plastic mask of justice and sanity. That their lives are a crude crayon drawing of the values they pretend to espouse, a layer of feel-good narratives and podcasts and Hamilton songs wallpapered over a rapacious omnicidal machine of endless war, ecocide and oppression.
And of course that’s not entirely their fault; they’ve been psychologically brutalized into their position by generations of mass media propaganda. But it is ultimately everyone’s own responsibility to expand their own consciousness to the point that they can be useful to the world. At some point, liberals, you’ve got to wake the hell up.
__________________________
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70 responses to “Liberals Are Crazy Idiots”
Sensing the frustration we all have with people who are so unreasonable and intolerant that you dare not try to have a conversation with them, about anything. Where does that leave us?
Its a mystery to me why obvious raging right wing nutters, like McCann, are called ‘liberal’ in America. Its only haooened in the last ten years or so and is complete reversal of the meaning of a word. ‘Left wing’ has suffered the same fate. Do you think someone has planned it?
No offense Ciatlin but this appears to be Anti American msm propaganda drivel too and the alt right tentacle of the mainstream news. If 90% news media conglomerate is privately owned what do you expect to get fed by it? Your followers probably didn’t want to ingest it, or maybe they do come here for NBC mind programming.
Do you often indulge in rambling nonsense? How’s that working out for you?
Mr. McSatan was an evil putrid non-human being. I would take all that “positive” backlash you’re getting and relish in it. I know I’m right because who ever runs this insanely complex, beautiful and confusing paradigm we live in yanked that S.O.B.s spirit to damnation on my Sons birthday. We get to partake in a dual celebration, the beginning of a wonderful life and the end to a heartless, war mongering psychotic one. I’m genuinely a peaceful person but it’s hard to forgive someone so innately evil, and he went way to easy. His death should have been a culmination of all the misery, heartache and sorrow he caused ALL over this planet.
The ‘liberals’ could find nothing good to say about McCain in 2008. He only became their hero when he started ragging on President Trump.
You are right, the world is better off without him.
One of the better rants by anyone in quite some time.
If you call people like Hayes or Maddow “liberals” you are playing into their game. They are conservative corporatists. They call themselves “liberals” to attract certain voters that think Republicans are worse. As you have mentioned before Caitlin, they are two right wings on a mutated bird. Let’s all stop playing their game and call them conservative corporate Democrats. Then people will stop getting confused about the two right wings. They are just a different flavor of right wing corporate types, so please, let’s stop calling them liberals just because that’s the phony name they apply to themselves.
I have always thought of them as mindless idiots. Evil propagandists. Actors who actually believe what they are saying.
No, “liberal” is not a synonym for “holy” as the bourgeoisie seems to think it is. Outside of the US “church left”, liberalism is the ideology of capitalism, which is disproof enough of any fantasy of the word’s good intentions.
And if your beloved virtuous Left gains the power to hold a gun to people’s head and force them to do or not do this or that, they will quickly degenerate into exactly the same monsters we suffer now, if not worse. Sane people have no desire for such power, meaning those that do are indeed insane. It was not the Right who murdered hundreds of millions of their own people when they took power in the USSR and China , etc. Lest we forget, NAZI stands for National Socialist. There is very little difference between the results of socialism or fascism.
Ugh … you’re that anarcho-capitalist aren’t you?
So you DO have a desire to hold a gun to people’s heads and force them to do what you think they should?
Actually, it was the Right that took control in the USSR and China and murdered all those people. Just like Liberals today claim to be Left today, see the aforementioned Chis Hayes, for example, the power brokers in the USSR, China, and Nazi Germany all subscribed to the all encompassing Right-wing Ideology of Might Makes Right. Try stepping out of your establishment talking points and media taught preconceptions and look at the non-distribution of power in its naked form, and welcome to the greed of the Right.
Why of course, socialist Psychopaths In Charge are morally superior to free market Psychopaths In Charge. Silly me. All governments are founded on the perception that might makes right. They all operate by the exact same principal. That holding a gun to someone’s head and forcing them to do this or not do that is the proper method. Kumbaya is not any government’s anthem.
If it is acceptable to state that someone who has died was a “warmongering psychopath and the world is better off without him”, is it any less acceptable to say the same about someone who is living?
Examples: George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney (and now his daughter), Tony Blair, John Howard, Barack O’bomber, Hillary Clinton.
Of course not. The should all be tried and spend the rest of their days in prison!
“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.” -Chomsky
https://chomsky.info/1990____-2/
Major applause for your bold headline and bold message, Ms. Johnstone!
I’ll go one step further and proclaim that ALL statists, that is to say, anyone who has any faith that governments anywhere can do anything good, are crazy idiots for having that belief.
This coercive representative government thing isn’t working and never will. Time proves this.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” – John Acton
Right on, Caity! Great piece.
Caitlin needs to join Matt and Katie on “Useful Idiots.”
That would be a real treat for all involved. Katie is wonderfully witty.
Tell it CJ! Whisking off the veil?
Mob Boss Strikes Again: In another gobsmackingly venal but entirely unsurprising move, Trump just commuted – even better than pardon! – the sentence of longtime henchman and Nixon fanboy Roger Stone, because even though Stone was convicted by a jury on seven counts of lying to Congress, witness tampering, obstruction and otherwise hiding the lamentable fact that Russia owns us now, what really matters is he knows where the bodies are and was coyly hinting he might spill. This article is here:
Scuzzy Crook Frees Scuzzy Crook by Abby Zimet!
https://www.commondreams.org/further/2020/07/10/scuzzy-crook-frees-scuzzy-crook
Did you even read Caity’s essay? Russiagate has fallen apart, even its main actors admit that there is nothing there, a complete hoax. Russia does not own us, but, from your own statement, the Oligarchs own your brain.
You should really think about them as fake (((liberals))), because they’re all Zionists now. They’ve committed too many crimes with, by and for the (fake) Jews on Madison Avenue, Hollywood, MSM, the DNC and Israel to be anything other.
Mc Cain is a disgusting peace of dog shit, a liar, a murderer, a thief, and a parasite upon Humanity! That’s what McCain is, AND his supporters! Turn your ears and eyes from them, they are the filthy stinking garbage that needs to be thrown out, turn off your tv, turn off your radio, there you will find nothing, but a hollow narrative without substance, and certainly without fact. ABC funding by taxpayer needs to stop, they are not only pushing BS, they are trying to cause racial divide!
“At some point, liberals, you’ve got to wake the hell up.”
And just exactly WHAT will liberals do after they “wake the hell up” — vote differently; storm the Capitol buildings with firearms in hand; chop off a whole bunch of Elite heads — WHAT?
Hear ye, hear ye! All of you already-woke human beings commenting here, please, please, please tell me how you’re going to remove all of the John McCains that remain in the Congress, DoJ, FBI, CIA, DNI, (deep) State Department, etc., etc. I’d really like to know what your plan is.
Vote socialist. Or wait until the food starts running out and let the hungry mobs do the job that the guillotine used to do.
For someone trying to make the world a better place, I’d think you’d be better about not throwing around pejorative mental health terms like crazy and psychopath. Such insults are lazy, undermine your intelligence, and serve to fuel the stigma surrounding mental illness more than anything else.
McCain was ALL THE ABOVE you mention. Deal with it buddy!
What is lazy and unintelligent is your failure to understand and appreciate why the deadly deeds of McCain should rightly be understood as psychopathic. And the “liberal establishment” IS “crazy”
to push Russia’s back against a wall while developing a new generation of nuclear weapons. Caitlin isn’t stigmatizing mental illness. She’s not dismissing the real problems many, if not most, individuals face in terms of mental health as something shameful or “crazy”. She is calling out liars and critiquing the U.S foreign policy establishment in which “bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran” McFucker played his part.
Disagree
When you comprehend that we live in an INSANE society in which severe mental illness is normalized, you will not confuse this with the mental problems faced by individuals. My nephew was labeled schizophrenic — I believe that at least to some extent his problems were physiological — and he never ever put other people in cages, joined the military to kill people, went to Washington, DC, to kill people en masse, or told Caitlin Johnstone she should die because she dared to call a disgusting old mass murderer exactly what he was.
Right on. And he kept it right up through his last decade with his love for terrorists in Syria and neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
Thank you, Caitlin, for calling out the ‘liberals’ for what they are: closet imperialists and deadly bourgeois. I am sharing this one widely.
Caitlin, you are my major relief from a world of literal insanity. My whole family is full of liberals on one side and on the other side is I don’t know what you call the Fox News watching side any more, they’ve gone into new territory than “conservatives” over the years. But they are equally insane. You’ve got half of them actively wanting a war mongering $700 billion military, and half of them not minding it, and thinking my energy against it is overboard and violent. That insanity carries over to every major issue. There’s a huge culture of people actively wanting to destroy and exploit the environment and the other half not minding it, and not wanting to sully our conversations with it.
On the way to this comment I only read one other commenters but it’s like people don’t comprehend reality “I think you’re provocative tweet is essentially the equivalent of a protester pulling out a gun and shooting a Republican.”. Here’s someone equating calling out the miserable large scale murderer with pulling out a gun yourself. Help!!
Peel the phony masks off the ugly bastards that the media machine urges us to worship, Caitlin. Bravo for your guts and fidelity to the truth!
Am not sure what a liberal is today. Not sure there any more.
Are there any “liberals” out there trying to guarantee basic rights for the populace? Healthcare, education, clean water, clean air, housing, jobs, electricity, internet, UBI, access to healthy food. May need new terms to differentiate folks such as “warmonger”. Not sure what term would be adequate for those which wish to deny folks basic rights, capitalist?
Seems majority of politicians and MSM are capitalist warmongers.
Liberals, as I see it, are people with no commitment to anything. The only philosophy they have is “go along to get along” and “don’t bother me with knotty facts and contradictions and let me get on with my latte on the way to the gym I don’t care about Covid-19”. They have no ideology or principles per se. They mouth “principles” but don’t actually hold them. They cry “morality” but don’t have any idea what theirs are. Floaters.
As usual, so spot on, Caitlin! I love all your articles and always recommend them to friends and others who are working to wake people up. It would be great to see you on progressive shows like The Grayzone, Jimmy Dore, Redacted Tonight, etc. I know you’ve done some of them before, but it’s been too long!
Let me second that motion for more Caitlin face-and-mind-time on progressive news shows. Why isn’t she all over those that have any cutting edge?
I want to say I support your truth saying about McCain; he was an evil man.
About today’s Liberals; they seem to me to process everything through feeling and sentiment, not intellect.
I think this is not accidental. They have been intentionally conditioned & programmed to be that way by the media industry; especially TV. People are more easily manipulated through emotion than intellect. The Elites have this down to a science at this point.
Completey agree Caitlin. I was very happy to see John McCain pass on. Not only for his warmongering stances but also because he was an ill tempered man who held a grudge. He also was without morals seeking only power. His life story if looked at closely is not pretty.
As far as liberals being crazy, I just consider them to be virtue signalling mouthpieces. When society collapses the liberals are always the first to be swept away by the swift hand of a dictator. This includes the true radical left and right as well. Notice I do not say if the dictator arises from the left or right because it doesnt matter. The result is the same.
Caitlin, you unmasked the dishonest and hypocritical liberals. If Donald Trump started wars, they would cheer him. When Trump bombed an empty warehouse in Syria, they asked for more. You put the warmonger John McCain in the right perspective. Nothing good can be said about him. He was evil to the bone. Caitlin, don’t feel intimidated about this karma-talk, which is utter nonsense. That liberals talk about this karma bullshit, show that they are neither reasonable nor enlightened people. They also could believe in voodoo.
Caitlin Johnstone is right, liberals are as trapped in their memes as Trump and his minions are caught in theirs.
Liberals like to think of the “income challenged” as deserving our paternalistic care, so long as it doesn’t cost too much. Hence, instead of making sure the free school breakfast and lunch program provides truly nutritious food, they’re in favor of putting a toxin like fluoride into public water (which their expensive under-the-sink water filter will remove for them) because it “lowers cavities.”
But it does NOT reduce dental decay, http://fluoridealert [dot] org/issues/health/
Here’s a graph showing that decay rates have gone down in prosperous nations with or without fluoridated water (7th question down at http://fluoridealert [dot] org/faq/)
Then there are vaccines, about which Hillary said, “The sky is blue and vaccines work.”
Again, it would cost more to provide nourishing (rather than filling) school meals that follow Mother Nature’s health plan instead of Pharma’s, so instead the quick, cheap fix that liberals support is vaccines, even tho’ the truth is squeezing out that (1) shots aren’t effective and (2) they aren’t safe: https [colon] //www.commondreams.org/views/2018/06/12/vaccines-and-liberal-mind
For some ideas about good school food that go way beyond the FDA’s vision, visit GoodSchoolFood [dot] weebly.com
Totally agree about the fluoride and vaccines. Kubrick was right about fluoride in the 1960s, but he had to put it in the words of a crazy person. Lots of truth abut vaccines on the internet, but it is being rapidly censored. Del Bigtree and RFK jr are great. Liberals like to say ‘My body my choice’, but don’t think it applies to mandatory vaccines. I used to be a liberal. I haven’t changed. They have.
You might be interested in this recent article on The Gray Zone about Bill Gates and his influence on global health policy and vaccine safety:
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/07/08/bill-gates-global-health-policy/
I would kind of like to see it vetted by my fellow “kooks” before I attempt to distribute it to unbelievers.
Sorry, Caitlin, there are no more liberals. Today, if you’re not a progressive, you are right of center – if you have any interest in sociopolitics at all. When roughly half of a society’s eligible voters refuse to vote, in means that they have given up and are so disinterested that, when pushed, they parrot back what they read and hear. And that’s what the ruling elite and deep state both depend on. A disinterested populace is perfect for those machinations, for it will not discover how it has been screwed until well after the fact.
The prospect of choosing between two fully corrupted employees of empire is enough to disinterest anyone that actually understands how the US government functions.
The “populace” as you call them are not “disinterested”. They just refuse to vote for candidates from two parties that they despise. The backward and undemocratic election system in the U.S. makes it nearly impossible for any party apart from the two imperialist parties to even make it onto a ballot. For example, the party that I support, the Socialist Equality Party, constantly has blocks thrown in its way when it tries to get on the ballot, most recently in Michigan. Many people have come right out and said that if they cannot vote for a socialist, they are not going to vote at all. And I concur. I myself will be voting for the SEP candidates this year as I have every year for the last two decades.
The responses you get to your deliciously acerbic remarks are almost always directed at your person. Unfortunately none of your critics seems able to argue the point you’re making, relying on personal attacks to vent their feelings.
Here within the United States Empire ” we justify mass murder ” because ” we are exceptional “! The laws of man. god, nature, etc. , etc. never apply to us. ” We Are Free to do whatever we feel like doing to anybody within the whole universe. We are the owners and the masters.
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2019/07/28/the-difference-between-being-a-liberal-and-being-a-progressive/
This article makes a good companion piece for much of what Caitlin describes.
If you start with Locke, there are a mighty lot of versions of liberalism, so that the word has become almost useless. You have to define what you mean for your audience, which certainly breaks the flow, unless of course you want to confuse or provoke them.
The same is true of the term ‘progressive’. ‘Progressive’ once meant ‘moving along’. But it doesn’t say to what or to where or how. In fact, it comes from the 19th-century idea that there is some kind of inevitable movement toward a better world. The 20th century disabused many of that notion. Capitalists, Communists, Fascists, and Nazis all believed they were moving mankind along to a better world. Which maybe they were, if there’s a pleasant afterlife.
Many of today’s self-styled liberals are actually conservatives, in the old sense of the world. They want to hang on to the remnants of the New Deal, which is now almost 90 years — three generations — in the past. To reassure an audience of rich people, Mr. Biden said, ‘Nothing will change.’
I suggest giving up on these terms, and calling a spade a shovel.
I have a different take on what’s going on. You kind of have to look beyond the specific words themselves and more about the intent behind them.
I think you’re provocative tweet is essentially the equivalent of a protester pulling out a gun and shooting a Republican. It would be an act that would spark a riot, and escalate a heated debate in to outright violence. From that perspective, your statement is highly dangerous and could spark a culture war they are not ready to fight.
The question is whether this violent escalation is in evitable or if there is some effective, peaceful way To turn people on the right away from their most destructive tendencies.
Personally, and knowing this isn’t the most compassionate and left wing way to go about this, I think we can split the difference somewhat. I think people in these red states need to stop being shielded from their own foolishness and see their own ideas play out and fail in front of them. I think they have to experience firsthand having Medicare, unemployment, and maybe other federal services taken away, if only temporarily, to give in to their demand and let them see for themselves why it’s a bad idea. I don’t see a better way around it, and at least it’s a better option than an all out Civil War.
“I mean check out the hundreds of responses to my latest act of blasphemy where I said that McCain was a bloodthirsty warmongering psychopath and the world is better off without him.”
Nothing more needs to be said about this liar, war monger, and overall waste of perfectly good human skin. But – in light of the recent Russia Gate hoax it seems the old neo con warhorses like Bush the Younger, Bolton, various CIA/FBI lying heads etc. gain acceptance in what calls itself “liberal” circles.
Indicates the term “liberal” denotes a person devoid of critical thinking, running with the tribe and otherwise gobbling up what the MSM feeds him or her or it or whatever gender they deem now necessary to apply to be en vogue.
“Divide & Conquer, the Left/Right Fraud” at > CorbettReport(.)com
Our feudal masters have honed every social wedge issue: race, religion, nationality, sex, age > to marginalize individuals and to herd the collective. Turn off all forms of predictive programming, then find and share Truth.
Thanks Caitlin, this needs to said – again and again. What is called liberal in this country is nothing short of shameful.
Shadows and Vegetation
The Crown Prince gets preferential treatment
In the Hanoi Hilton. Hear the songbird sing
Of kind handling by the people he has injured
From the air. What will the rear admiral think though,
Should his son accept that offer of release?
Better hang on in there, rather than return
Ignominiously at best, at worst a Rose of Tokyo.
“Darned if I will,” says the cowboy who has destroyed
As many of his country’s planes as he has of the enemy’s –
Lopping power-lines from the sky, airman out of a rodeo.
“Pa’s in command of all our forces here in the Pacific.
Can’t just hold my breath till I turn blue
As I used to when a kid and get him to get
Me out of here. To the bitter…got to see this through.”
But when he does get back, after it’s all over,
Hasn’t this Prince a job to do, blocking all info on
Unreturned POWs? Some may know too much
About him. Show their families no justice, rail at them
And scream, insult them, drive the wives to tears,
Push a grandma out of her wheelchair. Well, how dare
She question his loyalty, doubt his patriotism even?
Puts his faith in his right to the might of his fathers.
And if prisoners get dishonoured by being left to die
At least their secrets die with them. He’s got a career
To fly. There’s his hate’s volcano to be stoked.
Thin, dark and starving, kept in the caves that years
Later will boost tourism, won’t they drop off soon
Like flies?” Satellite photos show the markings
Pilots such as our Prince have been trained to use
When signalling for rescue. He will insist
The Pentagon sees nothing there but shadows
And vegetation. He will agree with the CIA
That these are saw-grass clumps, no more,
Mere rice-paddy walls. What you get in Viet Nam,
Never the desperate name of a missing man
Gouged into a field. But then, as one investigator
Puts it to the Senate. “Guys, if grass can spell out
People’s names and secret digit codes,
Then I have found a new respect for grass.”
If this is a national moment of opening where Truth can slip into the national dialogue, let’s not fall for the old tired bogus argument Senator Duckworth stooped to in response to a stupid right wing attack. I often quote philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt’s opening line from his little book On Bullshit: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” My purpose is not to pick on Senator Duckworth, whose bravery and suffering I recognize, but to point out she has employed one of our most glaring examples of imperial bullshit — something that has been used in the past to defend way too many disastrous quagmires.
We need to stop letting our politicians get away with it. This timely article can be read here:
Did Tammy Duckworth Fight For Our Right to Protest? by John Grant
An argument that does not pass the smell test
https://thiscantbehappening.net/did-tammy-duckworth-fight-for-our-right-to-protest/
Great article Caitlin. I was just talking to a friend yesterday and lazy “liberal” thinking. I still visit a New Jersey suburb I grew up in, and I would regularly see “coexist” bumper stickers and “Hate has No Home Here” signs on lawns of Hillary supporters. That she cackled over Qaddafi’s brutal murder was accepted because he was a “bad man”. That she supported the coup in Honduras was accepted because Zelaya was “corrupt”. Maduro, Chavez, Assad, etc are “evil dictators”. I could go on and on with examples of propaganda narratives that they swallow hook, line, and sinker. They think Obama was a great president, despite his murderous track record and his support for the banks and Wall St. In the end I think the major reason for their stupidity is lazy consumption of news from the “idiot box” rather than engaging in any critical thought.
Perfectly said, Skip!
Good article.
Caitlin’s rant is ill directed, it’s Democrats she’s writing about who, while not at all real liberals, have misappropriated the term as well as terms like “progressive”, “left” and “left wing”. Since the early 1990’s, the Democratic Party has become the tool of the Deep State and financial elites and little else, although it disguises itself in reformist rhetoric and fools a great many people who would otherwise be productive, like Afro Americans, in a party of their own.
Whatever label, these are the individuals who support a man who has an island home near Jeff Epstein’s island home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiaKXZkORA8
Please explain what a “liberal” stands for in light of the current trend to re-evalue as acceptable the neo con warhorses who just gains this acceptance by being opposed to a “Trump”, who despite all idiocies he manages to perpetrate has as of yet not started a new war and actually tried but failed – because of the bipartisan support – to reestablish some sane relationship with Russia again and remove troops from Afghanistan.
Quite different from the oh so admired war monger Obama who never saw a drone attack on civilians he didn’t like.
As a socialist (a socialist by Marx’ definition is necessarily “democratic” so tis added label is superfluous) I never understood what a “liberal” actually stands for.
I agree on Trump and Obomber . Trump has attempted and somewhat succeeded in reducing strife globally . Liberals all seek to maximize profits going back to Walpole’s Whigs the original Liberals . Marx was of the investor class , a moral capitalist of the Adam Smith ilk not a socialist as defined by the French Philosophes of the 1850s where the term arose.
“not a socialist as defined by the French Philosophes of the 1850s where the term arose.”
That why Marx called his “scientific socialism” in contrast of the utopian socialism they espoused. He acknowledges of course the role the french philosophers played but goes far beyond their approach by actually analyzing how capitalism works, the role of capital and how it is created and how the ownership of the means of production sets up an unsolvable antagonism in a class structure of society; why capitalism was necessary to develop the productive potential by superseding and destroying feudalism, and how the inherent contradictions within capitalism and within the class structure of society eventually will lead to the destruction of the capitalist way of production.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch01.htm
“We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.”
I agree with most of your response , however Marx believed in unlimited growth like all materialists of his era . A notion that is in fact going to bring an end to capitalism as overpopulation , leads to resource depletion , pollution. The planet is a closed system and we have reached its sustainability levels . America does not do socialism as you wish to define it , socialism = a form of moral capitalism in America and always has.
I agree with you except for your last sentence, which idealizes race as the major division in society when it is class that is at the bottom of social inequality and always has been. As a Marxist, I support the working class against its class enemy: capitalism. The Democrats are an imperialist party of the rich, true. We are living in the terminal late stages of capitalism, which is showing its bloody teeth in desperation as its destruction of society and the planet are on display now more than ever.