I’ve been playing a little game over the past few years (basically since I got ‘red-pilled’ and began talking openly about ideas that go against the mainstream corporate consensus of globalism, wokeism, and identity politics). As I’ve become more outspoken on issues such as immigration, abortion, gun laws, gender and race, and, more recently, Covid-19 and The Great Reset, I have watched with interest (and often sadness) as erstwhile friends and acquaintances unfriended me on social media.
I am glad to say that most of those whom I consider true friends are still around. But, were I to hazard a guess, I’d say that up to fifty of my extended network have walked away – either via the hard severance of the unfriend button, or indirectly, simply by distancing themselves and ceasing any form of contact or interaction.
This is a common story for those of us on the so-called ‘right’, and I do not claim any special status in this regard. What interests me though is the timing of some of the more recent departures, and I’d like to use one of these as a case study in leftism.
We’ll call this guy Tom.
Most of us have at least one friend like Tom – you know the one… The proud, self-proclaimed socialist. Tom was not only a devout anti-capitalist, but also a staunch male feminist and vegan. Outspoken does not even begin to describe Tom’s views on our broken, corrupt capitalist system and the way it shits all over the poor and oppressed of the world. I remember him berating my gross consumerism when I was flaunting my new iPhone 4S back in 2011, and his concurrent endorsement of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I vividly recall his impassioned arguments with me and my ‘capitalist’ buddies on Facebook as we condemned the behaviour of the G20 protestors. He was also vehemently opposed to Obama’s Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the proposed globalist trade deal that sought to make it possible for foreign companies to sue sovereign peoples for refusing to buy their products (among many other nefarious clauses).
Bear in mind, this was back in my Patrick Bateman phase – I had recently entered the corporate world and was so enamoured with my suddenly flush bank balance and the trappings of big city life that my hitherto anti-establishment leanings had evaporated and I was 100% beholden to The System and all its frills and thrills.
I think Tom thought he could save me; bring me back to the left and show me that my comfortable new middle-class life was a sham, and that the system I served was duplicitous, rotten, and evil.
I always saw Tom as the canary in the coal mine, for while several of my former friends deleted me during my Patrick Bateman period, Tom seemed to be above all that – as an artist and self-styled intellectual I think he saw it as his place to educate me rather than cut me off. And I was touched and reassured year after year to find him still there on my friends list, even as I moved into my Don Draper phase and began extolling not only the pleasures of consumerism, but also the inherent good (or so I believed) of marketing and advertising (which was the industry I worked in at the time, and still do, for my sins); and even as I progressed from there into my Gatsby phase and plastered montages of my oh-so-fabulous social life all over Facebook and Instagram – my $2,000 suits, oysters, martinis, and champagne, all culminating in my ridiculously ostentatious wedding and subsequent honeymoon (my marriage lasted less than two years and looking back now I understand that I was more interested in the glamour I could conjure via the nuptial celebrations than I was in my fiancé).
The friends I lost during this period had every justification for snubbing me – my behaviour was insufferable. But Tom stuck around – maybe it was only because he felt obliged, for I had often patronised and promoted his artwork, but I also know he did harbour a certain fondness for me. At any rate, any time I felt I might have gone a little too far with everything (for these moments did occur – I was not entirely blind to myself) I would often check to see if he was still there – and he always was. The canary in the coal mine was still alive and kicking.
Tom even stuck around through my subsequent disenchantment with The System. Why should this be a surprise, you might ask. Surely this would have moved me philosophically closer to Tom. Ah, but you see, I had become a Trump supporter, and the establishment media pulled off the neat little trick of convincing most socialists that Trump was the new Hitler – despite his populist policies that actually sought to protect working class people and local industry, such as his withdrawal from the TPP agreement.
So when, after four years of pro-Trump rhetoric, Tom was still on my friends list, I was more than a little surprised. So acerbic had been the vitriol directed against the Orange Man by the entirety of the left, I’d been certain that, were I ever to lose my most prominent socialist friend, this would have been the catalyst.
Tom even stuck around through my strident criticism of the perhaps the most untouchable sacred cow of the left – Black Lives Matter. My cynicism toward this movement even precipitated a cancellation attempt by another former Facebook friend who contacted my employer and accused me of racism. But Tom stuck around.
He even endured my anti-lockdown crusade throughout 2020. During the back half of this year, as the city I was living in began to resemble something from Cold War era Eastern Europe, I became as vocal as I’ve ever been on politics, posting daily scornful tirades against the government and its agents.
Truth be known, my rhetoric was in fact beginning to resemble Tom’s in its unrelenting denunciation of globalist interests, the way they were destroying small businesses, and my oft-used phrases ‘we, the people’, and ‘workers of the world’. I was in fact beginning to sound rather like a Marxist.
In my own mind I was indeed completing some weird kind of full circle and coming back around to Tom’s way of thinking. So I was not overly surprised come 2021, to find that Tom was still on my list – despite the bizarre way the left had fallen in behind the lockdowns and mask mandates.
Then came the vaccines.
There followed, naturally, my vociferous condemnation of the whole affair – the serious questions around mRNA technology, the rushed production and emergency approval, the media whitewashing and Big Tech censorship of any criticism of the vaccines and their producers, and of course the government mandates.
The next time I looked, Tom had gone.
What I find most striking about finally being unfriended by Tom after more than a decade is not that he deleted me – I had been anticipating this for years – but the apparent catalyst that finally tipped him over the edge. This hardcore leftist had tolerated my gross consumerism, my adulation for an industry which he despised, my Trumpism, and even my condemnation of Black Lives Matter.
But when I began calling out hard-line government authoritarianism – he snapped.
At least, this is what I must assume – I’m not going to contact Tom and ask for an explanation. Apart from the fact that this simply isn’t done – I don’t actually care. I have made it a habit not to unfriend people, no matter how wildly I disagree with their politics. The whole point of living in a civilised society is that we must be able to disagree without ostracising those we disagree with, and it is a worrying facet of recent times the way the left in particular has adopted this tactic of cancellation. It sucks Tom and I can’t be friends anymore, but it was his call, not mine.
And to be sure, my story is anecdotal and circumstantial. Yet having thought long and hard about this, I fail to see what else could have caused his departure (I have not been talking about anything else). Perhaps this was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. But even if this is the case, I find it extremely revealing.
For what is leftism, at its base? It is authoritarianism.
Tom, for all his talk about the plight of the common man and the evils of big corporations, revealed his true colours when the chips were down. When all the bullshit was washed away, what Tom really wanted was an all-powerful state that would tell the people what to think and what to do.
And yet this is not the most inexplicable part of the story. What is most bizarre, is that Tom’s evident support of the state and its tyranny during 2020 and 2021 also implies a wholehearted endorsement of the commercial interests that worked hand-in-hand with the state during this time to both implement, and benefit from the lockdowns and mandates – namely big business, in particular Big Pharma, Big Tech, and other massive multinational corporations…
…The very same corporate crooks who Tom had been so passionately opposed to back in the Occupy Wall Street days.
I am not surprised that Tom revealed a hardcore authoritarian streak. All far-leftists are authoritarians. But I remain perplexed at the way the left has done a complete 360 on its opinion of globalism and big business, and how people like me now get called ‘far-right’ for opposing the tyranny of governments and corporations working in concert to snuff out small business and erode civil liberties. I discuss this political inversion in my article 5 Ways the Political Left and Right Have Swapped Places and what I think is actually behind it in my follow-up piece I Support the Current Thing.
This thing with Tom will most likely ultimately remain a mystery – but I am pretty adept at reading these strange little dances that we humans do, and I remain convinced after nine months’ pondering that Tom cut me loose because I came out so strongly against the vaccine tyranny. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps there’s some random, obscure explanation.
Or perhaps Tom is simply a neo-Stalinist acolyte of the New World Order.