I've been saying this for years, but never this well, and never to this kind of audience.
Here's his blog post explaining the concept.
Here's a rough and partial transcript:
Let me tell you my story. I call myself a 9/13 Republican. I grew up a liberal, a New York Jew -- you don't get much more liberal than that, though it was lower case L, not what's considered liberal today. Graduated from high school knowing one thing (about politics basically) that Democrats are good and Republicans are evil.
I'll tell a story. It's not a true story, but I think it clarifies what happened to me. Imagine being in a restaurant with an old friend and you're catching up, and suddenly, he blurts out: "I hate my wife." And you kind of chuckle to yourself because he says it every time you're together and you know he doesn't hate his wife -- they've been together for 35 years. He loves his daughters, and they're just like her. "Ah, no" he doesn't hate his wife. You're having some dinner and you look out the window and you spot his wife, and she's being beaten up and you grab your friend and say, "Come on, come on, let's help her!" and he says: "Naw, I'm sure she deserves it." At that moment it dawns on you, he really does hate his wife.
Well, that was what 9/11 was to me. I would hear my friends on the left say how evil and horrible and racist and imperialistic and oppressive America is, and I'd laugh to myself: "Oh, they always say that; they love America." Then on 9/11 we were beaten up and I grabbed them by the collar and jumped up and said, "C'mon, let's help her, let's help America", and they said: "No, she deserves it." At that moment I realized they really do hate America.
It began for me what is now a five year -- a five year plus -- quest of trying to understand the mind set. How could you possibly live in the finest nation in the history of the world and see only oppression? How could you live in the least imperialist power in human history and see us as the ultimate in imperialism? How could you live in the least bigoted nation in human history and, as Joe Biden said, see racism lurking in every dark shadow? And over the next five years what I came to think through, what I came to learn, what I came to find in conversations, became this talk and hopefully very, very soon will be the book: "Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals Think."
I've got to assume that just about everybody in this room agrees that the Democrats are wrong on just about every issue. I'm here to propose to you it's not "just-about" every issue, it's quite literally every issue -- and it's not just wrong, it's as wrong as wrong can be; it's 180 degrees from right; it's diametrically opposed to that which is good, right, and successful.
What I discovered is that this is not an accident, this is part of the philosophy that now dominates the whole of western Europe and the Democratic Party of today. I -- like some others -- call it Modern Liberalism. The Modern Liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Give the Modern Liberal the choice between Saddam Hussein and the United States, he will not only side with Saddam Hussein, he will slander America and Americans in order to do so. Give him the choice between the vicious mass murderer and corrupt terrorist dictator, Yassir Arafat, and the tiny, wonderful democracy of Israel, he will plagiarize maps, forge documents, engage in blood libels (as did our former President, Jimmy Carter) to side with the terrorist organizations and to attack the tiny state. It's not just foreign policy, it's domestic policy, it's every policy. Give them the choice between promoting teenage abstinence and teenage promiscuity (and believe me, I know this from my home town of Hollywood), they will use their movies, their TV shows, their songs, even the schools to promote teenage promiscuity, as if it's cool. Like the movie American Pie, in which you are a loser unless you've had sex with your best friend's mother while you're still a child. While conversely, [ inaudible ] a pro-abortion group masquerading as a pro-choice group will hold a fund raiser called "F-abstinence." And it's not just "F," it's the entire word because promoting vulgarity is part of their agenda.
So the question becomes: Why? How do they [Liberals] think they're making a better world?
Well, the first thing that comes into your mind when trying to understand (as I've so desperately tried to understand) is that if they side always with evil, then they must be evil. Though we have a problem with this, don't we. We all know too many people who fit this category who aren't evil. Many of my lifelong friends, the people I grew up with, relatives, close relatives, and -- they're not evil.
So, if they're not evil, then the next place your mind goes is -- they're just being incredibly stupid. Right? They don't mean to always side with evil, failed, and wrong. They just don't know what they're doing. But we have a problem with this as well. You can't say that Bill Maher is a stupid man, my old boss; you can't say Ward Churchill is a stupid man; you can't say all these academics are stupid people. And, frankly, if it were just stupidity, they'd be right more often. What's the expression? Even a broken clock is right twice a day; even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and again. So if they're not stupid, and they're not evil, what's their plan? How do they think they're making a better world? By siding with Saddam Hussein, by keeping his rape and torture rooms open? by seeking the destruction of the democracy of Jews? I don't know if you've seen the list going around the Internet of all the Nobel Prize winning scientists from this tiny state of Israel. How do they think they're making a better world by promoting to children behaviors that are inappropriate and cause diseases and unwanted pregnancies and ruins people's lives? How do they think they're making a better world?
What I discovered is, the Modern Liberal looks back on -- give me a number here -- 50 thousand years? a 100 thousand years? of human civilization and knows only one thing for sure. That none of the ideas that mankind has come up with -- none of the religions, none of the philosophies, none of the ideologies, none of the forms of government. None has succeeded in creating a world devoid of war, poverty, crime, and injustice. So, they're convinced that since all of these ideas of man have proved to be wrong, the real cause of war, poverty and crime and injustice must be found, can only be found, in the attempt to be right.
See, if nobody ever thought they were right, what would we disagree about? If we didn't disagree, surely we wouldn't fight; if we didn't fight, of course, we wouldn't go to war; without war there would be no poverty; without poverty, there would be no crime; without crime, there would be no injustice. It's a Utopian vision. And all that's required to usher in this utopia is the rejection of all fact, reason, evidence, logic, truth, morality, and decency. All the tools that you and I use in our attempts to be better people, to make the world more right, by trying to be right, by siding with right, by recognizing what is right, and by moving towards it.
When this first started to dawn on me, I would take this out and question my liberal friends (and believe me there were plenty of them in Hollywood). The thing about Hollywood is that it is overwhelmingly Liberal, upper case "L", not lower case "l". But there are a lot more of us then you'd suspect. But, they're afraid, and it's hard to come out because what's so Orwellian (and virtually everything about this philosophy is Orwellian) is that they are -- the Liberals -- are as ill-liberal as you can imagine. And quite literally, as much as they scream "McCarthyism!" constantly, there is, in fact, a gray list there that sees people not get hired because they don't toe the leftist line.
So what you have is people who think that the best way to eliminate rational thought, the best way to eliminate the attempt to be right, is to work always to prove that right isn't right, and to prove that wrong isn't wrong, to bring about a philosophy. You see this in John Lennon's song "Imagine." "Imagine there's no countries" -- not imagine great countries, not imagine defeat the nazis -- imagine no religions, and the key line is imagine a time when anything and everything that mankind values is de-valued to the point where there's nothing left to kill or die for. Now obviously, this is not going to happen overnight. There are still going to be religions, but they're going to do their best to denigrate them. There are still going to be countries, but they'll do what they can to get us to cede our national sovereignty to one world bodies.
But in the meantime, everything that they believe is designed -- everything they teach in our schools, everything they make into movies, the messages of the movies, the TV shows, the newspaper stories that they pick and how they spin them -- have but one criterion for truth, beauty, honesty, etc., etc. And that is: Does it tear down what is good and elevate what is evil? Does it tear down what is right and elevate what is wrong? Does it tear down the behaviors that lead to success and elevate the ones that lead to failure? So that [eventually] there's nothing left to believe in.
You may not recognize this as the paradigm and the purpose of one of the most successful Liberal motion pictures of all time -- Fahrenheit 9/11. There's nobody who believes Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was an honest attempt to accurately portray the real events of that horrific day and its aftermath. Everybody knows that Michael Moore is a leftist, and that his was a propaganda film in which the facts were cherry picked, the evidence manipulated, the narrative near lunatic; all designed for one purpose. The question that we were debating at the time was "Should we go to war against the Iraqi government and Saddam Hussein?" So he used all the tricks and manipulations and lies that he could to show that America isn't that good; America's not worth fighting for; to show that Saddam Hussein isn't that evil, not worth fighting against; for the purpose of undermining our efforts to go to war. Again, there is, quite literally, nothing in Hollywood, in the newspapers, in our schools, that does not have this as its sole criterion.
For example, there is no journalistic standard -- none, zero, zilch -- by which the misdeeds of a handful of night guards at an obscure prison for terrorists, misdeeds in which nobody was killed, nobody was seriously hurt. There is no journalist standard by which this is a front page story in the New York Times. Much less for 2 days in a row, 5 days in a row, 10 days in a row, 20 days -- 44 straight days this non-story was a front page story in the New York Times. Why?
Because while it met no journalistic standard, it met the one and only Modern Liberal standard -- it said: "Do you think America's good? We've found something that's going to make you not believe that any longer. Do you think that the Islamic fascists are bad? No, no, no, no -- this is why they do it -- no wonder they fly airplanes into our buildings." That is just one of so many other examples.
Newsweek Magazine. There was no journalistic standard by which they printed the story of Korans being flushed down the toilet. Not only was it a bogus story -- it never happened -- it's an impossible story. It cannot happen. Think about it. Can you flush a book down a toilet? Try it. Go home and try it. And if there are any liberals here, go to your neighbor's house and borrow a book. Even a child. Even a five-year-old would know that you can't flush a book down a toilet. The first day that he plays that puzzle at school [he learns] you can't fit a square peg into a round hole. So why did Newsweek run with a story that was not only bogus, that failed to meet even the most obvious logic, as I say, it's an old expression: "You can't fit a square peg into a round hole"? Because nothing matters to them. There is no standard. Because a standard would require them to say "Something is better than something else," which goes against this entire philosophy. It met the one and only criterion of truth to Newsweek which was that it attacked America and justified the Islamic fascist terrorists.
And you see the same thing is true in the art world. There is no artistic standard. There is no aesthetic criterion by which (forgive me) a jar of urine with a cross in it is "beautiful." There's no aesthetic criterion by which the curators of the museum says, "Yeah, take down the Monet and put up the urine." But it met the one and only standard of art that exists to the Modern Liberal.
And just as in Hollywood and the movies last year -- I don't want to speak to the movies that were nominated this year because I didn't see them all. But the movies from last year met no criterion of story-telling, met no criterion of cinematography. The five nominees for Best Picture all met one criterion. "Brokeback Mountain" said: "Heterosexual marriage isn't that important; go be a homosexual if you choose." "Munich" said: "There is no difference between the terrorist and the people who try to stop them from murdering again"; and if you look at the other pictures as well, with "Crash" winning, "Crash" saying that America is this evil, horrible nation where every moment of every day is filled with bigotry and racism. I'm going to repeat, probably for the third time; it's so important and it's so hard to really accept -- but there truly is no standard, no criterion for truth, beauty, justice or anything else amongst the Modern Liberal, the dominant force in today's Democratic Party.
Not all Democrats -- OK, there are awards for Democrats who have standards, it's called Republicans. And it's true, there are a good many of us who've come to become Republican and then conservatives, and even others who are still Democrats. Tammy Bruce is a lesbian, feminist, former president of [inaudible] largest chapter who recognizes -- well, a minimum standard -- "Let's stop the people who want to hack off our heads." That's a starting point. There are people who get it. Clearly, not everybody who voted for John Kerry, not everyone is like my cousin who will mindlessly accept, without question, without doubt -- "Of course we went into Iraq to steal their oil, because that's what America does, no need to even consider any other possibility." That's how sure she is that America is imperialist and we steal resources and what not. Not everyone who voted for John Kerry and who fits that description is aware of the elite's Blueprint for Utopia -- that's what I call it. But what the elite have succeeded in doing is (by the way, I don't think they'd support it, if if they were [aware] -- I don't think my cousin would trade-off supporting evil, failure, and wrong, for some promise of a future Utopia.) But what the elite have succeeded in doing...
But what the elite have succeeded in doing through the institutions we've allowed them to control (and if we're going to save America we must take back the schools, the universities, the media, the entertainment industry) what the elites have succeeded in doing is indoctrinating. Starting with the very young and going all the way up through college and beyond. Starting the first time they turn on Sesame Street and Buster Bunny; going up through the middle years when they're told, "Hey, little boy, if you have a queer eye, you're going to be a cool guy; but, hey, little girl, doesn't matter how cool you are -- if you grow up to be a heterosexual married woman, you're going to be a Desperate Housewife." And, going all the way up and all the other shows that are on the air.
But so many of the other shows that are on the air show family and marriage and all the things that are traditional -- that we recognize as good. There's "The War at Home;" there's "Rules of Engagement," as if it's another battle. They wouldn't allow "Make Room for Daddy" and shows like those, because they were not realistic, so instead we now have "The Bundies" where the mother and the father hate each other and are looking to get as much as they can from each other; and this whole mind set continues on through Ward Churchill's "Ethnic Studies" class. And what happens is they're indoctrinated into what I call a "Cult of Indiscriminateness."
The way the elite does this is by teaching our children, starting with the very young, that rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry. That no matter how sincerely you may seek to gather the facts, no matter how earnestly you may look at the evidence, no matter how disciplined you may try to be in your reasoning, your conclusion is going to be so tainted by your personal bigotries, by your up-bringing, by your religion, by the color of your skin, by the nation of your great-great-great-great-great grandfather's birth that no matter what your conclusion is -- it is useless, it is nothing other than a reflection of your bigotries. Therefore the only way to eliminate bigotry is to eliminate rational thought. There's a brilliant book out there, and to those of you who know it, you'll recognize how heavily informed my opinion is by it. It's called "The Closing of the American Mind" by Professor Allan Bloom.
Professor Bloom was trying to figure out -- I'm going to be blunt, he was a little less blunt -- he was trying to figure out in the eighties, why his students were suddenly so stupid. And what he came to was the realization, the recognition, that they had been raised to believe that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative, because its opposite is the evil of having discriminated. I paraphrase this in my own words, I say: "In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate." I'll give you an example at the airports. In order to not discriminate, we have to intentionally make ourselves stupid. We have to intentionally pretend we don't know some of the things we do know. And we have to pretend that the next person who's likely to blow up an airplane is as much the 87-year-old Swedish great-great-grandmother as those four 27-year-old Imams newly arrived from Syria, screaming "Allahu Akbar!" just before they board the plane.
In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate. The problem is, of course, that the ability to discriminate, to thoughtfully choose the better of the available options, as in "she's a discriminating shopper" is the essence of rational thought. So quite literally we are dealing with the whole of western Europe and today's Democratic Party dominated as it is by this philosophy that rejects rational thought as a hate crime. So what you're left with after 10, 12, 14, 20 years in the leftist indoctrination centers (that our schools have become) are citizens of voting age who on the one hand are utterly unwilling and incapable of critically judging the merits of the positions they hold, and have held, unquestioned since they were five years old, since they first entered the leftist indoctrination process.
This is important to me because it sounds impossible. I mean, am I saying that they have the mentality of a 5-year-old? That sounds like hyperbole and I've tried to avoid hyperbole. It sounds perhaps like a gratuitous slander. There was a book that came out at just about the same time as Professor Bloom's that in some ways even better describes and explains the mind set of the Modern Liberal. It was called: "All I Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten." And it reads like the bible of modern liberalism and the playbook of Democratic Party policy.
Of course, you'll notice in the title, he doesn't say, Robert Fulghum doesn't say, "All I Know, I Learned in Kindergarten." Of course, Bill Maher has learned a good number of things, including bigger words. But the concepts that he still holds dear, he learned in kindergarten. So, yeah, the sentence fragment: "Don't hit" which is one of the lessons that Fulghum refers to has morphed into an entire sentence now that they're adult. It's "War is not the answer." And, of course, they've learned things in-between, but they didn't really need to know anything because even though they know about Neville Chamberlain; they know about what happens if you appease evil; but they don't really need to know it because knowing it or not knowing it, it would not have changed the position they have now and have held unquestioned since they were five.
When I was five years old, I used to go around the neighborhood, trick-or-treating with my friends on Halloween (not every day). And we'd have in one hand our bag for candy and in the other hand a little box with a slit on top for nickles and dimes and pennies for UNICEF, for the United Nations. At five-years old, the United Nations is a terrific thing: "Don't hit, talk." Another lesson from Robert Fulghum was "Share Everything" -- well, yeah, we'll share power and we'll share our wealth; we'll pay for the United Nations; let's talk things out; what a lovely, wonderful thing. Then you turn 10, 15, 20, and you learn some things about the United Nations that change your opinion. You learn about the corruption. You learn about the antisemitism. You learn about [how] they ran away from the genocide in Rwanda, and have done nothing about the Sudanese genocide. In fact, made the Sudanese members of the Human Rights Commission while they were committing this genocide. And you and I change our positions because these are things we really need to know. Yet they will maintain their five-year-old's position, their belief that the United Nations is this great, wonderful thing and completely ignore everything they've learned since and are quite literally locked into this.
There was a song that came out at about this time. It was called "Good-bye Stranger" by a group called Super Tramp (because, you know, being a tramp is "super"). In it this guy and this girl hook up, they shack up together for a couple of weeks. Apparently things are pretty wonderful until she says, something like: "Honey we've run out of food, why don't you go to the supermarket and we could do this for another week or two." He says: "I should go shopping? No, no, that's not my paradise. No, I'm leaving." And as he's walking out the door he says to her "I believe that what you say is the undisputed truth, but I have to see things my own way, just to keep me in my youth." And that is so much the mind set of the Modern Liberal. It's not so much they're not aware of all the things that we are aware of; it's that they need to reject them in order to remain in their five-year-old's Utopia that they've been told is the only hope for mankind: A mindless indiscriminateness.
So what you're left with is not only adults, citizens of voting age, who cannot judge their own positions, but who are virulently antagonistic to any position other than their own. Why?
Because in a world where you're indiscriminate, where no behaviors can be deemed better or worse than any other then your expectations are that all behaviors should lead to equally good outcomes. When in the real world, different behaviors lead to different outcomes. You and I know why, because we think. And we know why teenage promiscuity and communities that promote promiscuity tend to fail at a greater rate than communities that promote teenage abstinence. Because teenage promiscuity and teenage abstinence are not the same behaviors. Abstinence is the better behavior.
Forget the moral component for a moment. Let's just talk practicalities. If your boy's out messing around, he's not home reading a book. If your daughter's down at the abortion mill, again, she's not at the library studying for the SATs. If your son's in the hospital bed somewhere dying of AIDS, he's not putting together his five-year plan. So you and I recognize why those communities that promote teenage abstinence do better than those that promote teenage promiscuity in their music, in their movies, even in the schools. But to the Modern Liberal who cannot make that judgment, must not make that judgment (that would be discriminating), they have no explanation. So therefore the only explanation for success has to be that somehow success has cheated. Success simply by its existence is proof positive to the Modern Liberal of some kind of chicanery, and likely bigotry. Failure, simply by its existence, no other evidence needed, just the fact that it is failed, is enough proof for them that failure has been victimized. So the mindless foot soldier, which is what I call the non-elite, will support the elite Blueprint for Utopia, will side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success -- out of a sense of justice.
This is why I said at the beginning, they're not evil. My cousin is not evil, but it's just a mindless acceptance that in a world where she's indiscriminate, where her answer to any political question is "So what?" without any true Socratic desire to have that "so what" lead to -- "Yeah, let's talk about the real consequences." "So what" being an indiscriminate rejection of any possibility about the future. It's meaningless to them and it's why John Lennon said Utopia was all the people living for today. And, by the way, it's not a coincidence that those who live for today, now have so much debt. What is debt? It is the failure to re-pay a promise from yesterday. And vote themselves nothing but more and more entitlements, which is what? Stuff for me, I'll worry about who pays for it later. The same is true of good and evil. Since nothing can be deemed good, nothing can be deemed evil, that which a society does recognize as good must be the beneficiary of some sort of prejudice. That which a society recognizes as evil, must be the victim of that prejudice. So again the mindless foot soldier will invariably side with whatever policy, mindlessly accept, whatever policy seeks to tear down what is good -- America, Israel, Walmart -- elevate what is evil, until everything meets in the middle and there's nothing left to fight about.
Let's take an issue in the news and let's think like a Modern Liberal and you'll see how once you subscribe, once you've been indoctrinated into this mind-set, there is no other choice. Remember I said that it was inevitable. Once you belong to this cult of indiscrimnateness, there is no other conclusion you can come to other than that good is evil and that evil is the victim of good. We all know what standard practice is, in fact, it's official policy at the leftist media outlets to never call Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Asqa Martyrs Brigade, or any of the other Islamic fascist terrorist groups around the world "terrorists." And you know why, you've heard it a million times. In fact, it's even in one of the official memos -- I forget the news organization, probably the Times -- to the reporters, ordering them not to use the appropriate word. And that reason is "Hey, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Who are we to employ critical, rational judgment?"
But if one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, see you and I can tell the difference. At least, at a very minimal standard can't we at least agree that in order to be called a freedom fighter you have to be fighting for...Freedom? We know what Osama bin Laden is fighting for; he's told us. It's not freedom. It's an oppressive theocracy in which women are covered from head to toe, and unless we all change to his religion, we are considered the offspring of pigs and monkeys. Quite literally being indiscriminate leaves people like Cindy Sheehan and Michale Moore -- they will call Osama bin Laden a freedom fighter -- because quite literally being indiscriminate leaves them unable to tell the difference between freedom and having your head hacked off. That is quite literally how sick this mentality is. So if there is no objective difference between the terrorist and the freedom fighter, then why is it that you and I, in our schools, teach that George Washington is a hero and Yassir Arafat and Saddam Hussein are villains?
See, you and I know why because we think George Washington risked his personal fortune to personally lead his troops into battle. Battles fought nobly against other uniformed warriors, for the purpose of creating the finest nation in the history of the world. Pretty noble, pretty heroic stuff.
Yassir Arafat , on the other hand, stole his people's money; sent 14 year olds out to fight his battles, battles fought against kids and women and civilians at pizza parlors and at Passover ceremonies and what not -- all for the purpose of maintaining his corrupt dictatorship. Pretty villainous stuff. But to the folks of the New York Times who have established as official policy that there is no objective difference between the terrorists and freedom fighters, why do we teach our children that George Washington is a hero? The only possible explanation is because he's a white Christian of European descent. If there is no difference between the behaviors of the terrorist, then why do we teach that Yassir Arafat and Saddam Hussein are villains? There can be no other reason then that they're dark skinned Muslims of Middle Eastern birth. So when push comes to shove, after 18 United Nations resolutions and ten years of having our airplanes shot at (in direct violation of our very clear agreements), after Saddam Hussein had invaded Iran and invaded Kuwait, bombed Saudi Arabia, and bombed Israel, committed atrocities against the Kurds in the north, and committing genocide against the Marsh Arabs in the south, we finally, reluctantly go to war to liberate those poor people.
You and I know why, because we think . Because we make critical, rational, moral judgments. But to the Modern Liberal, to the mindless, to those who cannot discriminate between these behaviors, the only possible explanation for us going to war is some nefarious "cause" -- because we're evil and Saddam Hussein therefore is a victim. And they will rush there as we've seen, and act as human shields to protect his rape rooms and his torture chambers, because they won't judge rape rooms and torture chambers -- that requires a judgment.
And if you listen to the chants of the mindless minions who march down the streets at their anti-American rallies, which the forged document users and the leftist press euphemistically call anti-war rallies, you can hear their chant: "1-2-3-4 we don't want your racist war." What race, exactly, comprises Iraq? What are they talking about? They don't know; they have not a clue; it's not a factual statement; it's not an accurate statement.
Wait a second, didn't we just recently go to war to protect Muslims in Kuwait? Didn't we bomb the Christians of Europe to protect the Muslims of Europe? What is this based on?
It's based on the reality that once you subscribe to indiscriminateness, anything other than indiscriminateness is the evil of having discriminated.
