It’s Time to See the Left for What It Is: A Bunch of Screeching Babies–and Those Afraid of Them

You see a child acting out in the middle of a mall shouting, kicking garbage bins, spitting at people, and generally making a scene. What do you do? Admonish him? Ignore him? Try to locate his absent parent? Or do you humbly fall to your knees, awestruck, begging the infant to share with you his solutions for climate change, geopolitical unrest, and systemic racism?

The American Left suffers from two serious problems. The first is that it has a strong base of over-schooled, uninformed, loud and belligerent brats cosplaying as the paladins of justice and virtue. The second is that the remaining thoughtful and conscientious members of the Left have taught themselves to see the brats not as callow anarchists but rather as virtuous truth tellers. The violent outbursts, the vengeful excommunication of dissenters, the praising of looting and marauding––the adults in the room have taught themselves to see these not as the symptoms of childlike narcissism but as the Delphic wisdom of hearts untainted by cynicism and late-stage capitalism.

This tantrum worship is rooted in a nostalgic and guilty sense that we must heed the unsullied innocence of the next generation, especially when the next generation lectures us about failing them. There’s more to it, though: For the American Left, going through the citadels of higher education is a sacrament. The fact that elite universities produce these violent mobs ipso facto means that the mobs know something the adults don’t. Otherwise, what was the $120,000 education for?

In truth, there’s little moral content and even less intellectual coherence in this pseudo-social movement (call it whatever you want: wokeism, the elect, social justice, the “pay for my student loans or you’re racist” brigade). That should have been apparent by now. But the reactions in recent weeks to the 10/7 pogrom in Israel, when Hamas brutally slaughtered over 1,200 Israelis (mostly civilians) and kidnapped over 240, made the truth of this mob impossible to miss: kids extolling a massacre as a form of “joyful” spiritual liberation, academics expressing exhilaration about the mutilation of innocents, crowds rallying around calls for more bloodshed (“There is only one solution: Intifada revolution”).

People who screeched that “silence is violence” then cheered the actual violence of Hamas and cowed universities to stay silent about it. The crowd that implored us to “believe all women” became a task force of rape denial. The movement that accuses the GOP of perpetrating a genocide against transgender people vows obeisance to a death cult that would simply defenestrate them. The journalists who warned about the Trumpian darkness snuffing out democracy now make apologies for the dictators who murdered all members of their opposition party and imprison and torture political dissidents.

For many observers, these appear to be shocking hypocrisies. But hypocrisies require some belief structure. There is none here. A Star Wars-based heuristic that divides the world into Evil Empire and Plucky Rebels is not a real ethical system. Those still shocked by the incoherence of the mob simply refuse to see that behind the marches and the sloganeering, the traffic blocking and the vandalism, there’s nothing but unadulterated (and un-adulted) rage.

This delusion that mistakes temper tantrums for moral clarity needs to end.

We need to stop acting like these are serious people. It doesn’t matter how compassionate they think they are. We can wholly disregard the content of the heart of an NYU student when she chooses to spend her time seeking and defacing the images of kidnapped children. We can disregard the content of the heart of the professor who professes ecstatic, ecumenical joy upon learning of the rape and immolation of women of all ages. It does not matter whether these people are merely catastrophically childish or hellishly bloodthirsty. They are not the material on which a healthy society is built. They are fans of cruelty who concocted a lexicon of bullshit to make the dismemberment of babies seem sophisticated and noble.

We don’t regard white nationalists as a legitimate part of our national conversation. We don’t regard child traffickers as a legitimate lobby. Nor do we let five-year-olds drive cars. We need to stop regarding the whingy, verbose, screechy radicals as anything but grandiloquent nihilists with nothing to contribute to society.

We need to disregard their language: decolonization, intersectionality, problematization, positionality. These multisyllabic wonders aren’t the ciphers to moral truth or social justice. They are mental deadweight meant to confuse, distract and complicate how we think. If anything, employers should refuse to hire anyone who regularly uses words with more than three syllables.

We need to remind ourselves that society can run itself, heal itself, criticize itself just fine, even better, without the theatrics and histrionics of self-infatuated, self-righteous chaos bullies. We need to start ignoring the overgrown babies who advise us to commit social suicide.

Let the kids throw their tantrum rallies. If they act out and get violent, punish them. Otherwise, let them scream and cry as they please, but stop taking them seriously. We’ll focus on rebuilding our crumbling institutions, helping the weakest among us thrive, relearning how to prosper as a pluralistic, open, diverse society. If and when the radicals are ready to grow up, they’ll be welcome to join us.

Adaam James Levin-Areddy is the cohost of the Uncertain Things podcast and a senior producer at The Dispatch.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.