How I left the Left

It’s a funny thing divorce. One the one hand it is sudden and traumatic. The door clicks, a part of your life has gone, you hear feet running in the hallway, nothing will ever be the same again. On the other hand, it happens slowly as the cords of love and attachment break one by one and you realise one day, perhaps years before you leave, that the relationship is over. I always thought I was a Lefty because I saw a role for Government in the provision of non-market goods: libraries, museums, national parks, basic research, the ABC. I believed that monopolies like water and airports should be publicly owned. I railed against economic rationalism and junk ‘trickle down’ economic philosophy. I was and am happy to pay high taxes to fund public health care despite the fact that I have and can afford insurance. After all, wasn’t it Jesus who told us to go heal the sick? I don’t have a miracle healing ministry but I can support a national health care plan. But over the last 20 years I have watched  the Marxist left infiltrate and subvert every progressive movement. Its not just that they are pushing a failed discredited ideology; they bring with them a pathological hatred of the foundational values of our culture – family, faith, and nationhood. The tipping point came in 2016. I was watching a youtube video of Roz Ward at a training seminar telling attendees that the Safe Schools Program “is not about bullying”. OK, so what is it about?

As a young Christian I adhered to the crazy Jewish notion that since we are all created in God’s image we are all inherently valuable. This is the real cultural and moral foundation for human rights in the West, and was the motive force behind the early progressive movements. As a young left wing activist, I felt that I stood proudly in the tradition of Wilberforce, the chartists and the suffragettes. Living in Tasmania, the environmental issue was unavoidable, and it made sense to me to care for the planet out of sheer gratitude.

At 17, I became a Wilderness Society activist and met the founders of the movement. They were not Marxists. They were a country doctor who once famously attempted to join the Liberal party, a scientist, a nurse, a farmer; two had strong Presbyterian upbringings. Bob was gay but pretty quiet about it. They were broadly libertarian and eschewed big technocratic government, which in their day was represented by the Hydro Electric Commission. Now it was 1991 and the mood was nationalistic – this was our country and we wanted it looked after, not chipped-up and sent to Japan. The local communist group rebranded as the ‘Green Left’ and tried to take over our meetings but we gave them short shrift. The forest campaign was tough, and we had little time for lefty theorists.

Ben Oquist came down to help with the campaign and flatted with me before going to work for Bob. I was on first name terms with Bob Brown, Christine Milne, Geoff Law, et al and worked closely with Cath Hughes. I completed Pete Hay’s post graduate course in environmental thought with distinction. The Greens introduced freedom of information legislation, and when not in jail, the leaders remained libertarian. They were good times. ‘Form One Lane’ road signs were sometimes altered to say ‘Form One Planet’, but no one seriously thought that one world government was a good idea, despite Agenda 21.

In later years though, the cognitive dissonance between the causes we campaigned on and the deeper social agenda became untenable. Feminism become a repudiation of motherhood. As mammals we reproduce. This requires on average each woman to have three children. Those children need to be held, nurtured and breastfed for the first three years of their life. Their neurological and emotional development depends on it. That means that on average each woman needs to take 10 years out of the workforce (wholly or partly) for society to be OK. If women were allowed to be in touch with their real desires and supported in them, that would happen. That means that women cannot realistically over their lifetime, earn on average the same as men. That is why marriage is so important as a stable social and economic structure to support women and children. Thanks to women’s liberation women are now sexually vulnerable, relationally vulnerable, and financially forced to work. Feminism has no intention of allowing women choice and it is clear that the true goals of contemporary feminism are the destruction of the family and the alienation of men, women and children aka destroying ‘patriarchy’. Women are now told that they not only have to abort their children for economic convenience but they are not allowed to admit to the deep shame, guilt and grief that naturally follows. In this, feminism has become violently abusive of women and indeed of the whole society. According to one NGO one seventh of the population of Britain has been killed through abortion since decriminalisation. The cultural revolution has been a very bloody revolution but the tiny dismembered corpses are not allowed to be shown in public and their silent scream is drowned in the onward tramp of liberation. This cannot be spoken.

Concern for the rights of refugees morphed into an open borders campaign. There are a quarter of a billion Indonesians to our north, mostly Muslim and 1.3 billion Chinese. How open to we want our borders to be? Third world birth rates mean that it will make no difference how many migrants we accept. The countries of origin will still be poor and dysfunctional. There are things we can do to help but dissolving our own nations and cultures will help no one. Furthermore one of the reasons we are successful and they are not is because of our cultural mores. If our country is flooded with people whose cultural mores are the reason their country sucks, what will happen to our country? There comes a point where ‘open borders’ ceases to be compassion and becomes treason. That point has been crossed in Europe and the United States but not in China, India, Russia, or South East Asia. This cannot be spoken.

Apart from being asked out a lot by queers (who were mostly nice people) I knew little about homosexuality at University but I did have on acquaintance who killed himself after graduation. He had been raped as a young person, was gay, and couldn’t deal with it all. De-criminalisation and acceptance was so important for people like him….but what about celebration? The fact is, the number of cases of genuine biological non-heterosexuality are vanishingly rare. Homosexuality and transgenderism are psychiatric/psychological conditions that respond well to treatment for a great many people but not for everyone. Why is it then, that the GLBTI movement is so vicious in seeking to criminalise and shut down proven treatments for those people who, for whatever reason, wish to change? Why do they bully ex-gays, or active gays who dissent from the GLBTI script? Yet at the same time, they openly recruit. This cannot be spoken.

Homosexual relationships were now recognised in law and all financial discriminations removed. This was a remarkable achievement given its relevance to only a small number of people within a minority group of less than three per cent of the population; but this was not enough. They wanted marriage and adoption too. For some this was a logical extension of the campaign. For many sober, thoughtful and compassionate people this was a red line, since in order to justify gay marriage and adoption, society must conclude that children have no need for a mother and a father but only a ‘significant other’. A societal shift so profound demands the kind of mature and respectful discussion, even plebiscite, the Left are determined not to have. Meanwhile ‘gay rights’ became an excuse to impose transgender ideology – a form of mental illness - on young children. Nevertheless, according to the emails I kept getting for a year and a half from Penny Wong, any attempt at reasonable discourse or plebiscite is a “referendum on hate”, yet the hate from the Left is palpable.  As a 15/16 year old in year 11 high school, I joined the Amnesty International Club and wrote letters on behalf of political prisoners in nasty regimes. Now even Amnesty has jumped on the GLBTI and anti-Russian band wagon. What has fundamental political freedom got to do with sodomy?

Climate change meanwhile had come to the fore. It had taken a long time and a lot of energy, but here again the agenda shifted.  Climate change became a reason to impose a kind of global Centrelink that takes from prosperous successful nations and gives to poor unsuccessful ones. Faith in big government was boundless.

Hostility to Christianity was now overt but Islam was embraced. Peter Singer said that the starting point for moral consideration was somewhere near a mollusc yet the movement militantly promoted abortion. The Greens tabled a bill in NSW to make abortion-to-term legal on demand. I had knelt in the mud in front of a bulldozer to defend the inherent sanctity of all life. How could I now be part of a movement that thinks killing a nine month old baby is OK? How could Bob Brown, a medical doctor, and Christine Milne, a Catholic, be silent? In Tasmania, the ‘Gunns 20’ had suffered much and strongly promoted the right to protest. Yet the Green’s pro-abortion bill would make it a crime to pray, protest, or offer counselling within 150 metres of an abortion clinic. Obstructing logging was OK but offering alternative abortion counselling was not. Fungi matters, the unborn do not. The right to protest or speak stops where social Marxism starts, even if you are Green. Meanwhile the real environmental issues are ongoing and urgent. The Great Barrier Reef is in trouble. The oceans are full of plastic. The Murray Darling is dying. The Koala is being pushed closer to extinction. But, how can anyone be expected to talk about that when they are triggered over a lack of transgender toilets? 

Oh, and along the way Trump inadvertently saved the Australian economy by scrapping the Trans Pacific Partnership free (sic) trade agreement. This would have handed over what little remains of the Australian economy to US multinational companies and handed Australia’s sovereignty, and our ability to protect the environment, over to transnational courts run by the same companies. The ALP had already agreed to the deal. Instead of celebrating from the roof tops the Left accused Trump of racism. Speaking of racism, the Left jumped on the anti-Russian band wagon which is scripted by the CIA, has no basis in fact, and is racist to the core.

By now, there had been 16 years of continuous war in the Middle East but Greenpeace said nothing. The slaughter of whales elicited great concern. The slaughter of Christians did not. Obama was granted a Nobel Peace Prize as being the only US President in history to be at war for every day of both his terms in office. When Hillary Clinton ran for President on a platform of “punishing Russia” for upholding international law and fighting terrorism in Syria, the Left supported her. When Trump suggested normalising relations with Russia he was viciously attacked. The Left now stood for war not peace. It got worse. Hillary was the policy architect and advocate for the destruction of Libya as a modern nation State, and for using ISIS to destroy Syria as a modern nation state. She laughed when Gaddafi was sodomised with a bayonet and had no problem with ISIS operating a market in sex slavery, throwing homosexuals off buildings, and torturing children to death. A million people died under her watch. Left wing feminists supported her Presidential bid merely because she has a vulva, this being more important than the lives of a million men women and children. Then it got worse. The Democrats and associated media, having rejected the outcome of the election and having called for the assassination of Julian Assange, allied with the CIA to undermine the peace initiatives of the newly elected President, and succeeded.

And the ultimate irony? The Southern Povery Law Centre is seeking to impoverish and shut down Christian organisations who refuse to promote the LGBTI agenda by listing them along with bona fide neo Nazi groups as hate organisations. 'Tolerance' it seems, means destroying anyone and anything that gets in your way.

Finally, in 2016 I asked the obvious question: ‘what would have to happen for all the feminists, leftists, and homosexual activists etc to be happy and stop making demands?’ In other words: ‘what is the end point of the campaign?’ The only answer seemed to be the complete dissolution of society and its replacement by a totalitarian state, so obviously that wasn’t it….but eventually (thanks in large part of a friend whose pastor is being sued for stating the traditional Christian view on sexuality) I found my way to Antonia Gramsci and the Marxist theorists of the 1930s. They realised that the working class had rejected Communism because of traditional moral values: the role of fathers and family, the sanctity of marriage, the church, faith, and patriotism. They reasoned that capitalism would fall if these things could be torn down and society reduced to a state of moral and social anarchy. Then would arise the Marxist State; but first a long march through the institutions was necessary.

Gramsci died in jail but his followers set up shop in the University of Frankfurt where they developed ‘critical theory’ aka ‘cultural Marxism’, before fleeing to the United States. The long march began in California in the 1950’s, energised the counter culture of the 1960s, thoroughly infiltrated the education system and the unions, and became influential in the church. The KGB referred to this process as ‘demoralisation’ but it got scant attention outside conservative religious circles even after KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov blew the whistle. After the USSR dissolved, the Communist movement continued unabashed. This time they focussed on subverting feminism and environmentalism. Key among their objectives were the abolition of independent schools, removing mothers from the home, promoting promiscuity and abortion, dissolving national borders, and indoctrinating youth against Christianity. It was all sounding familiar, but surely I was jumping at shadows?

Then I found Herbert Mercuse’ essay ‘Repressive Tolerance’ in which he argued that real tolerance meant tolerance for leftist ideas and repression of conservative ideas, even if that included violence. I guess that explains whatis happening at Evergreen College and why the Left have no problem with hooded thugs blockading public meetings organised by the Australian Christian Lobby. Then in the online Marxist archive I found a book published in 1932 Towards a Soviet America, which stepped out the planned destruction of the family, church, nation state, independent schools, and civil society. ‘Reactionary classes’ it said ‘will be eliminated’. “Once the power of the bourgeoisie is broken internationally and its States destroyed…There will be no place for the present narrow patriotism, the bigoted nationalist chauvinism…” I guess that is why the Democratic Party believes ‘no one is illegal’, and what better reason to remove national sovereignty than a truly international crisis like climate change? “Religious schools will be abolished and organised religious training for minors prohibited. Freedom will be established for anti-religious propaganda.” If traditional views on sexual morality and deviance are made illegal in the class room and replaced with promotional lessons for sexual degeneracy, that objective will largely have been achieved. This is the direction of State education in Canada, Sweden, and the United States under Obama.

As I perused the now mainstream anti-conservative hate sphere, which includes my once beloved ABC, it was obvious that the happy smiling face of progressivism had slipped and I was staring directly at the face of communism or some mutant variant thereof, and it was horrifying.

The Greens still have a chance to save themselves, shake up their party and move back to the centre, away from the security of the inner city cultural ghetto and values echo chamber. It won’t be easy and Bob may have to get off his laurels, but they are a side show anyway. The real action is the Communist take-over of the Labor Party, the education system, and the media.

Of course, the right have their contradictions and penchant of magical thinking on specific issues too, but that's another essay.

As I watch my children delight in their parents and in being boys and girl I reflect on the psychosexual abuse that passes for progressive ‘safe schools’ and am glad we home educate. Our kids will need to be resilient. There are no easy answers.

Divorce is never easy – I am still angry but in a way I have found myself again, and I’m not the one who moved.