There is no left, leftism, or radical left. The Zapatistas, Occupy Wall Street, and WTO protestors are all dead movements. The socialism scare is the orchestrated fear-mongering of a genius campaign to shift the world to the right. Wanna-be dictators might spew rhetoric about Deep State cabals, but the truly nefarious nature of our reality leaning into the far-right hate politics of the 21st century is happening right before our faces. The corporate, big money-backed television, radio, and social media personalities who extol a vitriolic diet of inflaming and bating angry, disenfranchised people afraid of the accelerated changes that have arrived with new communication media are happening right in front of our faces.

I am the left, some guy who wants to go with the flow as I adapt to the evolving circumstances of time going forward. I’m not afraid of young people, people of color, those who are exploring gender fluidity, or a land and culture that is transitioning into tomorrow. I am afraid of conformity, gross stupidity, those who don’t read, anger aimed at nebulous, non-existent boogymen who are creations of political jingoists, and those who feel an entitlement to anything at all.

The left is something America is so afraid of; there’s no chance of allowing anything other than a tiny fringe minority of leftists to even exist in this country. Not that they would be actively sought out and eliminated, but their fingerprints and traces are so easily monitored that their presence is always known and their influence mapped. Just how many people do you know who’ve read left-leaning anything? Aside from Marx and Engels, I’ll wager I could ask the next 1000 people I meet to name one left-leaning author, just one.

Tell me the title of one book from Michael Foucault, Alain Badiou, Edward Said, or Mark Fisher. How about the notorious Howard Zinn? Maybe you could tell me just a little something regarding anything they’ve written about? Didn’t Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, and maybe even Nietzsche, for that matter, go on about socialist ideology? You wouldn’t know because leftist anything is a chimera dressed in the black clothes of someone protesting anti-fascism called Antifa.

There are no less than 11 million Americans who identify with Alt-Right ideologies, and right-wing hate groups have murdered nearly 400 people in 25 years; how many Antifa are there, and how many Americans have they killed?

If you believe there’s a woke ultra-left thing happening in America, it’s because you are afraid of things you’ve been taught to fear, such as being woke (alert to injustice in society, especially racism) or Critical Race Theory (“The Frankfurt School was a group of scholars known for developing critical theory and popularizing the dialectical method of learning by interrogating society’s contradictions.” – Nicki Lisa Cole, Ph.D.) I’m referencing critical theory here as, in my view, thinkers about racism have used this method to look at racism and inequality with the idea of learning more about society and improving our lives, but for the far-right, any look and criticism that might lead to cultural change are forbidden, so being “woke” or teaching “CRT” and the idea that addressing anything that deals with the white/black divide, gay/straight chasm, gender identity, or injuries that arise from various types of violence, any conversations that might be critical of the status quo puts at risk what it means to be American.

Don’t worry, people of the United States, all the important leftists in America that you’ve never heard of because there are no living, famous, important leftists here, would all fit on one Space-X rocket and could easily be blasted into orbit. The thing is, whoever might be on that very, very short list just wants everyone to get along and let others find a solid path to a fulfilling life.

The funny thing about the system moving even a hair to the left to what, in reality, is at best the center, one must first admit to being a fully-fledged socialist as though being thus credentialed is essential to claiming to be a lefty.

Being on the left, the real left is certainly an incredibly dangerous place to see a population heading to as it would imply a move towards freedom as defined by the individual and not by a state that tells its subjects which laws will work against them in order to contain them from thinking or acting on their own behalf.

So why is there even a left and a right? Because in the effort to maintain a state of dependence predicated on mass stupidity, reducing all things to either/or, with us/against us, winner/loser, gay/straight, and left/right, we are able to draw up quick sides of isolation, marginalization, and polarization. Nuances cannot be a part of the program as that injects too many options and demands self-responsibility, and that requires an education that eclipses everything we’ve done to diminish the importance of learning. We may pay cursory lip service to “learning,” but knowledge and wisdom are not areas we are striving to reach.

Image: Black bloc. (2022, September 12). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc