If you look at the Democratic Party Platform you will see
things like “Ending Systemic Racism, Closing the Racial Wealth Gap,
Guaranteeing Women’s Rights, Guaranteeing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and
Transgender Rights, Guaranteeing Rights for People with Disabilities,
Protecting Workers’ Fundamental Rights.”
It would seem that the Democratic Party really cares about
rights. In a way they do care about rights, just not in the way most people
think about them.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her book Infidel undoubtedly described it best when she wrote “The
Democratic Party is grounded in the rights of groups of people not the
individual.”
It is this grouping of people together in an attempt to gain
votes that is causing division and hate. This growing tribalism is recreating
the political landscape, turning friends against each other and seeming enemies
together. These ideas are new manifestation of an old threat.
That was not REAL Communism
The idea of
group’s rights is not a new concept. It finds it roots in the ideology of Karl
Marx, who promoted the rights of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie.
Toward the
latter half of the twentieth century it became increasingly obvious that
Communism did not produce the wonderful utopia that it promised. The horrors of
the Soviet Union, the genocide of Pol Pot, and oppression in Cuba could not be
ignored. Those who believed in Communism could no longer associate with that
ideology and be taken seriously.
Instead they performed a sleight of hand. Instead of
proletariat verses the bourgeoisie, it became oppressor verses oppressed. This
allowed the idea of group’s rights to flourish. If a group is being oppressed
of course they need more protections.
It is this sleight of hand that allows an ideology
responsible for some of the most horrific atrocities in the world to still be
openly put forward as a good idea. Ask yourself, why is it acceptable to fly a
hammer and sickle banner but not acceptable to fly a Swastika banner? Both are
symbols of despotic regimes responsible for the deaths of millions of people,
both are offensive to lots of people, yet one is acceptable and the other is
not.
This in part has to do with the fact that those who
subscribed to the communist ideology never owned up to the horrors it produced.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the head of Communism was cut off. It took
some time, but true to its form the
hydra
of Communism sprouted several more heads. Those heads sprouted up as
positions in universities. Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Gender Studies,
LGBTQ Studies. Using the experience they gained in the civil rights movement
the Democratic Party realized they could appeal to groups of people and claim
that they are champions of those group’s rights.
Why Classical
Liberals Find Themselves on the Right
The term online is ‘Red-Pilled.’ Taken from the matrix it
means someone who can finally see reality for what it really is.
The left has increasingly become obsessed with identity
politics. The term identity politics is not exactly correct. Lately the
Progressive/Social Justice Warrior types point to the right and accuse them of
engaging in identity politics too. At some level they are not wrong. Everyone
has one identity or another that they think needs more help. That is natural to
human behavior.
So why are classical liberals joining together with people
who are more on the right. Classical Liberals can see or at least feel that the
Progressives on the left have moved away from individual liberty. John Stuart
Mill, a prominent liberal thinker, in his book
On Liberty sums up this feeling well when he says, “
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by
whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the
will of God or the injunctions of men.” Group’s rights crush individuality, it
is the tyranny of the majority.
The politics on
the left promote the group above the individual. This why you see people like
Linda Sarsour Tweeting out “Brigitte
Gabriel = Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She’s asking 4 an a$$ whippin’. I wish I could take
their vaginas away- they don’t deserve to be women.” Despite being women
Brigitte Gabriel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are treated as undeserving of that status
because they do not fight for the rights of the group over the rights of the
individual.
This behavior
is not exclusive to feminism. Racial slurs are directed toward people who
oppose the group, the term race traitor is thrown about, and a mountain of
shame, outrage and disgust is dropped on anyone who dare step out of line. If
group’s rights is the end goal than anyone who opposes that is not only not
part of the group, but an enemy of the group.
Classical
liberalism is nested in the idea that each individual has intrinsic value and
natural rights. Fundamentally the ideology of group rights cannot coexist with
the intrinsic value of the individual. The needs of the group must always come
first, if that means a few individuals have to suffer for the betterment of the
group than it is acceptable. This is why liberals who used to be on the left
now find themselves more to the right. As Dave Rubin
host of The Rubin Report said
“Defending my liberal values has become a conservative position.” It is this
belief in the rights of the group over the individual that is driving people
away from the left.
How Feminism and
Islam can coexist.
The coexistence of Feminism and Islam has been a question
that baffled me for some time. On the surface it would seem that the two
ideologies vastly contrast one another.
At first I thought this had to do with the fact that both
groups seem to harbor a hatred of Western culture and civilization. This might
be one factor in their friendship but it goes even deeper than that.
Islam is concerned with the group of people who have submitted
their will to Allah. Islam has different rights for those who are Muslim as
opposed to those who are not, the dhimmis. Jizya, the idea that any non-Muslim
subject has to pay a yearly tax that Muslim do not, is just one example of this
playing out.
Feminism at its founding was a movement to gain equal rights
for women. One of the biggest problems the feminist movement has suffered was
being too successful. Legally women enjoy all the same rights as men. Now
Post-Modern Feminism does not want equal opportunities with men, instead Post-Modern
feminism seeks to have equal outcomes with men. This can only happen two ways.
Either give women an additional leg up, or cut men down so that everything will
have equal outcomes. Both of these methods seek to grant ‘rights’ to one group
of people instead of all people as individuals.
These two seemingly opposing ideologies overlap in one key
area. They believe in the rights of one group and disregard the rights of other
groups. In that regard they are philosophical siblings. They happen to also
have a perceived shared enemy in the Western Capitalist Judeo-Christian
Patriarchy.
It is this dedication to the rights of group’s over
individuals that allows groups with opposite views but similar ideological
roots work together. Like some sort of comic book superhero team up gone
horribly wrong, they have decided to join forces to defeat a common ‘enemy’
even if they normally could not stand each other.
Free Speech and the
Individual
The right to free speech is the most powerful weapon an
individual possess. If you have no money, no status, and no influence you will
always have the ability to speak the truth. It is this freedom that gives power
to even the most marginalized person. That is why freedom of speech is under
attack.
Group’s rights does not work unless everyone fits into their
group. So when an individual uses their freedom of speech to speak against the
group they get stuck with the label hate speech. To the group’s right activist
speaking out against the group means you do not care about that group’s rights.
The line of thought follows this path to the idea that they are suffering from
internalized oppression or they are actual oppressors who seek to do harm to
the group.
Further down this line of thought is that if they are
seeking to do harm, then the group, or those representing (or claiming to
represent) the group, have a right to self-defense. This is the victim
narrative. Group’s rights activists and Democrat Party politicians need a
victim narrative to survive.
Democratic Party politicians like to position themselves as
champions of
the
people. They are the ones fighting for women’s rights, they are fighting
for Trans rights. In reality they only care about the group rights of certain
people often to the detriment of other people. That is why they are so willing
to attack freedom of speech under the guise of hate speech. They want to
protect the group, not the individual.
Ideology of group’s right bring together groups that would
normally seem antagonistic toward one another. This is accomplished because of
the close ideological familiarity of group’s rights. The push for more and more
group’s rights has resulted in a lot of classical liberals being pushed over
from the left to the right.
The ideology of group’s rights is built on the foundation of
resentment. Not a resentment that they do not have enough, but that someone
else has more than they do. When someone feels like they deserve something that
someone else has, things go from bad to dangerous. It is clear to see that this
ideology is destructive and crushes the individual in its attempt to usher in
the utopia.
The Threat to
Civilization
Individual liberty and the rights of the individual are the
foundation that Western Civilization was built. These ideas of group’s rights
are a serious threat to that foundation. They can only see power and want
nothing but more power for their group.
This quest for power will ultimately thrust everyone into warring
tribes’ hell bent on the destruction or subjection of other tribes to their
will. Countries founded on individual liberty and individual rights stand in
the way of this goal. That is why recently at Berkeley you could hear a
chant of “No Trump, No
Wall, No USA at all.”
The political landscape is changing, we need to adapt to it.
The rights of the individual are under attack by those who seek the rights of
the group. This time of chaos has brought ideologies with goals that are anathema
to each other together under the banner of group rights. Once the rights of the
group are put above the rights of the individuals, atrocities will soon follow.
At that point the only question that remains is, how many individuals must be
sacrificed before utopia can be reached?
I arrived and parked my car and met the professor and her
two students. They were all very polite and welcoming. Quickly any silly ideas
I had about being in danger vanished. My gut told me there was nothing to worry
about and it was right. I went into a room filled with the smell of pizza,
completed some forms and waited for everyone else to arrive.
I told of the best man at my wedding unfriending me on
Facebook and not talking to me since. It was good to know that I was not the
only one who had experienced these sort of things. We all did not agree on
everything, but we did agree that we did not like the attacks from the left. One
thing that did jump out at me was one guy who got serious when he said that he
was worried about the rise of socialism in the United States. I have to admit,
I share that concern. 
Looking back on the experience it was good to know that
there were other people who had similar ideas as I do. We talked about Milo and
Berkeley, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Antifa, Socialism, and Kekistan
(Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee). We were not a group of Nazi’s, but just regular
people who had to work the next day. People who see the world one way and get
attacked for trying to explain it. People who are proud to be Americans and not
afraid to say it out loud. 
