What made me think of him today was this Instapundit post mentioning that Kristol has come out for Mamdani, and asking, “Did @BillKristol ever believe anything he said he did for decades?” My answer: it depends on what you mean by the word believe.”

Let me add that I was slightly acquainted with Kristol, having met him perhaps twice – one time of which involved sitting very near him at a table of about eight people, for a dinner after a talk he gave. I also wrote for the online Weekly Standard for some years, and would submit articles to him (the articles still exist, with format somewhat strained, at this URL at the Washington Examiner, in case you’re interested in ancient history). My observation is that he certainly appeared to believe what he was saying, although his personality wasn’t what you’d call intense.

Kristol was a Harvard guy, however, who moved in those circles for quite a while. And he was what you might call a legacy conservative. His father was a leading neoconservative (that is, a left-to-right changer) and his mother Gertrude Himmelfarb was a conservative academic historian and author. Bill Kristol’s Wiki page (at the top of which you can find the unintentionally humorous “Not to be confused with Billy Crystal”) notes his career and then his NeverTrumper credentials. But it’s one thing to not like Trump; it’s another to be okay with Mamdani.

Quite a journey. The easiest explanation – money – doesn’t quite do it for me. My guess is that the legacy aspect of Kristol’s conservatism made it perhaps rather shallow, and if you look at his history he was a fan of McCain, for example, and was the kind of neocon who advocated for military interventions. So he was more of a Republican than a conservative.

Trump offended him in some essential and deep way. But why the swing to the left? It was not his children, as far as I can tell. His son works for Tom Cotton and his daughter is married to Matthew Continetti, who is a Trump supporter (at least, according to recent articles he wrote such as this one). I wonder how Thanksgiving goes in their family? Haven’t seen much information about his wife’s politics, so I can’t speak to that.

Kristol’s father died in 2009, before Kristol’s political change. But his mother lived to be 97, dying in 2019. Is that a clue? Did his full political conversion only happen when his mother was deceased? One telling fact may be that, although Kristol hated Trump from the very start, he didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton but did vote for Biden and then Harris; both votes occurred after the death of his mother. Did that death enable him to cut the final cord with his parents’ viewpoints? He also no longer calls himself a Republican. And although he’s continued to support Israel, as far as I can tell, I see no evidence that he’s religious.

Here’s the fuller text of his explanation for supporting Mamdani; he said it in an interview. His reasoning doesn’t make all that much sense and is extraordinarily shallow as well as pretty meaningless, since Kristol lives in Virginia and can’t vote in the mayoral election at all. But here’s an excerpt:

… Abigail Spanberger, who I think will win in November, is really excellent. It might be Sherrill, actually, in New Jersey, excellent. And so, part of my core praise for Mamdani has been that, you know what, if we elect three Democrats who win in November—the three big races, really—and it’s Spanberger or Sherrill and Mamdani? That’s okay. …

… [T]he idea of going back to Cuomo is just, I think, ridiculous. I think if it had been the first round, I would’ve voted for someone else and maybe wouldn’t have even ranked Mamdani and would’ve had other people who were more centrist, liberal types.

It was very disappointing. All these big shot, you know, finance types in New York, they couldn’t get behind anyone except for Andrew Cuomo. It’s really pathetic, in my opinion. So now they’re rallying to Cuomo with some of them, but I don’t have that much sympathy for that.

And I also just think, practically speaking, New York is a huge city. He’s not going to destroy it, I don’t think. He’s gonna set up five silly government-run grocery stores, I guess. I don’t think he even will do that [inaudible]. And so they’ll be fine. So there’ll be some grocery store somewhere and it won’t be as good as the privately run ones, and it will go out of business in three years and it’ll be a little bit of a waste of taxpayer money, you know? Or it’ll be harmless, you know? And so people—I do think the right’s reaction to Mamdani has been a little hysterical. He’s a very impressive politician. I don’t know that he’s going to be a very good mayor. He’s 33 years old, he’s never run anything. They’re good people who could work for him though, in New York.

Huh? So, whatever.

The post What happened to Bill Kristol? appeared first on The New Neo.

The ignorance of the average voter — even the average educated, affluent voter — is difficult to fathom for those of us who are more engaged, even if we’re not obsessive about it.

A year or so ago, I heard a young mother, about 30 — a seemingly intelligent and affluent college graduate — “blame” Biden for the overruling of Roe v Wade (she was pro-abortion, obviously) because it happened while he was president. This level of ignorance and irrationality, while common, is so deep as to make meaningful discussion impossible.

The same is true of the people on the “Right” who seem to think “Zionists” are behind everything wrong with the United States.

Given the left’s dominance of the media, and the wishy washy nature of the supposedly “rightwing” Fox News, I expect the Democrats to avoid blame for the shutdown. Apparently, the media was able to convince many people that the border disaster under Biden was the fault of the Republicans.

To many of us who follow politics closely, it does seem very odd. Why do so many people seem not to care? Why do they read only information that comes from one side? Or little to no information at all?

But at the risk of repeating myself, I’ll give my answers, and those answers come from my own personal experience. I’m not just talking about my experience with acquaintances, friends, and family. I’m talking about my own behavior and thoughts.

For the first thirty years of my adult life I simply did not follow politics closely. I read the Boston Globe and The New Yorker, but in those days the latter wasn’t politics-heavy; that happened much later. I read the Globe mainly because I lived in New England, and I was especially interested in the arts and sciences section. Some Sundays I got The New York Times, again mostly for the arts, sciences, book reviews, and also the double-crostic (I’m not a crossword puzzle lover). I didn’t like TV news – still don’t – and rarely watched it unless something especially important was happening.

Did I think I was well-informed? Not really. But I thought I was well-informed enough. I wasn’t keen on most politicians. The majority of people I knew about seemed to vote for Democrats, but I actually didn’t even know the politics of many of my friends because the subject didn’t come up. My entire family voted for Democrats; I did know that. And it was perfectly fine with me to vote for them too.

What was I doing most of that time, instead? Mothering, reading, writing fiction and poetry, working when my son got older, going to the movies, listening to music, exercising, cooking, socializing, talking to my husband, traveling to see relatives and friends – all the activities of normal life. Later, I went back to grad school and got my MFT degree, but that didn’t involve politics, either.

And yet it did; I just didn’t realize it. I found myself at odds with a lot of what my professors were teaching us, and I often argued with them about the way to treat clients. My fellow classmates weren’t so enthralled with my orneriness, and I didn’t understand why they didn’t agree with me. But looking back, I think a lot of it had to do with my more conservative way of looking at human nature and human interaction – including, for example, issues of responsibility as well as truth-telling.

I’ve written my story in my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” posts; no need to go into all that again. The point I’m trying to make here is that I believe most of the people I know – nearly all of them are Democrats – fall into the same patterns of news and politics consumption that I had for those thirty years.

Sure, there are people I know on the left who follow politics much more closely. But they’re nowhere near as numerous among the people I know, and I think that’s true in general. Dedicated leftists and activists depend on the much greater number of people who are neither.

I imagine some of you are thinking: oh, so you were a useful idiot. I may have been useful, but I was no idiot. I was the very same person I am today, except that now I spend many hours reading and writing about politics. It’s a great surprise to me; I simply didn’t see that coming. But life can be surprising.

The post People who are uninterested in politics appeared first on The New Neo.

I’d worked in politics nearly half my life, starting out as an intern on Barack Obama’s campaign when I was only seventeen years old, then as a field organizer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Before Obama won the primary in 2008, I was an alternate delegate for Hillary in Kansas’ third congressional district, one of the youngest ever in the state of Kansas.

After a series of disappointments with the establishment, I eventually found my way to the Bernie side of the party …

So she’s established her Democrat bona fides and even her leftist bona fides. However, something happened to her on the way to the 2024 election, and that something can be summarized as Kamala Harris (although certainly not just Kamala Harris):

A lot of people have asked me what the exact moment was at the DNC that made me realize I wasn’t on board with the party I’d worked for nearly half of my life. The truth is, it was everything. The crowd that mindlessly chanted “joy”, the vasectomy van offering free tacos, the coronation of a candidate with zero policies or platform available, and the final straw: Oprah Winfrey. Her tone deaf lecturing turned me off so much, I left the building, getting an uber straight to my hotel, where I booked a flight home a day early, not even staying for Kamala’s acceptance speech.

I wouldn’t agree that Kamala had zero policies or platform, but although she certainly seemed unable to discuss her platform coherently, the platform she did have was IMHO pernicious. That doesn’t appear to have been Barker’s problem with Harris, because even though Barker technically qualifies as a changer she’s certainly not on the political right even now.

Nevertheless, she’s been shunned for having been unwilling to vote for the empty Kamala:

In the past year, nearly all of my old political friends have stopped speaking to me. One of them said: “fascism doesn’t look good on you”, another said “why couldn’t you have waited until after the election?” The social ostracism has trickled out into my non political life, too. I’ve lost friends I’ve known for fifteen years. My toddler stopped getting invited to birthday parties. He was rejected from preschool. We even had to move to a new town.

Now that we are more than half a year into a second Trump presidency, I’ve been asked numerous times if I regret my decision to ditch the Dems, or if I’d publicly say sorry for what I did.

The answer is NEVER.

In fact, more Democrats should’ve had the courage to speak out about Kamala’s candidacy, and the direction of the party in general. …

If the Democrats want to become a winning party again, they need to recognize that policy, and not messaging has led them to defeat. This means they need to stop only defining themselves against Trump, and decide what they are going to stand for. The days of mealy mouthed corporate speak are over. What the public craves more than anything is authenticity.

Besides this, Democrats need to come to terms with accepting more heterodoxy within their own party. Throw the purity tests in the trash can. It isn’t a moral failing to have a different opinion when it comes to immigration, gender ideology, or identity politics. If the Dems want to truly be the party of diversity, then diversity of thought must be included.

Good luck with that, Evan. Those days are gone. Will they ever come back? Can they ever come back? I doubt it, although of course I could be wrong. I certainly don’t think it will happen in my lifetime. I don’t even think it will happen in Evan’s lifetime, and she’s pretty young.

Nevertheless, Democrats might win the presidency and/or Congress (and certainly the House) again, and rather soon. Someone such as Evan is still in the minority in her party, and many Democrats are still very energized to vote against the GOP.

The post Another political changer shunned by friends appeared first on The New Neo.

The stock market is at record highs….I don’t see a country in a depression at all. I see people out there just living their lives.

“And I would have thought — and I gotta own it — that these tariffs were going to f***ing sink this economy by this time — and they didn’t. So, how do we feel with that fact? Because that’s the fact.”

“I gotta own it” is an unusual sentiment, especially with public figures whose pronouncements have been seen and read by so many people.

Maher also changed his mind on something else:

NEW: Bill Maher *RAVES* over Trump’s Iran strike

“I loved it. That was a home run.”

“And I’m a guy who was always saying … we should try to see if the Obama plan — the peace deal that Obama made — can work.”

“Maybe I was wrong.”

It’s certainly not a full-blown political conversion. But it’s nevertheless something of which many people – I think most people – are incapable.

The post Bill Maher does something unusual – he says he was wrong appeared first on The New Neo.

Horowitz was the political changer extraordinaire, going not just from left to right but from leftist mover and shaker to becoming a huge force on the right. In both of those roles, but especially the latter – to which he devoted the last forty or so years of his life, churning out article and article and book after book, giving speech after speech and generating tactics and strategy – he was eloquent, insightful, and feisty. His work meant and means a great deal to me.

And boy, was he ever ahead of his time on so many issues. This article about him, which came out ten years ago, offers a summary of his political life:

[Horowitz underwent] a ten-year, slow-motion transformation from theorist of the Left to its worst enemy …

Indeed.

Horowitz knew politics from “both sides now,” and he devoted much of his time to understanding his own early role, his transformation, and the failure of many of his friends and colleagues to go the same route. Early on in that transformation he had experienced a dramatic and extremely serious disillusionment with the Black Panthers, who had committed the murder of a woman he had sent to work for them, and that was one catalyst:

His New Left outlook was unable to explain the events that had overtaken him; his lifelong friends and associates on the Left were now a threat to his safety, since they would instinctively defend the Panther vanguard; and no one among them really cared about the murder of an innocent woman, because the murderers were their political friends.

That’s the sort of thing that can lead to political change – even political reversal – in a thinking person who’s honest with himself.

Forced to look at his own commitments in a way he had never allowed himself to do before, Horowitz realized that it was the enemies of the Left who had been correct in their assessment of the Panthers, just as they had been correct in their assessment of the Soviet Union, while the Left had been disastrously wrong.

Also:

As the Indochinese tragedy unfolded, Horowitz was struck again by how the Left refused to hold itself accountable for the result it had fought so hard for — in this case, a Communist victory. It evidently could not have cared less about the new suffering of the people in whose name it had once purported to speak. He became increasingly convinced, as Peter Collier had tried to persuade him, that “the element of malice played a larger role in the motives of the left than I had been willing to accept.” If the Left really wanted a better world, why was it so indifferent to the terrible consequences of its own ideas and practices?

In November 1984, Horowitz turned another corner. He cast his first Republican ballot, for Ronald Reagan.

Horowitz’s memoir Radical Son was a book I read early on in my change experience. I was never a leftist nor were my parents (just regular Democrats of the mid-century), but a section of my family was from the same Communist milieu in which Horowitz had been raised, and so I was quite familiar with the genre. Some of them never left.

And see how ahead of his time he was when you contemplate these books he wrote and the years in which they were published:

Horowitz’s next book, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, published in 1999, quickly became the most controversial work the author had written. It addressed the new cultural dimensions of the radical cause, specifically the determination to make race function the way class had in the traditional Marxist paradigm. …

In The Art of Political War (2002) Horowitz observes that progressives have inverted Clausewitz’s famous dictum and treat politics as “war continued by other means.” By contrast, conservatives approach politics as a debate over policy. …

… [I]n 2002, he launched a “Campaign for Fairness and Inclusion in Higher Education” to foster a pluralism of ideas and viewpoints, and in the spring of 2003 he drafted an “Academic Bill of Rights” based on the classic 1915 statement on academic freedom by the American Association of University Professors. Over the next seven years Horowitz attempted to persuade universities to adopt a code to ensure that students would have access to views on more than one side of controversial issues and that faculty would conduct themselves professionally in the classroom, and refrain from using their authority to indoctrinate students in partisan agendas. To advance these principles Horowitz wrote four books analyzing the situation he encountered on the several hundred campuses he visited during the seven years of his campaign: The Professors (2006), Indoctrination U. (2008), One-Party Classroom (2009; co-authored with Jacob Laksin), and Reforming Our Universities (2010). …

Unholy Alliance was the first book to trace the evolution of American radicalism from its support for the Soviet bloc to its opposition to the War on Terror and to explain how the Left and Islamist movements share a mindset that creates a bond between them. For the Left, America is the hated seat of global capitalism and individualism. For Islamists, America is the hated seat of Western values, a bulwark against the global domination of Islam, and a wellspring of spiritual iniquity. Consequently, these two destructive movements have a shared conception of, and contempt for, the “Great Satan” — America — which they identify as the primary source of evil in the world. They find common ground in their desire to annihilate or “fundamentally transform” it. …

… [A]nother book, this time co-authored with Jacob Laksin: The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future (2012). The new book documented and analyzed what no other work of scholarship had even noticed: that the Left had successfully built the richest and most powerful political machine in American history. The authors’ findings upended the conventional wisdom that the Republican party represents the rich and powerful, while the Democrats are “the party of the people.” The New Leviathan reveals how a powerful network moves radical ideas like Obamacare from the margins of the political mainstream and makes them the priority agendas of the Democratic party.

I’ll stop there, although Horowitz certainly didn’t – until now. RIP.

NOTE: Here is a post I wrote about Horowitz very early in my blogging career. I’ll add that I had an early correspondence with him at that time, and he was kind enough to reply and send me his latest book. I may write one more post about Horowitz, although not today.

The post David Horowitz is dead at 86: RIP appeared first on The New Neo.

Those are rhetorical questions, of course. Efforts to recall Newsom failed. He might even have gotten more votes than Harris had he run for president this year.

Here’s what made me think of Newsom:

March 2023: Gavin Newsom promises to build 1,200 tiny homes by Fall

Fall: Newsom's Senior Advisor on Homelessness offers a word salad explanation for the nonexistent tiny homes

August 2024: $750 MILLION gone & not a single tiny home constructed pic.twitter.com/rI6wwNFnKC

— BAY AREA STATE OF MIND (@YayAreaNews) November 20, 2024

You get a lot of bang for your tax buck in California. Apparently those houses are so very tiny that they are microscopic.

As for why people keep voting for Democrats in a place like California, this piece – by someone in the greater Philadelphia area, rather than California – comes to mind. It begins like this:

I am a woman living alone near Philadelphia with a cat, so I guess you could call me a “childless cat lady.” I never wanted children, so I never had any. Since I have dedicated my life to helping other people, for many years I subscribed to all of the social justice causes. That began to change when the neighborhood I live in became a hotbed of crime and leftist intolerance.

The writer goes on to describe the violence and chaos that has descended on her neighborhood in recent years, then explains her state of mind these days:

A few months ago, there was a meme on Facebook that showed a white woman saying, “I don’t feel safe in my neighborhood,” and a man answered her, “You literally voted for this.” I now understand that my situation resembles this cartoon.

I have voted Democrat all my life. I supported soft-on-crime candidates because I didn’t want to see people go to prison and lose their chance at a better life. But now I see the ruin that we have to live with as a result of these policies. The white liberals in the suburbs do not live with the consequences of their votes. I do. …

Like most people, I just want to be safe. I want to live in a place where I can leave my apartment without fear that the man who saw me watch him attack a woman will come back and attack me. I want to live in a place where I’m not risking verbal violence for engaging in private phone conversations while taking a walk.I want there to be police who are here to protect me and other innocent citizens who just want to do our jobs, buy affordable food, and go to the YMCA in peace.

Is that too much to ask? Democrats seem to think it is. Many of my liberal friends expressed horror that “Americans value their pocketbooks more than my human rights.” Apparently wanting to pay the rent and afford food and medications is something we should be ashamed of.

My entire life, I saw myself on the left. But now I understand that the left has left me. I am a childless cat lady for law and order. I want a government that will protect me and my cat, that cares about the price of food and doesn’t say people should be satisfied with a lot of new minimum wage jobs that will not allow them to support their families. I am tired of being told my safety doesn’t matter and that I’m racist for pointing out that there is crime on the streets of my neighborhood.

That is how a mind changes.

I’m not 100% sure that this lady is ready to vote for Republicans across the board, but I suspect that she is. If so, she’s not alone – in most blue cities, the GOP gained a substantial percentage of votes compared to 2020. But when will it be enough to really change things in a place like Philadelphia? Or in California?

Meanwhile, Newsom declares he’s going to “Trump-proof” the state:

Newsom’s office told The Associated Press that the governor and lawmakers are ready to “Trump-proof” California’s state laws. His announcement Thursday called on the Legislature to give the attorney general’s office more funding to fight federal challenges when they meet in December.

Newsom and other governors seem to think – or continue to want their voters to think – that Trump threatens “reproductive rights.” And yet Trump has said very clearly that he thinks that abortion should be left to the states. In California, Democrats control everything and there is zero chance that the state won’t have liberal abortion laws. As for birth control and/or IVF, the GOP isn’t against them. But Democrats think it’s a winning strategy to say they are, and to cast themselves as the brave liberty-lovers who will defend those practices against all big bad Republican threats.

And then there’s the issue of illegal aliens and their removal. Another topic for another post.

NOTE: This post makes me think I should start a new category, “Election 2028.” But I’ll desist for a while.

The post Why would anyone continue to want to elect Democrats in California? appeared first on The New Neo.

Prior to the 2008 election I pretty much knew that Obama would win. It was hard to accept, and I also knew he would be very destructive. His pretense of being moderate and of being a racial uniter had already been revealed by his campaign as phony. In 2012 I was even more worried because now I knew how dangerous his administration had been in setting us on a leftist path, including the enabling of Iranian power and a very subtle way of undermining race relations while feigning being a lofty healer.

In 2016 I disliked both candidates, and although I knew I detested Hillary Clinton and worried about what I saw as a possible continuation of Obama’s terrible policies and approaches if she were to be elected, I also worried that Trump was a loose cannon who would be in way over his head and would cause chaos. It took me a few months after Trump’s inauguration to realize that wasn’t the case, and to relax. But then the 2020 election – after COVID and riots had reduced Trump’s chances of winning, and with the always-mediocre yet now cognitively-challenged Biden as a possible winner – represented a nail-biter. And the 2020 experience of going to bed thinking Trump had won and waking up seeing that he hadn’t was deeply disturbing.

And then of course there was the 2022 red wave that turned into a tiny trickle.

But none of those elections can compare to what I feel now. I perceive Kamala Harris as representing the worst of all those worlds: the duplicity and dislikability of Hillary, the leftist policies of Obama on steroids, the cluelessness and uniformly poor decisions of Biden as well as her own seeming cognitive (or purposefully vague?) way of not making sense when she speaks. Couple that with the further leftward movement of the Democrats, and knowing how radical their legislative agenda is, plus a lack of faith in voting security and the strong sense that they wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever they they can to win and then to consolidate power that will last indefinitely, has got me in a tizzy. I alternatively reassure myself that Kamala won’t win, and then fear that she will. Back and forth and back and forth.

So, why would so many people vote for Kamala – including almost everyone I know? Don’t they see and hear the vacuous meaningless statements, the relentless lies, the strange affect? Don’t they know her extreme leftist history? I actually think that the majority of Democrats I know have not watched her interviews and do not see and hear – or at any rate, that what they do see and hear is processed differently from the way a person on the right sees it. They either pay little attention and vote in a reflexive way for the Democrat – and a woman! and a black woman! and Republicans will take away your birth control! – or they have only seen Harris debate with Trump and her speech at the DNC, and in both of those appearances she probably seemed fine to them. And, even more importantly and decisively, they truly believe that Trump is all the horrible things the left says about him and their fear of him is real.

And no, they are not dumb. The ones I know are for the most part very smart indeed in most areas of their lives. But they continue to swallow propaganda without even realizing that’s what it is.

Now, you might say, as commenter “Chris B” does here:

The thing is, it is so easy to learn the truth nowadays if one really wants to. Even with biased search engines, anyone can google “did Trump really say…” and find out that what they are being told is a lie. I believe that in reality they don’t want to know the truth. The intense hatred they have for Trump they find intoxicating. The last thing they want is to to lose the high they get from expressing their righteous hatred with like minded friends.

I spend many hours a day trying to “learn the truth” as best I can, and I really want to, as well. And yet I would never call it “easy” to do so, much less “so easy.” For example, the search engines are more than somewhat biased; they are constructed so that a person ordinarily has to scroll through reams and reams of suggestions that seem to validate all the bad things said about Trump and all the good things said about Harris before finding anything that differs.

So a person has to be committed to finding differing opinions and reading them, and to take some time in the process, while meanwhile all the anti-Trump propaganda is constantly reinforced by the search. When someone on the right does a search like that, the person knows it will be a quite a hunt, and he or she is aware of the need to be patient and to persevere. Plus, the person on the right is at least somewhat impervious to the propaganda; a mind is a difficult thing to change.

But there is no particular reason for the Democrat to be so patient, and that person probably is not already aware of the bias in the search results. That person will almost certainly see result after result that doesn’t challenge the propaganda but instead extends it and solidifies it. Why would that person keep going and going in the face of all that? And then, even if that person does keep going and finally finds a pro-Trump article, it’s from Fox or some other source on the right that the person has been told for decades is biased towards the right. Yes, every now and then a fact-check site defends Trump, but that’s often difficult to find as well unless one is willing to dig deep.

What’s more, why would a person start such a quest in the first place? To do so, the person would have to have a reason for challenging his or her own very solid and long-held belief system. Such a motive is rare on the left, but it’s actually rare on either side of the political spectrum. Political change is something I’ve written about at length, and most people will not ever be motivated to seek it.

And after all, as Chris B notes, not only does hatred have its own satisfactions, but righteous hatred can be a bonding experience: “the last thing they want is to lose the high they get from expressing their righteous hatred with like minded friends.” Indeed. I’m aware, for example, that my own presence in a group somewhat inhibits the people from a nice satisfying anti-right rant, and therefore including me in a group puts a damper on the fun even if I don’t say anything in opposition.

Why would Democrats be curious to learn whether the bad things they think about Trump are false? There aren’t many people in the world on any side of any issue who are eager to discredit their own belief system. All of most Democrats’ long-trusted media sources, and often all their friends, and all the professors and lawyers and smart people and oh-so-erudite NeverTrumpers agree: Republicans bad, and Trump just about the worst of all. To search for alternative points of view would require something that has engendered doubt about that proposition, and although that sometimes happens it’s easy enough to shake it off if it’s just an occasional flicker of hesitation.

For example, the very idea that Trump wasn’t referring to Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville as “fine people” would have to enter a person’s mind in order for the person to be motivated enough to look it up and check it out. And why would most Democrats ever do that? Why would it even occur to them? They’re not hearing it on the news they watch or read, and for those who live in blue cities their friends aren’t saying it either. The thought that it’s not true is in the nature of an unknown unknown – nearly unthinkable. And to at some point accept that it’s not true would require not only initially entertaining the thought that it isn’t true, but a much bigger shock: the knowledge that one’s political worldview, erected over a lifetime, might be a house of cards.

Don’t underestimate how threatening and difficult it is to even entertain that notion, much less believe it. It’s a long process and a shattering one, as I can report from personal experience.

And what’s the result? Why, you get to be a pariah to a lot of people you trusted and loved. Not all of them, of course; some will stand by you, and those are pearls of great price. But you are risking a lot. And it’s a facile response to say to that person, “Oh, if they desert you or grow cooler to you they weren’t ever your real friends.” Because you have a history that says they were friends, and especially if you’re older it is very difficult to replace those friends. In fact, you can’t, and you can’t replace family. Political change can even break marriage bonds and cause tragic outcomes for children.

So I have no problem whatsoever imagining why most people don’t pursue a course of challenging their own deeply-held belief system on politics. I never set out to do it myself, either – or not exactly. Although I actually always have been one to challenge a belief or a fact I think is true, changing my politics as a whole was something I never saw coming over twenty years ago when the whole thing started for me. I just followed this link and that, with a certain amount of naivete about the social consequences for me – in fact, with complete and utter naivete.

And yet once you cross that Rubicon there’s usually no turning back. I’ve gained a great deal from following where the quest led, but I’ve lost things too, and I don’t make light of why so many people would be deeply reluctant to even entertain a thought that might take them to that sort of upheaval.

[ADDENDUM: Please also see this relevant post that I wrote not long after the 2020 election].

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But I’d been feeling dread about the 2024 election already, even when the polls were good. I have distrust for polls – although not as much distrust as some people have, because I think they sometimes measure something that’s valid, especially when they change. But how it translates to an election is anyone’s guess. The 2022 Red Wave is a good example; the GOP did much less well than predicted. And 2016 was a case where the GOP candidate did better than expected.

This year I remain astonished that Joe Biden has more than 20% of the vote. It should be a complete blowout for Trump, but I have no gut feeling that he’ll even win. There are so many ways this can go wrong. There’s the constant lawfare, which new polls indicate might be the reason Biden is doing somewhat better than before (see this). There’s the wild card of fraud and rigging; the only question being whether they will be able to do it effectively, not whether they would do it if they could. There’s the backlash to the repeal of Roe. And of course it’s a long way to November, and a lot can happen in the meantime.

In a very gloomy post, John Hinderaker also mentions that the polls for Congressional candidates aren’t going too well for the GOP either. I haven’t even begun to follow that, and I haven’t checked it out myself, but I don’t like hearing it.

But it’s not just the polls. As I said, I realize polls can mislead and it’s also quite early. What’s far more important to me is that so many people are willing to support another four years of Biden or of Harris. Is it just because they really really hate Trump? I don’t think it’s that simple. Hinderaker seems to think another GOP candidate – perhaps any other GOP candidate – would be blowing Biden away in the polls. I disagree. A great many people would never vote for Trump, it’s true. But a great many of those people wouldn’t vote for any Republican. And there are a significant number of Trump voters who wouldn’t be voting for any other person but Trump. So Trump repels and he attracts.

And yes, the left would try to destroy any other GOP presidential candidate.

I think the thing that really disturbs me is that so many people aren’t disturbed by developments that, even a couple of decades ago, would have outraged a lot more people. The current widespread use of lawfare as a political weapon is a big one. Too many people are very happy with an “ends justifies the means” approach, and the very successful Gramscian march of the left through the institutions is responsible for that and so many other obviously reprehensible things.

I spend a lot of time on this blog analyzing why people think and feel the way they do, especially in the political realm. Sometimes I’m criticized for that, with the argument from the critics that it’s not worth bothering because it doesn’t do much if any good. I’m probably more sympathetic to that argument than one might think. Nevertheless my curiosity about people drives me to wonder and to speculate. Nearly everyone I know is politically on the other side from me, and if there’s one thing that’s been apparent for years it’s that, for the most part, nothing could change their point of view short of something catastrophic – and perhaps not even that. I find this stunning but true, and it seems to be a basic fact of human nature.

And then there are articles such as this one from the NY Post, which isn’t about an American but is relevant to the question of political change (the topic that propelled me to become a blogger in the first place). The article is about an Israeli peace activist who has changed her mind. She is hardly alone in that among Israelis, but she probably has the most dramatic reason for her change:

An Israeli peace activist who was kidnapped and held hostage for 53 days in Gaza said the horrifying experience shattered her longstanding belief that there could be peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

“I don’t believe in peace, I don’t, sorry. I changed my mind,” Ada Sagi, who was captured by Hamas on Oct. 7, at the start of the Israel-Hamas war, told the BBC.

Talk about getting “mugged by reality”!

She’s sorry, and I’m sorry too – sorry that reality dictates that peace there is a pipe dream, unless it’s ultimately accomplished by a larger war. The dream is so much more pleasant. But she had to give it up:

“For many years, I believed in peace. It’s the reason why I started to teach Arabic at school. Maybe it will bring peace between the Arab people in Israel and the Jewish people,” she recalled thinking. “But from year to year, I understand Hamas don’t want it.” …

Sagi recalled during the harrowing 53-day period she was held hostage, students were paid to watch over her and the other hostages inside an apartment in the southern city of Khan Younis.

“I heard them say… 70 shekels ($18.83) for a day,” she said.

It’s a short article and not very illuminating; you have to fill in the blanks yourself. But although it shouldn’t take being kidnapped and savagely treated to effect a political change like that, perhaps for most people it takes something just that dramatic or close to it. The terrorists’ worst tactical move on October 7 may have been that many (and probably most) of the people whom the terrorists tortured, raped, and murdered were on the Israeli left and were peace activists, like this woman. But the events of October 7 and beyond have convinced most of that population that a 2-state negotiated solution must be abandoned.

That’s political change resulting from catastrophe. It can happen. But I hope that’s not what it will take in this country.

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The main thrust of Pollock’s essay is to explain that today’s radical demonstrators have been trained according to the Alinskyite rules of their elders in the Movement – the Movement being leftism in general. The basic rule is that truth doesn’t matter – “truth” is a shape-shifter that requires no consistent principles other than dedication to the left and the cause. That’s why the contradiction between, for example, upholding the rights of gay people and supporting those who would throw them off roofs can be safely ignored. It simply doesn’t matter to the left.

This isn’t really news (see this post of mine from 2009), but it’s always good to remind people. That 2009 post contains a quote from Hilton Kramer (written in 1984) that I reproduce here. It speaks of “Stalinism” but it is true of radical leftism in general, including its current manifestations:

It is in the nature of Stalinism for its adherents to make a certain kind of lying—and not only to others, but first of all to themselves—a fundamental part of their lives. It is always a mistake to assume that Stalinists do not know the truth about the political reality they espouse. If they don’t know the truth (or all of it) one day, they know it the next, and it makes absolutely no difference to them politically. For their loyalty is to something other than the truth. And no historical enormity is so great, no personal humiliation or betrayal so extreme, no crime so heinous that it cannot be assimilated into the ‘ideals’ that govern the true Stalinist mind which is impervious alike to documentary evidence and moral discrimination.

No crime so heinous that can’t be assimilated into their “ideals.” That’s a perfect description of what’s happening with the pro-Hamas crowd – although these days I might take issue with the idea that they all know the actual truth about what Hamas is and what Hamas does. I think many really are “useful idiots” – or ignorant youths who have been carefully taught by many leftist mentors who feed them lies. By the time they get to the point of demonstrating for Hamas, the lies are so entrenched that “documentary evidence” to the contrary is merely brushed away as lies.

That’s why I often use the term “Orwellian reversal” to discuss the pro-Palestinian propaganda. It’s a characteristic of the left in general, and preys on the uncurious young who swallow it whole. And why are these young people so eager to believe? I think that for many it takes the place of religion or of love of family, and it gives them a feeling of structure, meaning, and community that they haven’t gotten until now.

Which leads me to offer another quote I’ve posted on this blog many times before. It’s from Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

The pro-Hamas demonstrators are circle dancing. Their teachers have taught them lies and they believe those lies, but even evidence of truth will not sway them from the compelling and magic and satisfying dance.

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Cognitive dissonance is painful. It occurs when a belief is challenged by facts or events that are difficult to deny. People dealing with cognitive dissonance of that type have a number of choices. The first is denial – these new facts or events didn’t really happen, or didn’t happen that way. The second is rationalization and excuse-making – the new facts or events don’t really challenge the belief system and can be looked at in some way that makes the dissonance go away. And the third is changing the original set of beliefs and looking at things in a different way, incorporating the new facts or events into a changed point of view.

That last is the hardest; people usually choose one or even both of the first two.

If you’re puzzled by how many people on the left who aren’t Palestinians or Arabs can defend what Hamas did on October 7, think about cognitive dissonance. A lot of these people, many of whom are college students, are deeply invested in a belief system that calls israelis colonizers and oppressors, and sees Palestinians as the suffering oppressed. These opinions make the leftist students feel good about themselves. They are on the side of the underdog, on the side of goodness and compassion.

So when the news of the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 came out, denial was a common line of defense. It simply didn’t happen, said some. The videos Hamas took to document the events were fakes. Some went so far as to say that Israelis actually killed and tortured their own people and blamed it on Hamas. This requires a serious divorce from reality, but reality isn’t all that real to young people who live their lives mostly on computers anyway, and who have been stuffed full of pro-Palestinian attitudes and slogans by so many of their teachers.

Approach number two – the rationalization and excuse-making – are mechanisms that come with the leftist territory. Because the Palestinians are defined as oppressed “brown” people, their violence is labeled “resistance” and excused as the only “tool” available to them when fighting the technologically superior “white” Israelis. This is an all-purpose excuse and serves well to reduce the anxious feeling cognitive dissonance causes. Pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas demonstrations put those who see it this way in the company of many many other people who also see it this way, creating the feeling of solidarity, unity, and strength in numbers.

And then we have college administrators who ought to know better, offering mealy-mouthed reactions such as these:

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