A follow-up to The Left is Vastly More Evil than Religious Conservatives.
Now that some conservatives seek to execute a woman for having an abortion, Objectivist friends of mine ask me: Do you still think that leftists are more evil than conservatives?[1]
It is a fair question. The answer is: Yes. Here are some, but not all of the reasons.
1. Education
Today, leftists control the education system and, for the most part, have done so since John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick at the Columbia University Philosophy Department and Teachers’ College respectively a century ago. Although it is certainly true that conservatives—Christian Fundamentalists—banned the teaching of evolution in Bible Belt high schools, the pernicious influence of leftists has been vastly more pervasive. For a century they have warred against phonics and crippled the ability of countless millions of Americans to read. Many of my college students cannot write a coherent paragraph, much less a college-level essay. They teach far too little math in the school system and most students are unprepared for college-level math courses. The kids know virtually nothing about American history. Literature reading lists have been severely dumbed down. Science has largely been turned into global warming propaganda.[2]
Dewey, Kilpatrick, and other Progressive “educators” warred against academic training in favor of practical skills like hygiene, wood shop, home economics, and the like. Their contemporary heirs war against academics in favor of leftist propaganda: socialism over capitalism, the systemic racism of the US, the inveterate racism of white people, the existence of numerous genders among which children can choose, and so forth. The goal of earlier leftist educators was to train kids to be good at their jobs and to obey the wise rulers of the socialist state. The goal of contemporary leftist educators is to train kids to be indoctrinated little leftists and to similarly obey the wise rulers of the socialist state.
A century ago, Dewey, Kilpatrick, and other Progressive educators’ pilgrimaged to the Soviet Union to find the ideal school system, one that trained kids to selflessly serve the Communist state rather than pursue their own fulfillment. Today, educators impose on kids a persistent barrage of Marxist, Soviet-style propaganda. The common denominator is: Leftist educators DO NOT want kids to read effectively, to write well, or to know history, science, or math. Dewey, the godfather of modern US schooling, wrote:
“The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.”
Thinking, knowledgeable individuals will govern their own lives. They will not uncritically obey the “wise” rulers of the socialist/communist state.
Leftists have transformed schools from an education into an indoctrination system. They have destroyed the US school system—and they did it deliberately. For a plethora of evidence supporting these conclusions? Read my book, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read or Write or Understand Math: And What We Can Do About It.
2. Freedom of Speech
After you cripple the thinking ability of most Americans, how do you deal with those who slip through the cracks? You restrict their right to speak. You impose cancel culture in the universities and corporations and fire recalcitrant individuals who refuse to conform to leftist dogma; you have the FBI “coach” social media companies regarding whose speech is permissible and whose will be suppressed; and you establish a “Governance Board of Disinformation” at the Department of Homeland Security. The “woke” mob and its leftist regimes in DC and sundry state capitals decide truth and falsity and censor rational voices that challenge leftist orthodoxy.
Freedom of speech is freedom of the mind: It protects the right of freethinkers such as Socrates, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Pasteur, Rand, and others to challenge authority whether secular or religious, to offend people including the powerful, to speak truth supported by evidence, and to gain a hearing for arguments that the rulers do not want to be heard. This is why every actual and wannabe dictator, including the contemporary Left, seeks to censor dissenting voices.
Further, why use the term “disinformation”—a word nobody in America heard of until a few years ago, rather than common terms like “falsehoods” or “lies?” The term “disinformation” was coined by Joseph Stalin. Is this a coincidence—or an admission of the Left’s ultimate goals?
This war on the mind is enough to certify leftists as monsters. We don’t need more evidence to identify the evilest parties in America. But there is more evidence.
3. Crime
Leftists de-fund the police. They let violent criminals out of prison. They eliminate bail and turn brutal perpetrators back onto the street immediately after arrest. The predictable consequence is a terrifying rise of violent crime in every city of the country. Crime expert Heather MacDonald estimates thousands of additional murder victims—most of them black Americans—because of these policies.[3]
4. Racism
The Left is racist to its core—in both overt and covert forms. Daily, it spews virulent hatred of white people. As but one example of many, in 2021, a Rutgers University professor said “We got to take white people out.”[4] A New York City-based psychiatrist told an audience at Yale University that she fantasizes about shooting white people in the head.[5] Harvard Magazine published an essay titled “Abolish the White Race.”[6]
But its war on black Americans is even worse. Official DOJ crime statistics show that year after year after year some 5000-7000 black Americans are murdered. Each year, roughly 90% of the perpetrators are black thugs.[7] When did the homicide rate rise to such astronomical levels in the black community? It starts in the late-1960s. Before that, violent crime was not nearly as prevalent among black Americans. What caused this massive increase? Leftist policies.
Specifically, which ones?
- A woman could receive welfare checks for each child she had as long as she was unmarried. This led to a greater than 70% illegitimacy rate among black Americans and to a pandemic of fatherless children, a phenomenon harmful to the girls—and devastating to the boys.
- Opposition to school choice and tax refunds for families who send their kids to private schools ensured that the overwhelming preponderance of black urban kids attended the anti-education public schools
- Establishing and continuing to raise a minimum wage leads to but one result: It prices low-skilled workers—especially the young—out of the job market. For if a low-skilled worker’s labor is worth, say, $6 per hour to an employer but the state requires him to be paid $10 per hour, then the employer will lose money and the worker will not be hired. The result in black urban neighborhoods is thousands of fatherless, illiterate, unemployable kids, some percentage of whom form or join violent drug gangs. (Read the true crime literature on this sad topic. Sex, Money, Murder by Jonathan Green about the eponymous, notorious drug gang in the Bronx, NY is one representative example.) Ending the War on Drugs is the first step to ameliorating this problem because it would cut severely into the drug gang’s revenues and make membership less profitable and less appealing. But it is only a first step because for many kids joining a gang is only partly about gaining money; it is also about gaining a family.
The brilliant Thomas Sowell speaks of these issues; as did the late, great Walter Williams; as does Larry Elder, and some other supporters of capitalism. Leftists almost never do. They refuse to amend or even question their policies that murder thousands of black Americans annually.[8] As long as the Left wins its battle to replace capitalism with socialism/communism, it regards tens of thousands of murdered black Americans as naught but collateral damage.
Color-blind individualism is the sole panacea for racism in any of its hideous iterations. But the Left utterly rejects it, calling support of it “a micro-aggression.”
5. Climate Change
Research into the world’s leading astrophysicists who study the sun-climate connection provides a plethora of evidence supporting two conclusions: 1. Climate change is natural, not man-made 2. The warmer periods of the Earth’s natural climate cycle benefit earthly life; it is the colder periods that are baneful. The IPCC and other environmentalists/leftists deliberately ignore the most compelling evidence we have regarding climate change in order to spew a theory of pernicious human-caused warming, a theory that generates a relentless supply of false doomsday predictions and a ton of shrill hysteria. Baneful man-made warming is a lie. Period. The activities of the sun, the oscillations of Earth’s ocean currents, and other natural phenomena cause the ongoing climate cycle.[9] Leftists ignore a ton of evidence in order to ballyhoo their hysterical claims. They will reduce us—literally—to eating bugs in order to ameliorate a phony climate crisis. They are willing to kill countless human beings in poor nations and severely reduce living standards in rich ones in the name of a mythical crisis. Why? Because it enables them to seize control of the vital energy industry and to thereby hasten the replacement of capitalism by socialism/communism.
***
The conservative quest to execute a woman for having an abortion is medieval and repulsively evil. Freedom lovers must fight them to the death on this and several other issues. But the Leftists are evil on virtually every public policy issue. This is especially true regarding their deliberate attacks on education and free speech, for these constitute a war on the mind and its right to free expression.
Analogically, there are miles, feet, and inches of evil. The conservatives are narrowing the gap but the leftists still have a sizeable lead in this race to the moral bottom.
Notes
[1] Kevin Williamson in a National Review podcast was the first one I heard of who recommended hanging women for having an abortion. Then the South Carolina state legislature proposed making execution for abortion a law. Hopefully, this is just the lunatic fringe of the conservative movement and it does not become mainstream (although National Review is mainstream, as is a state legislature). But remember: About 10 years ago, the ideas that became the Green New Deal were advocated only by the fringe of the environmentalist movement. Now they’re promoted by a US Congresswoman.
[2] See American Schools: The Collapse, The Cause, The Cure.
[3] https://www.foxnews.com/us/black-lives-matter-silent-2020-black-murder-spike-experts-blm-defund-contributed. Retrieved on June 15, 2023.
[4] https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-jersey-professor-on-white-people-i-want-to-say-we-got-to-take-these-motherf-kers-out
[5] https://nypost.com/2021/06/04/nyc-pyscho-fantasizes-about-shooting-white-people-in-yale-talk/. Retrieved on June 15, 2023.
[6] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2002/09/abolish-the-white-race.html. Retrieved on June 15, 2023.
[7] Taleeb Starkes, Black Lies Matter (Independently Published, 2016), 30. See also: https://www.iwf.org/2021/05/26/heather-macdonald-on-uncomfortable-truths-about-policing-and-crime/. Retrieved om Jine 15, 2023.
[8] Also see my essays, Leftist Supremacy, Not White Supremacy, is the Gravest Threat to Black Lives, and America: A Racist Nation?
[9] Andrew Bernstein, The Truth About Climate Change (KDP, 2023), 10-44 and passim.