Natural leaders are talented at giving and receiving respect.

No self-respecting person accepts a leader who does not respect them.

If you disrespect until respect is “earned”, you have not yet earned the right to lead.

Exchange of respect is everything. It should not be rare.

If you are Progressivist and identify as some other identity or combination of identities, please understand something: you are no longer the identity you once were.

You now have one identity, and only one identity and that identity is Progressivist.

You are like a naturalized citizen of another country who still proudly carries around your expired passport, and uses it as a prop for your new persona. This might impress your new neighbors, but those of us who still live here at home see you as the foreigner you’ve chosen to be.

You chose another nation, and you no longer speak for ours. You are not an ambassador.

Progressivists are essentially political ventriloquists.

Progressivists renounce their own people, and then loudly speak on their behalf, putting Progressive words into their mouths.

Do not even say, “speaking as a Jew” and then talk as a Progressivist. You only speak as a Progressivist, for Progressivism. You do not represent Judaism or the Jewish people. Technically, you are a Jew and nobody can take that away. But please don’t pretend to speak for Jews. You do not.

And if you are a Progressivist with a Progressivist friend who “speaks as a Jew” against Israel, do not even dream of using them as evidence that some perfectly reasonable Jews are antizionists. Your friend agrees with you because you both belong to the same people: the Progressivist people.

Your self-loathing, antizionist, antisemitic Jewish friend speaks for you — and that is why you like what your Progressivist friend says and want to throw their words in my face.

Tell your Progressivist friend “Am Proggo Chai.”

This goes for any other identity.

A Progressivist black person does not speak as a black person on behalf of black people. That person speaks as a Progressivist on behalf of Progressivism.

A Progressivist woman does not speak as a woman on behalf of women. That person speaks as a Progressivist on behalf of Progressivism.

A Progressivist gay person does not speak as a gay person on behalf of gay people. That person speaks as a Progressivist on behalf of Progressivism.

And a Progressivist POCs and BIPOCs? Latinx? Invented genders? Self-diagnosed mental malfunctions deployed as identities? These aren’t even existent enough to have a point of view to represent. Utter nonsense — all figments of the collective Progressivist imagination.

I just read Matthew Yglesias’s piece “I’m sort of ‘against polling’ too” and was struck by some “saying the quiet part out loud” moments in the article.

If you look at Schumer’s book from 2007, “Positively American,” it’s a deeply political book that’s all about sketching out a set of positions for Democrats that can win a big national supermajority. But it barely cites any issue polling; it’s a very intuitive book.

The core frame of the book is Schumer’s imaginary couple, the Baileys, who are meant to be emblematic of boring middle-aged suburbanites who have mixed feelings about partisan politics. Every few years some internet leftist or other will rediscover some of Schumer’s old statements about the Baileys and their reaction is almost always sharply negative, because “make Democrats more appealing to boring middle-aged suburbanites” is not something that left-wing intellectuals are interested in. But that was the point of Schumer’s exercise, he knows that the kinds of people who work in Democratic Party politics care what left-wing intellectuals say and do and he wants to get them to think more about the kinds of people who don’t care about left-wing intellectuals.

At any rate, that was the old pre-empirical politics — it leaned heavily on the idea that self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals and that a large majority of the electorate is white so you are basically always bending over backwards to appease the sensibilities of culturally conservative white people. The data revolution in Democratic Party politics was the discovery that issue polling could reveal specific topics on which the public’s view really is quite left-wing. There was actually an opportunity to go beyond the Baileys and use empirical science to identify winning progressive issues and stake out a more left-wing profile for the Democratic Party. This unfortunately became a kind of Goodhart’s Law situation where once you started moving left when issue polling told you to move left, you created an incentive for advocates to pollute the epistemic environment by flooding the zone with skewed issue polling. Outside of time-series (how has the answer to this question changed over time) or cross-sectional (how do men and women answer this question differently) analysis, it’s very hard to know what to make of issue polling, which is often heavily influenced by question-wording or has the public expressing contradictory ideas at different levels of generality. But in practice what happened is people commissioned issue polling to “prove” that Democrats should shift leftward on climate, guns, immigration, etc. after Obama’s reelection.

So here we have it.

The Progressivist Democrats do have a clear idea of what they really want — and what they want is far left of what the electorate wants. It is not only left of what the electorate wants, it is left of what most citizens will accept.

Progressivists know that the electorate does not want what they are selling.

But, even more, Progressivists know they are right. They literally cannot doubt that they are right. They do not even know how to doubt it, because every alternative they hear makes no sense. And why would they work at making sense of it, when they already know it is immoral, irrational, oppressive and violent?

(Indeed, it is easier for a Progressivist to imagine the end of the world than to imagine an alternative to anticapitalism!)

Therefore, false advertising of their intent is not only OK, it is an ethical imperative. Consequently, they see democracy and liberalism as necessary evils to work around and manipulate in pursuit of its higher goal of social justice.

“But!” say the Progressivists, “that is how everyone is! Everyone has a secret agenda! Liberal-Democracy is always a ruse, and whoever isn’t a secret Marxist is a secret Fascist!”

And therefore, of course, it makes total sense to assume the worst of so-called centrist Conservatives and to confront them as the Fascists they really are. In fact, they are even worse than Fascists, because they sneak around, pretending to be moderates, when they are, in actuality, radicals. They must be undermined, fought and annihilated “by any means necessary.”

And old-school left-liberals who actually believe all that old liberal nonsense — and worse, actually believe the liberal rhetoric of Conservatives — are dangerously naïve fools, who, for all practical purposes, are useful idiots to the right.

So, in this way, the left “projects” its own bad faith onto its enemies and then becomes the very thing it claims to oppose.

And then, by some perverse sense of entitlement, the left quotes their arch enemy Nietzsche to their enemies:

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

But what is this abyss? Who even asks this, anymore?

It is the abyss of an amoral reality, beyond good and evil, beyond true and false. It is a reality of pure will, where everything is constructed by power, where might makes right. It is the abyss of taking what transcends our understanding as lacking reality. It takes what our understanding cannot grasp and therefore grasps as nothing for absolute nothing. Is is a confusion of Infinite Absolute for a human-all-too-human zero. It is nihilism.

If you come to see reality as meaningless, and absurd and only arbitrarily meaningful, you become part of that reality. You become a nihilist realist in a nihilistic reality.

And then reality must be that way, for if it is not, you are monstrous.

You — you, personally — are a monster in a meaningful, moral universe.

It matters not one bit how many people around you have chosen monstrousness. You stand alone, naked, guilty. And you stand as a coward, because you preferred standing guilty in a herd to standing righteously alone.

So now it is existentially crucial that liberals and conservatives are all just like you. Duplicitous, nihilistic, self-serving, vicious.

But they are not.

And they — not you — know something important that you refuse to know.

Years ago, a good friend of mine started swirling in the toilet of European New Right illiberalism. He said he was doing recon on a new movement that “had mojo”. He read it obsessively. I warned him that overconsumption of this content would consume him. He dismissed my concerns. He knew himself better than I possibly could, and he was immune to this kind of thing. He needed to understand it to oppose it. But as he researched it, he began to see its validity. He recognized how naive and misinformed he had been. In fact, he now knew how disinformed he was, and how dangerous and powerful these disinformers truly were. They needed to be stopped at all costs, liberal democratic niceties be damned.

I told him that if he is wrong, he becomes the very one who must be fought with fire.

He is now, of course, a citizen of the sewer underworld, QAnon.

I tell Progressivists this story and the nod along, shaking their heads with disbelief.

“See? We must fight them with fire.”

Illiberalism is four-sided duplicity — an evil heart that pumps bad blood.

What do liberals know that illiberals do not?

Liberals know that each of us, at best, knows a small part of an incomprehensibly vast truth. We do not already know better. Far from it!

Liberals know that a truth we arrive at together in good-faith will be inconceivable until the miraculous moment of conception — and only then we will see things differently. Those who believe the scales have already fallen from their eyes, that they were blind but now they see, and that they were asleep but now they are awake have fallen into a dream of awakenness within a dream. And now they have to wake up twice to join the waking, ever-waking world.

Liberals know that every one of us finds it difficult to believe he is not right about all his moral convictions, and that when we succumb to this conviction, we trade morality for moral feelings righteousness for self-righteousness.

Liberals know that we are morally obligated to operate this way, and that anyone who believes that the quest for justice exempts them from this morality holds an immoral misunderstanding of morality and an unjust misconception of justice.

Liberalism is not naive compromise. It is the cornerstone rejected by every illiberal builder of world-systems. It insists that no one already knows the truth, that justice emerges only in good faith collaboration among fellow citizens, and that certainty of righteousness is itself the path to corruption. That humility is the radical heart of liberalism.

I think what separates me from radical leftists is that I believe that there are forms of evil beyond mere greed and bigotry — and that these forms of evil are far worse than injustice.

But many leftists see a world where the ultimate evil is injustice — usually motivated by bigotry or greed or both. That is where the moral spectrum terminates. For them, it’s justice, injustice… and justifiably violent reactions to injustice. After long, egregious oppression, the oppressed feel intense righteous anger, and it is understandable that they sometimes express it violently.

I see this as a deeply stunted conception of morality, and that people who are stuck inside that conception are susceptible to unwitting participation in the worst forms of evil.

Far worse than injustice is a desire to make a person or group suffer for no other reason than hate. This kind of hate is not mere anger. It is an enduring desire to inflict suffering and annihilation not as a means to some other goal, but for the intrinsic sadistic gratification of inflicting it.

My diagnosis of Progressivist support of Hamas is they think Hamas was driven to sadistic violence by injustice, because, according to such Progressivists, it was an act of opposition to injustice, and the expression of their feelings of oppression, the violence — even the exuberant cruelty of that violence — was understandable and justified.

And I think there is a profound darkness in this understanding and justification of radical evil.

I suspect that the darker Progressivists feel this same evil in themselves toward others who have treated them unjustly, people toward whom they feel enduring resentment, people they would like to punish and humiliate. At some submerged semi-suppressed level, they relate to Hamas — sympathize (feel-with) — and revel in witnessing them act on their hatred and actualize real bloody, sadistic revenge.

For Dark Progressivists, feelings of profound hatred and desire to inflict suffering and annihilation on those they call unjust are the primary animus of their “social justice” mission. They are evil and they don’t even know it. Or as one famous Jew put it, “they know not what they do.”

This is what I intuited in the souls of Progressivists even before they gave over en masse to Dark Progressivism in the summer of 2020 — and before their latent antisemitism came to light in 2023.

They are not coming from a wholesome place — despite their idealistic and impossibly aspirational rhetoric. To anyone with eyes to see it, ears to hear it, and most of all, noses to smell it, it is manifestly obvious that what animates their hearts, souls and efforts is not good, but in fact, infernal.

They call for a perfectly just world, first, to make unfavorable comparisons between an impossible worldly paradise and this existing flawed world. And second, to justify violent dismantlement of this flawed world — allegedly as ground-clearing for paradise, but in actuality, for the sake of the sadistic annihilation itself.