Just Thinking Out Loud
6.3K posts
A Letter to the Left To those who still believe, from someone who once did too. I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear me out before you decide what I am. I was one of you. Not in some distant, theoretical way. I was deeply one of you. I marched. I shared the posts. I believed, with total conviction, that the progressive vision of the world was not only morally correct but self-evidently so. Anyone who disagreed was ignorant or malicious. I had Trump Derangement Syndrome, but then, I complained about all politicians. I couldn’t see it was a case of choosing ‘the best of’. I had no middle ground. And that’s what finally shook me awake: the realisation that I had stopped allowing for middle ground. My thinking had become entirely black and white. I had radicalised—slowly, invisibly—without even noticing it was happening to me. The moment of clarity didn’t arrive dramatically. It crept in through the small, uncomfortable questions I started asking myself. Why was I so certain? Why did I feel such fury toward anyone who hesitated, even slightly, on positions I held? When had I stopped thinking and started simply reacting? When I tried to share these doubts with friends and family—people I loved, people on my side—I wasn’t met with conversation. I was met with a wall. A similar wall to what I had previously put up for anyone daring to question me and my positions. “No discussion.” “You’ve gone right-wing.” Lies were constructed about my motives. It didn’t matter that I was asking questions in good faith. The act of questioning was itself the crime. That is not normal. A political movement that forbids its own members from thinking critically is not a movement for justice. It’s something else entirely. And it worried me then. It worries me more now. Do you remember the 1980s and 1990s? I do. We had done real, meaningful work on race relations. Most people in the West genuinely did not care about the colour of your skin. Were things perfect? Of course not. But we were heading somewhere good. We were building something. And then we pulled it apart. We decided that every small, clumsy human interaction was a “microaggression.” We reframed the past as one hundred percent negative, as though nothing decent had ever been achieved. We became so obsessed with naming every tiny slight that we forgot what real progress looked like. We unstitched the good work and called it enlightenment. Once I began looking with honest eyes, the contradictions were everywhere. We decided blackface was a mortal sin. But woman face? That was brave and fabulous. We insisted entire societies must be restructured to accommodate the preferences of fractions of a percent of the population, and if you questioned the pace or method, you were a bigot, evil or fascist. We pursued reckonings for the crimes of Western civilisation—slavery, church child abuse, colonisation—and those reckonings were important. But we stopped there. Only the West was held to account. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was a horror, yes. But it was the British who ended it. Meanwhile, the Islamic slave trade ran for centuries, and pockets of it persist to this day. Where is that reckoning? Who is demanding it? We created a world in which nobody is allowed to simply settle and build a life. Indigenous people must perpetually identify as victims. Everyone of European descent must perpetually identify as perpetrators—for events centuries old. Yet nobody seems interested in acknowledging that white Westerners were not history’s only colonisers, or that colonisation, in softer forms, is happening right now. Mass immigration into Western countries is a form of soft colonisation. That sentence will make some of you furious. But consider: why is it only European and other Western nations being pressured to “diversify”? No one bags Nigeria or China or Latin American nations for a lack of diversity and not promoting the idea of multiculturalism. Only white-majority countries are told their cultures must be diluted or they are racist. Wanting to preserve the native peoples and cultures of European nations is not xenophobia. It is a right that in the 21st century we wish to grant to every non-white culture on earth. But apparently it’s a sin to want it or expect it for ourselves. And when it comes specifically to Islamic immigration into Western democracies, there are countless videos—not propaganda, but Muslims speaking plainly—describing a vision in which the world becomes Islamic, in which Sharia law replaces secular governance, in which their growing numbers translate to growing power. These are not conspiracy theories. These are now publicly stated intentions. History tells us what happens when these numbers reach a tipping point: the freedoms we take for granted begin to erode. Some know this because they are ex-Muslims. Some know because they are Westerners who converted to Islam and found it wanting. Frightening, even. Expressing that concern is not Islamophobia. It is pattern recognition. Being concerned about how trans medicine affects young people is not transphobic. Asking how trans ideology impacts women’s rights and the gay and lesbian community is not bigotry. These are legitimate questions that deserve honest answers, not silencing. So much of what I had taken for granted on the left collapsed under the lightest touch of common sense. I had to accept something I’d been resisting for years: the world will never be perfect. It won’t. And if you spend your one and only life railing against the world because it refuses to become your utopia, you will lose. Worse, you will drag the rest of us down with you. Constantly tearing society apart because it cannot meet an impossible standard doesn’t make you righteous. It makes you destructive. What I did instead was start asking a different question: ‘What’s the optimal way to improve this?’ Not achieve perfection (#impossible). Not burn it all down and rebuild a utopia from the ashes (also impossible). Just better. What specifically needs improving, and how do we do it? That shift—from ideological fury to practical problem-solving—changed everything for me. So those are the things that drove me away from the left. Not toward the right, but away from what the left has become: reactive, unquestioning, hostile to dissent, and increasingly detached from reality. I wasn’t changed by the right, I was changed by the left. My left. If the West is going to survive—and I think it’s that serious at this point—the left has to start thinking again. Questioning again. Demanding evidence instead of demanding obedience. So I’m asking you—begging you, really—to think. Consider that an alternate view might not be hatred. Consider that you may have been wrong about some things. I was. That’s not a confession of weakness. Admitting a mistake and choosing a different path is braver than marching further down a road you already suspect is leading somewhere dark. You are not a bad person for questioning. You are not a traitor for thinking. The people who tell you otherwise are not protecting you. They are controlling you. That’s all I ask. Just think. Please.
They are getting paid.. Spot on, though. Tribalism. He gets it.
