Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

So, over the last 24 hours, my feed and my online conversations have all been about Gina Carano.

I can’t begin to tell you how completely bizarre this is for the woman who never watches TV or movies. This is not a brag, by the way. It’s a combination of being ADD and not USED to consuming my stories that way, since we only got a TV when I was eight, and even then… well, Portugal didn’t have many hours of TV a day. I go through phases of watching series—usually British mystery, though it’s starting to get hard not to find them bizarrely and stupidly “woke infused”—but usually only when I’m sick or very depressed.

Normally I wouldn’t even have noticed this mess, except that my friends had all been into the new SW series, and were all very upset.

MOSTLY what they were very upset about was that the actress got “cancelled” for something that wasn’t even vaguely anti-semitic under any sane interpretation.

My first reaction was “Oh. Actress said something, and… they cancelled her.” Which is not only “day ending in y” right now, but also has been for a long time. Part of the reason I came out of the political closet is because I’d gotten tired of watching every word I said, and every expression I made in public. Because even a slight slip would have caused my career to be completely dead. In the nineties. As it was, I wasn’t perfect, they weren’t sure of me, which is why although they routinely f*ck every writer over, for me they brought out the Kama Sutra.

So, I was going “Yeah, only innocents who don’t realize what life is like in a completely taken-over industry would think this is surprising. All power to the lady, but I’m sure she knew what would hit her for stepping out of line.”

And then I came across a screen capture of what she said. And someone asking “how is this anti-semitic.”

Which is when I panicked.

Let me explain, okay?

I grew up in Europe, which in American terms is at the very least “soft left” which is what they consider “the right.” But on top of that, I was a “young lady who made good.” I wasn’t precisely working class, since dad has a degree, but we lived with dad’s dad who was a carpenter (and I was his apprentice until school interfered.) I wasn’t the first one in my family to go to college (though both dad and brother qualified for scholarships on that head… on their mother’s side and because dad’s degree was sort of in limbo, at the time. It’s a long story.) However, I came from a working class environment, from a one room school about 50 years behind the times. And I made it to college, which at that time and in that place was 100% meritocratic and mostly by examination.

What that required was adapting to a completely different culture. (You could say by the time I came to the US I had practice acculturating.) And the left in both high school and college, in Portugal, in the seventies, was at least as crazy as here. I’d say more Stalinist than the current American Maoists, but—waggles hand—I mean for six months the Maoists were the government (it’s survivable. Not for everyone, but survivable.) Since I was in a humanities degree, the political spin was particularly pronounced, though SIL’s psychiatry books in medschool were …. completely loony left. (Yes, I read them. Hey. They came into the house. I read them even in foreign languages. Because that was the deal. It came into the house, I read it. I never understood why it took the rest of the family so long to understand that.)

From experiences in Middle School I knew that I had to hide my politics, or I’d never make it to college. And in college I knew I had to hide my politics and fake their idiocy, or be flunked. (Look, I got so good I could make fun of their ideas while they thought I was supporting them. Unfortunately by the time I broke into writing, I was tired of that game. Something to do with having kids, maybe?)

What I want to say is that I lived for the first 4 decades of my life (at least) largely immersed in what you’d call “elite intellectual left establishment) on two continents. (Most of the people in my family, my generation, are still part of it.)

So, I have the same understanding, at gut level, of how leftists think/react as most people do of those people they’re most used to.

And this is why what Gina Carano said, and the reaction scared me sh*tless. What she said was this:

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors… even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views,” she wrote. [Source]

The only way, remotely, not matter how much you stretch it, that what she said can be considered “anti-semitic” is this:

The left believes the Jews were innocent. (This is correct, btw.) That what happened to them was shameful and terrible, and a dishonor on those who attacked them.

BUT they also believe it’s an insult to compare them to the people the left hates FOR THEIR POLITICAL VIEWS.

Because they think the people they hate for their political views—us—are really that bad, and really deserve everything the left intends to do to them. Which is more or less—in rough outlines—what the Nazis did to the Jews.

I mean, they have already talked of reeducating us, taking our children away, and they do in fact do think of us as not fully human.

Mind you, they have absolutely no idea who we are and what we believe, but they know we don’t agree with them, and since their hearts are pure, and utopia is their objective, we must be the very devil, and terrible on principle.

They’ve been exquisitely propagandized to the point they think the only American president with Jewish grandchildren was “anti-semitic.” They think that black people who don’t want to careen into ruinous and deadly socialism are “white supremacists” (the poor things swallowed Gramsci without chewing); they think other races aren’t hetero-normative; they think America is the most racissss, sexissss, homophobic nation on Earth…. and they will not listen to corrections of their appalling and atrocious ignorance of true history or foreign anthropology or…. really anything. Because anything opposing the indoctrination has been trained into them as an attack on their psyche.

So, they’re ignorant. They live in a political/social universe where if you oppose the completely insane leftist version of the world, you must be evil and “a nazi” which is to say the devil. They are so completely saturated in utter inanity that they call Israel “fascist.”

BUT one thing they know, and they know it at gut level: everyone to the right of Lenin—or perhaps Mao—are untermensch who will have to be utterly destroyed, so that the final promised utopia that they were promised since elementary school will come to be.

So, in their eyes comparing innocent Jews to their political opponents is experienced as an insult to the Jews.

Because in leftist eyes, we are evil, cockroaches and sub-humans whom they have to eradicate from society.

And they will not look in the mirror, or admit that what they’re engaging in is exactly what the nazis did, only with political beliefs instead of race. And it’s complicated. These idiots have simply decided that the real master race are black people. And that all evil comes from white males. But to be fair, it shades to people like me who have “internalized oppression” and are therefore “male.”

The Nazis philosophy wasn’t all that different. Sure. there was a racial component, but opposing them was a sign you’d been corrupted by “foreign” or “Jewish” ideas. And after that, the picture blends with our woke left.

In fact, our left is in the grip of the normal totalitarian illusion, that they’re somehow more perceptive than every other human, ever; that they’re pure and above it all and that if they only kill the sinful elements of society—you and me, my brothers and sisters—they will be like onto the angels, living eternally with no strife and no sin.

In fact, they’re made of the same human clay as the rest of us, only in the grip of a bizarre totalitarian cult.

And that means—

Well, these moments in history always end the same way. In this case, given the balance of numbers and weapon-owning, I’d say the backlash will come sooner, and be more terrible than their attempt at making us vanish will be.

Which doesn’t mean any of us, individually is safe.

It does mean we win, they lose. But the butcher’s bill, alas, will turn the oceans incarnadine.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for February 12, 2021