Twitter is notorious for hiding its bias with “shadow banning.” But its CEO, Jack Dorsey (shown), has now ventured a bit from the shadows, more overtly revealing his bias by endorsing an article calling for the GOP’s destruction and the “Californification” of the whole country.
Labeling it a “great read,” Dorsey tweeted the piece “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War” to his 4.18 million followers April 5. Authored by Reinvent founder Peter Leyden and leftist commentator Ruy Teixeira, the article calls “for a complete marginalization of the Republican Party and its voters since they only care ‘about rule by and for billionaires at the expense of working people,’” as the Daily Caller relates it. Of course, billionaires and the wealthy may (during a sodium pentothal moment) disagree — most of them today support Democrats.
The authors’ thesis is that “there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture” because conservatives are stuck in the past and resistant to “change,” which, of course, has become a leftist sacrament. For liberals and conservatives are divided, they aver, by two fundamentally different world views.
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The latter is true. Never have we been so split over foundational issues. What is marriage? Should sex be (barely) governed by some animalistic libertinism or be pushed back toward the closet? Is sexual dimorphism a reality or are “male” and “female” just part of a “gender spectrum”? Is faith a necessary bulwark of civilization or a destructive anachronism? Et cetera.
It’s clear where the authors (and Dorsey) stand. Emphasizing in particular conservatives’ rejection of the climate-change and diversity agendas, they write, “Let’s just say what needs to be said: The Republican Party over the past 40 years has maneuvered itself into a position where they are the bad guys on the wrong side of history.”
This is a common claim, but it not only confuses bad with good but also history with current events. Traditionalists are certainly on the wrong side of the latter, just as Christians were in early A.D. Rome, late-1930s Germany, and the mid 20th-century USSR. But Rome, the Nazi regime, and the Soviets are now history — and Christianity is still part of current events. “A lie has speed, but truth has endurance,” the saying informs.
Speaking of speed, the authors write that a “political collapse could happen very fast, as it did in California,” referencing the state’s transition from GOP governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and 2005 ballot initiatives — which the writers call the “zenith of conservative Republican attempts to control California” — to the ascendancy of hard-left governor Jerry Brown and Democrat supermajorities in the legislature.
It’s certainly true that demographics and cultural conditioning favor Democrats. Every year we absorb a million-plus immigrants; 85 to 90 percent them hail from the Third World, and 70 to 90 percent of that group votes Democrat upon naturalization. (Welcome to the real reason leftists love “diversity.”) Moreover, the culture shapers — media, standard and social; academia; and entertainment — are brainwashing generations with leftist ideology, which is why Millennials break Democrat two-to-one.
Yet the authors make a mistake. California circa 2005 (and even 1995) was already a very left-wing state, and Schwarzenegger is a liberal Republican whose celebrity status won him the governorship. It can’t be equated with a traditionalist state such as Utah, Alabama, or Oklahoma. With politics downstream of culture, California could experience a rapid GOP collapse because it had already undergone a cultural collapse.
The authors equate what they predict is nigh with Republican dominance post-Civil War and Democrat hegemony during and after FDR’s presidency. They write, “At some point, one side or the other must win — and win big. The side resisting change, usually the one most rooted in the past systems and incumbent interests, must be thoroughly defeated — not just for a political cycle or two, but for a generation or two. That gives the winning party or movement the time and space needed to really build up the next system without always fighting rear-guard actions and getting drawn backwards…. The nation can’t take much more of our one step forward, one step back politics that gets little done despite the need for massive changes.”
This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding — but a common one. While there may be minor movements toward sanity (such as President Trump rescinding regulations), the overall pattern on what truly matters has thus far been irreversible gravitation leftwards. When do conservatives ever roll back anything of significance? There is no viable movement to eliminate faux (same-sex) marriage recognition; no proposal to rescind the thought-control legislation known as hate-crime-laws; no reversal of the ever-metastasizing “transgender” agenda; no halting of the left-wing drift of schools, media, and entertainment; no defunding of Planned Parenthood; and no alteration of our culture-rending immigration regime, in place since 1965. Why, even the recent budget deal was replete with enough liberal priorities so that Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) could hail it as a victory.
Reality: Everything called a conservative triumph is — when not wholly illusory — merely a small movement rightwards on a ship steadily drifting left. It’s little more than rearranging the deck chairs.
Yet the real problem is our widespread failure to believe in Truth. This causes us to trade the correct conception of reality — Truth vs. lies — with right vs. left, two terms with no historically fixed definitions pertaining to ideology. Rightists and leftists were, respectively, monarchists and republicans during the French Revolution yet were something else in the USSR, fancy themselves something different again today, and (along with many conservatives) are confused in every time.
This brings us to “change” worship. The only consistent definition of “liberal” is the “desire to change the status quo.” Yet as G.K. Chesterton cautioned, “Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” In other words, “progress” implies movement toward a goal; thus, insofar as we’re unsure of the goal, we’ll be unsure of the progress.
If we believed in Truth, which is unchanging, and searched for it, we could have a concrete vision for civilization and know whether or not progress toward it was being achieved. But what is leftists’ vision? They have ever-shifting goalposts. Like pathologically rebellious children, their only constant is opposition to conservatives, those rather poor guardians of the status quo. Translation: Their only constant is undisciplined, ill-considered change. Why, a Barack Obama slogan was “Hope and Change.”
But hope isn’t a strategy, and change should be a means to an end, not an end unto itself. For “change” isn’t good by definition, and change unguided by proper principle (Truth) is like a rocket without a guidance system. It’s a recipe for crashing and burning.
But burning with misguided passion, leftists forge ahead with their progress toward they know not what. Dorsey, we now hear, does his part and personally chooses what Twitter accounts to ban (always conservatives). And Leyden, Teixeira, Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and others gleefully proclaim that California is America’s future. They’re given no pause by the state having soaring housing costs, a fleeing middle class, a debt crisis, the nation’s highest supplemental poverty rate, a balkanized populace, rampant illegal aliens, some of the United States’ worst schools, and homeless camps and a rich-poor divide reflective of the Third World. (Video below examines the state’s homelessness.)
Yet these leftists may very well be correct that California reflects our tomorrow. If so, there’s one thing we certainly can say the republic’s future will be.
Short.
Photo of Jack Dorsey: AP Images