The Illusion Of Revolution

We went from MLK to chickenshit 19 year old "activists" requesting gluten free bagels and fighting for a cause they can't explain.

One of the topics I discussed with Matt Taibbi during my interview with him this weekend was the palpable loss of soul that has taken place on the Democratic side of the political aisle. And, as Matt Damon reminded us in Good Will Hunting whilst quoting Henry Ward Beecher:

“Liberty is the soul's right to breathe, and when it cannot take a long breath laws are girded too tight.”

In my interview with Matt Taibbi, I told him that I used to read him when he wrote for Rolling Stone decades ago and admitted that I often wondered if the 20 year old version of me then would loathe the 40 year old version of me I’ve become.

I brought this question up because I find it important to keep myself in check. Is the world really changing and becoming so radical that it’s on the verge of breaking, or have I just grown older and become as allergic to “normal” progressive causes as the people I routinely dismissed as racist, homophobic, conspiratorial right-wing shitheads when I was in a touring band with leopard print hair in my early 20s?

My discussion with Matt also touched on the topic of the arts. He pointed out that nowadays there really isn’t any great new music, art, poetry, or film that feels like it moves the needle in the way that classics of the last four or five decades used to.

During the course of our discussion, I remarked to Matt that I thought George Carlin was probably the last great left-wing comedian, even though he may have described himself as an independent.

And then, as if the universe heard me wondering aloud and wanted to offer up an answer, I woke up yesterday morning, and my entire Twitter feed was clips from the roast of Tom Brady.

For those unfamiliar with the format, roasts, as made famous by Comedy Central over the last decade or two, are widely accepted “safe spaces”... for comedians. This means it’s widely accepted that people are allowed to say whatever the fuck they want and that no joke crosses the line. The roasts of the last two decades have been extraordinarily successful because of this. When comedians are unleashed to take digs at one another and there is nothing off-limits, genuine comedy and laughs happen.

The roast of Tom Brady was so popular on the internet yesterday morning because the content—including jokes about Tom Brady’s wife leaving him and the now-dead former Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez—truly was as ‘on the edge’ as it could get.

Yet, despite the fire breathing comedians that pierced the membrane of the PC bubble repeatedly, there was nary a Karen to be found, nary a censorship report being sent to a censor, and nary a protester to be seen. For an hour or so, the soul of the nation was allowed to breathe, and people were too busy cracking the fuck up to be offended or care, even when the crudest and meanest things were said.

It’s moments like these, Ricky Gervais hosting an award show or a Dave Chappelle “controversial” Netflix special that now serve as the reminders of what made the nation great to begin with: free speech.

During my conversation with Matt Taibbi, we examined how free speech used to be the hill that Democrats would die on. As Matt told me, it was the one issue that was non-negotiable. Matt and I both believe vehemently in free speech and I still consider myself to be liberal in the classic sense. As a self-described libertarian, the prefix lib- puts me almost all the way there already. They both come from the idea of liberty, meaning “the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views.”

As Matt and I continued with our Socratic analysis, desperate to figure out whose brains have been broken, us or everybody in the Democratic Party, we arrived at one key point: neither one of us could believe that censorship had become a key issue for Democrats.

And not a key issue to fight against…a key issue to fight for.

Yes, that’s right. The party that once dominated Woodstock and advocated for peace, civil rights, race relations, freedom of expression and freedom of...well, anything you wanted to do...has now become the party segregating college campuses, censoring speech and meticulously micromanaging what they perceive to be misinformation about vaccines being hurriedly forced onto the public by giant pharmaceutical companies. What happened?

As Matt and I discussed, the Democrats have somehow become the party of the know-it-all snobs, societal elites and the wealthy, whereas Republicans now seem to be the party of the working man. This wasn’t always the case, but as we said on the podcast, the entire party appears to have had some type of bizarre ideological aneurysm simply as a result of Donald Trump existing, and the magnetic poles of both parties have apparently flipped.

For example, while Gavin Newsom was dining out maskless at a Michelin star restaurant called French Laundry in the middle of Covid, the rest of us peons were at home, triple masked, surviving off of French dressing and doing laundry.

Decades ago, the Republicans used to be the fat cats. You know — war mongers, oil companies, the whole litany. Now the Democrats are the Martha’s Vineyard-living, limousine-riding, gated community-living insider traders.

Democrats have become the party George Carlin is railing against instead of for. They’re the big club that you’re not in.

“They own all the big media companies,” he exclaims. “They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking.”

Another glaring example of how the left has inadvertently become what they once hated are the ongoing protests on collage campuses. Unlike days of yonder, students now cloak themselves in masks to avoid being “doxxed” — oddly hilarious for a group so obsessed with embracing their own particular identities.

And while many of the students choosing to partake in these protests are doing nothing but fairly exercising their right to free speech, which I support, there have been innumerable examples of how these “activists” are devoid of understanding what they are fighting for to begin with.

Instead, it’s an exercise in entitlement and groupthink. What kind of a “revolutionary” protester demands that gluten-free bread be delivered to them?

Real revolutionaries fight the power and don’t give a fuck about what they eat!

And if there’s nothing left to eat — fuck it! They go on a hunger strike god damn it, and they do it happily because it’ll draw more attention to the cause they are genuinely standing for! Real revolutionaries put the cause far ahead of themselves — something the coddled narcissism of today’s left wing “activist” would never let them do. Here’s what actually having the balls to stand by your convictions looks like:

Forgive me for not being intimately familiar with the details, but I’d bet my life savings that Thích Quảng Đức (Vietnamese: man on fire in photo) never requested a gluten free bagel before self-immolating.

And look — it’s not especially surprising when you think about it. Over long periods of time, tendencies change, and preferences whipsaw back-and-forth. That’s human nature. At some point, the Democrats will once again be the party supporting actual free speech, and Republicans will be the ones that want to curb “misinformation”. It’s only a matter of time before preferences once again change.

During the days of Woodstock and the feminist movement, people on the left were the ones pushing the edge of what outlandish was to put forth big ideas like fighting inequality and discrimination. The collateral damage of them “fighting the cause”, gifted us with music like Lennon and Dylan, the poetry of Ginsburg and the comedy of Richard Pryor. Riding the edge of what is socially acceptable while making coherent, ideological arguments and observations in favor of liberty and freedom has been a surefire recipe for creating some of the most beautiful art that the world has ever seen.

As was demonstrated by the roast of Tom Brady the other night, continuing to push that envelope still breathes moments of beauty and unity into our country.

But going back to my line of questioning with Matt — sadly, I do think it is the world that has changed, and not us. For instance, I made the point to Matt that “activists” on the left nowadays have devolved into engaging in petulant “protests” like throwing soup on priceless works of art, instead of coherent and impactful action.

It’s only after thinking about why Sunday night's roast of Tom Brady was so successful that it became crystal clear to me: the same “liberals” who used to stand for liberty and free speech and, as a result, make beautiful art — now stand for nothing coherent and resort to temper tantrums where they destroy the very same art their party's causes once birthed.

And even though it feels like there’s nothing to look forward to, I will say this: there will be no crueler or more deserved irony than the day that today’s self-absorbed, traffic-blocking, soup-throwing activists realize they’re not revolutionaries — but rather the same authoritarian, censorship-wielding, group-thinking, malleable automatons they once thought they were fighting against.

And that sounds like the makings of a roast I’d love to attend.

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