Friday, February 9, 2024

Confessions of a Corrupt Liberal

Sasha Stone's Confessions of a Corrupt Liberal is a remarkable essay written by a former leftist who once felt it her moral duty to "Always vote blue, no matter who."

She's a "former" leftist because she realized at some point that the Democrat left, including its media arm, has been thoroughly corrupted by power and that she could no longer remain a part of it.

Here are a few excerpts from her piece:
[For] most of my life.... I was a devoted Democrat, a good soldier for the Left. I went along with everything, even when I knew it was wrong, even when I knew I was lying, because I had convinced myself that winning meant more than just putting a president in power.

I have been a willing participant in taking us to this desperate moment we now face, where both political parties seem crippled and bottle-necked, but only one of them has turned to corruption to stay in power. Only one of them has blocked any challengers to their preferred candidate. And unfortunately, it’s the one I chose to support.

I supported a party that became corrupt over time, and in supporting them, I became corrupt too. If you’re wondering how seemingly respectable people like Jen Psaki, Rachel Maddow, Rob Reiner, Barbra Streisand, or Stephen King can go along with such obvious corruption of our trusted institutions, that’s why. They are who I used to be.
Stone goes on to compose a scorching indictment of her former political affiliation:
Corruption is the last resort when you can’t get voters to turn out, you can’t beat a charismatic Reality-TV star, and you can’t fix what ails the people. Corruption is easy. Just get everyone to agree, silence dissent and no one will be the wiser.

Who’s going to call them out on it? NPR? PBS? The New York Times? The Washington Post? MSNBC? Not a chance. They’re complicit.

Corruption can be the cozy relationship between corporations and politicians. It can be taking bribes from foreign leaders. But it can also be weaponizing our justice system to turn it into something that looks more like a Soviet-Union show trial, the Jim Crow juries, the Oyer in Terminer in Salem, or Nazi Germany.

Corruption can be declaring attacks on your political party as attacks on Democracy. It can force all major Big Tech institutions to do your bidding. It can be deciding that the people of the United States don’t have the power unless they choose the candidate they force upon them.

It can be overt censorship by the state via Big Tech and a lying media that refuses to ask the hard questions because they know they’ll get a call from the White House. It’s a president who is failing on the job but with a media that needs polls to tell the people the truth because they can’t do it themselves.

That we’re now watching a political party attempt to take down their chief rival by fast-tracking legal cases in hopes of a conviction, maybe jail time, because that will finally move the needle for Joe Biden, is terrifying.
Stone, a committed leftist, was moved by the corruption she saw infecting the left to abandon it altogether:
All of this corruption, exposed to anyone who cares about the truth, has turned me into a Trump supporter. But more than that, I vow to devote what’s left of my life to helping to undo some of the damage I helped cause.

On some level, I knew what I was doing was wrong. But I convinced myself I was serving a higher purpose - climate change, racism. That is the danger here. It isn’t that they see themselves as dirty-dealing cheaters. Would that they were that honest. No, they see themselves as the new Puritans who have a right to claim this country, this internet, this Republic for themselves.
I think it should be pointed out that the reason Stone has found so much corruption on the left is that secular moderns, especially those who have rejected any serious religious commitment and who are politically involved, have no basis left for any ethical standards. Consequently, many of them have simply adopted a Machiavellian pragmatism that says that whatever works to help one acquire power and hold on to it is ethically right.

If the corrupt practices Stone enumerates above work to help the Democrats grasp and hold power then they're ethically justified.

She adds that, "What should make all of us concerned is the desperation they feel in trying to jail Trump BEFORE the election. Why? Because they are afraid he will win. Imagine thinking you had more power than the American people to decide who should and shouldn’t win an election. And then force everyone to go along with it."

There's much more that I couldn't include here at the link, and I recommend reading the entire essay. It's worth the seven minutes or so that it takes to read it. Thanks to HotAir.com for the tip.