The left

Thursday

Roger Kimball

The bloodthirstiness of the left is not new

The savage assassination of Charlie Kirk at a Turning Point rally at Utah Valley University yesterday prompts me to wonder, as I have often wondered, what is the leading characteristic of the left? There are several candidates. Intolerance is one. A rancid and anchorless do-goodism – think of Dickens’s Mrs. Jelleby and her “telescopic philanthropy” – is another.   But on balance I think that the late Australian philosopher David Stove was right: the leading characteristic of the left it is bloodthirstiness. Behind all the emollient rhetoric about brotherhood and equality, bloodthirstiness is the left’s most reliable calling card.   That is one reason that the nearly instant emission by prominent Democrats of their opposition to violence rings so hollow.

Charlie Kirk

Monday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The grievance games of the left

In the first week of October 2022, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, France’s perennial man of the Marxist left, former leader of La France insoumise and present chief of Nupes (Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et social), an alliance of hard-left, left and green parties, invoked the jours d’octobre that commenced on October 5, 1789 with the Women’s March from the Parisian marketplaces to Versailles and ended with the more or less forced departure of the royal family for the capital city in the early morning hours next day after several members of the Palace guard had been decapitated and their heads impaled on pikes. It is unclear what that revolutionary year, and the events of October 5-7, have to do with twenty-first-century France.

revenge

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

No apology is ever enough for the digital mob

Promoting physical fitness, the left has developed a bracing set of competitive callisthenics. Participants vie over who can complete a marathon crawl on the belly like a reptile, who can flop onto the floor in a pose of the greatest prostration, and who can bend over the farthest, pants down, while begging to have large pieces of furniture shoved up the backside. Athletic displays of public remorse also constitute an increasingly popular spectator sport. The young American poet Anders Carlson–Wee was excited at first about getting ‘How-To’ published in a July issue of the Nation, a storied New Statesman-style weekly.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The more extreme the left’s screeches, the greater the populist surge

The latest exciting news is that it may very soon be possible for surgeons to perform uterine transplants, so endowing a man who has ‘transitioned’ into being a strange approximation of a woman with the ability to gestate a child. And to give birth, after a fashion. The benighted child would need to be hacked out of the man’s midriff, because there’s not enough room down there for a child to come out naturally (yes, because he’s a man). Sweden — the world leader in uterine transplants — is anxious to reclaim the title of the world’s most batshit crazy nation, which the Canadians and that simpering idiot Justin Trudeau currently have in their grasp. The uterus stuff will undoubtedly help.