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Home » The left relies on the public’s ignorance of history

The left relies on the public’s ignorance of history

The New Neo Posted on by

For the left, failing to teach history – or teaching the leftist version of history – is a feature rather than a bug. A big, big feature. It makes it easier to fill in the blanks with utter claptrap.

To wit:

In what alternate universe would that be believable? In the universe created by abysmal ignorance of history.

I’m not saying that Clapper, Brennan, and Comey are themselves ignorant of the actual history. I suppose that could be the case, but I very very very much doubt it. I think they rely on the public’s ignorance, particularly that of people under fifty.

Comments

The left relies on the public’s ignorance of history — 38 Comments

  1. The Democrats rely on peoples’ ignorance of what they do. I strongly suspect that if people read the bills that Democrats vote on, many people would vote a different way.

  2. there’s is no intelligence in that assessment

    https://redstate.com/terichristoph/2025/07/25/media-matters-is-on-its-last-legs-n2192090

    of course we could go back to what paul kengor has fleshed about the Lion of the Senate, who was as close to a Soviet agent as one could imagine in this country, and he was a well spring of political apparatchiks, for some two geneation

    we can go back to 2012, when Obama certainly offered inducements to Medvedev, who the likes of super genius Mcfaul, didn’t realize was not a separate power center from Putin, the Khozayin, he seems to have staked out the most ridiculous position among the siloviki

    one possible source of the bubble is being popped,

  3. I’m not saying that Clapper, Brennan, and Comey are themselves ignorant of the actual history.

    In Brennan’s case, ignorance is there. As a college student in 1976, Brennan voted for the CPUSA candidate ( Gus Hall, I believe) for President. I took a politics course in 9th grade. We read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, which taught us the evil of the Communist system. I wrote a term paper on Soviet agriculture which informed me that not only was the Soviet system evil, it couldn’t deliver the material goods. Evil and incompetent. I knew that as a 9th grader, and could cite chapter and verse in proof of that. Brennan was an ignorant fool as a college student to vote Commie.

    The CIA personnel who hired Brennan—who admitted to the CIA that he had voted Commie—were damned fools.

    The only saving grace is that for several decades (1960-1980..) an FBI bagman took annual trips to Moscow to deliver Moscow gold to the CPUSA.(John Barron’s Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin.)

  4. Democrats rely on their Propaganda Ministry to indoctrinate the masses how to think.

  5. I guess that makes Brennan a, a, a…an IDEALIST!
    – – – – – –
    The Democrats and their supporters can say and do whatever they want because…they are the ONLY ONES who can SAVE THE COUNTRY from Trump and his deplorable, fascist followers—all of ‘em unrepentant Nazis and racists—as the Democrats et al. keep assuring us!

    (Especially, one must assume, his Jewish ones…)

  6. I’m with Gringo. I’m suspicious of anyone ignorant enough to take communism seriously, even in their college years.

  7. I saw a video somewhere of a group of young students talking about Hitler. One girl said Hitler had to do what he did because the Jews must have “done something” to justify what he did. Awful.

  8. Ex-communists caught up in McCarthy era investigations claimed they “didn’t know” about Stalin’s crimes and mass murders. Dubious even then but possible, maybe.

    But by the 1970s everyone from the 5th grade on up knew the CPUSA was nothing but a front for the Soviet Union. It’s unbelievable that Brennan not only got a clearance but was actually made head of the CIA. Except for the fact that he was appointed by Obama.

  9. no that makes him a knave like Van Jones who took to communism (sorry community organizing) after the wall fell, informed speculation, suggests Brennan was recruited by one or another Arab faction in his first tour abroad, he seems to have been ecumenical in his fixations both Salafi and Shia militant, because he was one of the few at langley who was competent in Arabic, he rose up the ranks pretty fast,

    back in the oughts, another lefty Company man, Fulton Armstrong, who was a critic of John Bolton, too willing to accept the bonafides of several foreign powers

  12. Ex-communists caught up in McCarthy era investigations claimed they “didn’t know” about Stalin’s crimes and mass murders. Dubious even then but possible, maybe.

    They “didn’t know” because they had blinders on their eyes. Any information that reflected badly on the Soviet Union was dismissed as “anti-Soviet/Communist..”

    Eugene Lyons spent 6 years as a journalist in the Soviet Union. He interviewed Stalin—in Russian. He wrote Assignment in Utopia about his time as a journalist in the USSR. He came to the USSR as someone who was very sympathetic to the Communist “experiment.” He didn’t leave the USSR in the same frame of mind. He also wrote The Red Decade about Communist activities in the US, a book which had the misfortune of being ready for publication around the same time Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, so it didn’t sell a lot.

    The Red Decade is available for 99 cents as a Kindle. Internet Archive is also a source for those books.

    A high school classmate rubbed me the wrong way. He was very argumentative, very critical. Very tense—you couldn’t relax around him. At the same time, he lacked self-awareness: at times he criticized people for doing what HE did. Years later I did an Internet search. He was doing well as a professional. Also did pro bono work. I found out that his father had been a Communist operative for 10 years—left in 1956. His unwillingness to testify about his former colleagues went to the Supreme Court. (His father won.) His father’s activities helped explain why my classmate was so tense. His father was under a lot of tension, so his son grew up in a tense environment.

    His father turned Commie after the War. Stalin defeated Hitler, the killer of the Jews….I doubt his father ever was aware of Eugene Lyons’s books.

    Here is an interesting coincidence regarding my high school classmate. He told a “joke” saying that the W.A.S.P. Bible was the Reader’s Digest. I didn’t find it funny, which may be why I remembered it. Decades later I was reading a biography of Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet and also faithful Communist. Neruda made the same quip in 1948, around the time of an Interamerican conference about something in Bogota Colombia, that the W.A.S.P. Bible was the Reader’s Digest. Guess Commies read the same joke books. 🙂

  15. Re: American communists
    ___________________________

    Membership levels [in the CPUSA] remained below 20,000 until 1933 and then surged upward in the late 1930s, reaching 66,000 in 1939 and reaching its peak membership of over 75,000 in 1947….

    As the CPUSA’s role in Soviet Espionage activities became more widely known, the Party suffered dramatically at onset of the Cold War. The Second Red Scare saw the party prosecuted under the Smith Act, which criminalized advocacy of violent revolution and led to high-profile trials of its leaders. This decimated the CPUSA, reducing its membership to under 10,000 by the mid-1950s. The Khrushchev Thaw and revelations of Joseph Stalin’s crimes also led to internal divisions, with many members leaving the party in disillusionment …

    By 1957, membership had dwindled to less than 10,000, of whom some 1,500 were informants for the FBI.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA
    ___________________________

    American communists weren’t entirely uninformed and unresponsive after Khrushchev exposed Stalinism. Some were disillusioned.

  16. In the 60s, 70s and beyond, Russian Communists financed the leftist Democrat “Peace Movement.” I remember leftist Democrats mocking Reagan’s anti-Soviet missile defense program as “Star Wars.”

  17. One reason the Brennan case pushes my button so much is that I worked many years for a defense contractor and had several TS clearances. You had to “re-up” every 4-5 years and one of the questions they asked was “Have you ever belonged to an organization that was trying to overthrow the US government?”. It seemed like a joke but I guess you could still head the CIA ..

  20. And it’s not just ignorance of history, it’s also ignorance of basic economics.

    We see that recently in NYC where the voters there selected a communist as the Democratic nominee for mayor.
    And odds are that he will become the next mayor of NYC.

    The people of Vermont have repeatedly elected a communist – Sanders- as their US Senator.

    Many people are attracted to socialism / communism because it promises something for nothing. The miserable history of this economic system is of no consequence to those who support this political / economic form of govt.

  21. it’s also ignorance of basic economics.

    Bingo! Ludwig von Mises had their number all the way back in 1922. I read Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis my freshman year in college as I was embarking on a degree in economics.

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/154244.Socialism

    It is the single most influential book on economics that I’ve ever read. It is a point by point takedown of every form of socialist thought. I assumed, after I’d read it, that I’d eventually come across some socialist economist explaining all the things that von Mises had gotten wrong. It’s been decades now, and I still haven’t seen it.

  22. But there is this from Robert Heilbroner, a leftist economist who wrote a bunch of textbooks I had to suffer through:

    Capitalism has been as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure. Here is the part that’s hard to swallow. It has been the Friedmans, Hayeks, and von Miseses who have maintained that capitalism would flourish and that socialism would develop incurable ailments. All three have regarded capitalism as the ‘natural’ system of free men; all have maintained that left to its own devices capitalism would achieve material growth more successfully than any other system. From [my samplings] I draw the following discomforting generalization: The farther to the right one looks, the more prescient has been the historical foresight; the farther to the left, the less so.

    Beautiful, just beautiful.

  23. And the reaction when you try to explain some history to a leftist…

  24. Mike, IIRC Susan Sontag came rather reluctantly to the same conclusion as Heilbroner, though quite a bit later.

    In her case, I believe she stated that NYC taxi drivers proved to be more capable analysts of communism than all-too-many supposedly credentialed academics.

  25. The attraction to socialism…they idea of centralized economic planning is a very seductive one. It just seems to *make sense* that such planning would lead to more efficiency…less waste…and certainly less unnecessary human suffering than an environment in which millions of decision-makers, many of them in competition with one another, are making their own separate and uncoordinated decisions, resulting in pointless product redundancy, economic cycles driving unemployment, and lots of other bad things. It takes either high intelligence, exceptional perceptiveness, a good knowledge of history…and.or personal experience…to see the flaws in this belief.

    Francis Spufford’s brilliant book Red Plenty is about what such a system is like in practice. It is about the Soviet Union’s economic planning efforts as seen from the inside. The characters include factory managers, economic planners, mathematicians, computer scientists, and “fixers.”

    https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/71068.html

  26. @David Foster: I think it’s a tactical mistake to focus on “planning” as what’s wrong with socialism. From time to time a large organization will try to run its own operations in a “capitalist” way, where each department has their own profit and loss and has to bid for resources, etc, and it doesn’t seem to work well. Every economic entity in a free-enterprise environment is planning or it doesn’t last too long. Planning is not bad.

    It’s the knowledge problem coupled with coordination and decision-making processes in organizations that prevents effective planning of a national economy. The individual entities in a free-enterprise environment can plan on the basis of price signals for things they themselves don’t have expertise in and couldn’t do calculations for and make decisions on in real-time anyway, and they know a great deal about what they focus on and do the usual sort of planning for those things. And they screw it up all the time of course.

    A free market is like a huge distributed computer telling everyone where to send what resources when and to whom, which can even route around mistakes and bad information. There’s nothing humans have designed yet that is comparable.

  29. Niketas Choniates…the issue isn’t *planning*, it is *centralized planning*. Of course businesses plan, but they they can’t plan the behavior of their customers. Whereas in an economy that is entirely centrally planned, there is no such thing as a customer. Everyone entity in the economy makes what it is supposed to make and receives what it is supposed to receive, according to The Plan.

    Which makes persuasion unnecessary, and hence makes Salesmen unnecessary.

    In the book I linked, one character is a ‘fixer’…before the Revolution, he was a salesman. But now, under Communism, the economic problem is not selling, but buying. He reflects:

    “You’re thinking of some fellow who works in a sales administration, sits by his phone all day long like a little king, licks his finger when he feels like it, and says, “You can have a litttle bit”…That’s not a salesman. You see, the world used to be the other way up, and it used to be the buyers who sat around examining their fingernails, hard enough as that is to imagine. A salesman was a poor hungry bastard with a suitcase, trying to shift something that people probably didn’t want, ’cause back in those days, people didn’t just get out the money and buy anything they could get their hands on. They had to be talked into it.”

    But with Communism, the things changed. “Back then, people didn’t want to buy. Now, they don’t want to sell.”

  30. From an experienced, no-nonsense, old-school JOURNALIST:

    ‘When Obama Began Strangling the Republic “By the Book” Part II‘—
    https://johnkassnews.com/when-obama-began-strangling-the-republic-by-the-book-part-ii/

    (Also includes a link to Part 1.)

    + Bonus:
    Speaking of the myriad ways of distorting history, there’s this fascinating appreciation of an important figure from the Carter administration—perhaps even a resurrection—(whether one agrees/agreed with him or not…):

    “Brzezinski’s Battles
    REVIEW: ‘Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet’ by Edward Luce”—
    https://freebeacon.com/culture/brzezinskis-battles/
    H/T Powerline blog (for both).

  33. as a pole you wouldn’t expect him to cotton to leftists, but Richard Pipes insight was much greater in many respects, re the ideological underpinnings from the beginning, while the Dems listened to a shallow scribe like Strobe Talbott who was Victor Louis’s flying monkey, speaking of flying monkeys we know what that twit Edward Luce,* really thinks or doesn’t going back to 2022, as nearly as deranged as Michael Beschloss, scratch that,

    imagine if there was one reporter in any major broadsheet with the accumen of John Kass, certainly there isn’t by a country mile, or Andrew Malcolm formerly of the LA Times, or the southern scribe Don Surber

    *the son of the foreign office mandarin, who missed the whole import of the nationalist movement that would provide a sanctuaty for terrorists like Wadi Haddad,

  34. Compare and contrast:

    1.
    “The Real January 6 Wasn’t at the Capitol – It Was at Trump Tower [in 2017]”—
    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/07/26/real_january_6_wasnt_at_the_capitol__it_was_at_trump_tower_153101.html
    H/T Powerline blog.

    Opening grafs:

    January 6 has become a date of hallowed pagan sacredness to the ruling class – a supposed talisman marking chaos, a shorthand for “threats to democracy.” But the media, predictably, has focused on the wrong January. And the wrong threat.

    Because the real January 6 – the one that changed everything – wasn’t in 2021. It happened four years earlier, in 2017. Not at the Capitol, but rather in a glass-walled conference room on the 26th floor of Trump Tower.…

    2.
    “Spygate: The Inside Story Behind The Alleged Plot To Take Down Trump”—
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/spygate-inside-story-behind-alleged-plot-take-down-trump

    Jeff Carlson wrote this very long and—by necessity—complex, intricate article.

  36. And a reminder or two…from Lee Smith—digging deep—since “things” do seem to have been accelerating quite dizzyingly over the past week (or even month) or so….

    “The Brennan Forgery;
    “Did Obama’s CIA director falsify evidence showing Russiagate was a hoax?”—
    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/brennan-forgery-russiagate

    “Trump’s Opponents Want to Humble the USA;
    “What do Iran’s nuclear ambitions have to do with America First? A lot.”—
    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/trump-opponents-humble-america

  37. ‘Retailers Accused Of “Racism” As They Flee Black Neighborhoods In Milwaukee’
    ==
    If white people move out, that’s ‘white flight’, which is bad. If they move in, that’s ‘gentrification’, which is bad. If they stay where they are, that’s ‘segregation’, which is bad.

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