A response to a question on Ace of Spaces

What made you a conservative?

I've never been a leftist, at least not really. Oh, when I was a teenager and didn't know ANYTHING about politics I used to call myself a liberal. Why? Because at that time I thought the word referred to someone like Thomas Jefferson, not Karl Marx. Like I said, I didn't know anything about politics, or at least not contemporary politics, only historical politics.

I was exposed to quite a bit of MTV which had an awful lot of leftist nonsense baked right into it. But rather than swallow the nonsense whole and be corrupted by it, I worked to try and fit it into what I understood to be reality, not realizing that the people on TV weren't just wrong, but were deliberately lying. When we are young we don't see the world as it is, but as WE are, and what I perceived in the leftist nonsense on MTV and from other sources was not the message they were trying to trick me into believing, but a reflection of myself and my own innate values, which are not those of the left.

I think that there are a lot of people who are leftists by default simply because they live in a microcosm where leftist nonsense is so pervasive that it is all they know. Since these people are not leftists by nature, I suspect that the leftist nonsense they have been steeped in is something they're trying to make sense of in much the same way I did. A lot of them go around using the preferred terminology of the left, but meaning something quite different when they do.

The reason is that the left works to corrupt language. They don't just use words to lie, they lie about the words they use to lie. Lies within lies using terms that are themselves dishonestly re-defined in order to sow confusion. They do this in order to cover up their evil intentions and to trick people into agreeing to things without understanding what it is they're signing off on.

The term "liberal" itself is the perfect example of this. Once upon a time that term referred to someone who might now be called a libertarian. But the left began using it to refer to their Marxist nonsense to the point that its true original meaning was all but lost. Only when we use the word in a compound term like Liberal Democracy is its original sense still used.

Another example is the word "equality." The left loves to toss this one around, almost as much as they do "justice." A normal person would interpret this words as a reference to a person's civil and political rights: freedom of speech, the 5th amendment, etc, etc, all of which are fundamental rights that can be guaranteed to all. But that isn't what a leftist means. When a leftist talks about "equality," they're imagining a world where failure is to be somehow magically prevented, and success punished, despite the fact that success and failure are almost always a manifestation of the character and abilities of the person in question. People who make wise choices get what they want from life to make them happy. People who make foolish choices don't. Rinse and repeat over hundreds of thousands of individual choices by millions of individuals and you soon wind up with a normal distribution. This outcome is inevitable because people are different from each other and some people make better choices than others. Nothing can be done about this. To try is foolish and ultimately destructive.

But leftists want to pretend that this is the result of systematic oppression or a conspiracy theory of some kind, which is pure insanity.

This is just one example of course, there are countless more that can be made.

My conclusion about the true-believing leftists, the Noam Chomsky set, is that they are either evil or crazy. They're smart enough to know that what they are promoting is both untrue and inherently harmful, but they do it anyway. Only someone who is malicious or insane would do that.

Does that mean that "conservatives" are angels? Certainly not. But the flaws and faults to be found in conservative ideas are of the sort that are normal when people of limited wisdom attempt to make sense of things. We have imperfect ideas because we are imperfect beings. But unlike the vile totalitarian notions that the left subscribes to, our ideas are an honest attempt to know and live with the truth.

But to answer the original question, if you want to understand the left from the standpoint of someone who got off the crazy train, read Radical Son by David Horowitz, a recovered red diaper baby whose parents were low-level Soviet operatives and committed Marxists. He grew up and became a somewhat well known member of the "New Left" Marxists back in the 60's. But as time went by, his own experiences in life eventually overwhelmed his indoctrination and he the scales fell from his eyes. Today he's a well-known conservative pundit.

He grew up with the crazy in its purest form, tried to make sense of it, tried to make it work and to conform with reality, and eventually gave up because it just doesn't. 2+2 does not equal 5 and never will. A less honest person might not have done so well.