One of the drivers for the left in their very public protests is that they often have nothing going in their personal lives.
Imagine being a card-carrying lefty. You get up and go to block a street in the name of climate change. In the afternoon, you join a college campus protest against Israeli genocide. Finally, at night, you march with the local Antifa branch to protest Donald Trump and ICE activities in your town. Tomorrow will be more of the same, maybe with a protest against the oligarchy with Bernie Sanders and a visit to the local high school to watch Bob “Betty” Brown take all of the girls’ trophies. There is barely time to catch a bite to eat.
As many have pointed out, the right seems less prone to protests because it actually has a life. If one has a family, religious obligations and a job or company, he or she has very little time to get glued to the street or hold a sign demanding a pan-galactic intifada against those Jews. Taking care of children is a 24/7 job that in the early years does not allow for a moment for them to be unattended. The tendencies on the left are not to marry, not to bring children, not to buy into religion or any of its obligations, and to define one’s identity by his or her political views. There are many for whom politics and social media are their lives. May God have mercy.
If one were to ask our young warriors about their lives, they would tell you the social importance of all that they do. For example, their blocking ICE is based on the idea that the U.S. has a moral obligation to take in anyone who wants to come into the country. This has nothing to do with being a refugee from violence; if you come, then the U.S. owes you entry as well as goodies such as food and housing to make your stay as pleasant as possible. They would say how Israel is murdering Palestinians for sport, even if all of the evidence points to an opposite conclusion. In Europe, they like to compare the modern Palestinians to the Jews of the Holocaust. Never mind that Jews did not murder and rape thousands of Germans, but you know, good guys/bad guys—oppressed/oppressors constructs. “This time, we’re not going to screw up as during the Holocaust. This time we’re going to help the downtrodden victims.” It’s interesting that in both periods, it’s the Jews who get shafted, once by being murdered by the Nazis and today, by supporting the Palestinians who murdered Jews wholesale. Interesting how that works.
While those on the left would claim a moral high ground for trying to save the planet from overheating or protecting Palestinians from Israeli drones and tanks, the reality is that many of these modern warriors have little to nothing going in their personal lives. By making social issues central to their existence, they don’t have to look too hard into the mirror to wonder what they are doing with their lives. Days become years, and the years pass by without marriage, home ownership or children. Every person is given exactly 24 hours each day. How he uses them is a good deal up to him. If one goes back decades, people went to school, often joined the armed forces, attended college, got married, and then worked to support a family. They married, brought up children and then enjoyed some retirement before leaving this world. That traditional life is not dead, but it has become more the exception than the rule in most college settings. I remember 40 years ago back at Harvard there was one married couple (who happened to be orthodox Jews) among thousands of undergraduates. They were a lovely couple, but we looked at them as some kind of living museum piece—like some ancient relic from a time when many married during or just after college. Charlie Kirk’s advice of “get married, have kids” is brilliant as it is traditional. That’s how it was for most of history. Only in the past few decades, as religious observance in the West has deteriorated has the associated life of faith, family and friends also vanished. A person can drive across the country to attend some anti-ICE protest in LA, but he would not think to get married and build a family where he actually lives.
One of the great advantages that religion provided in the past was a set of scales as to the importance of things. If one is gangbusters to stop the use of oil, that’s his business. But in the past he would have known that family and religious obligations come before gluing his hand to I-80. But when a person does not have a moral compass that comes with a religious viewpoint, then he can hold banners supporting mass murderers and rapists, he can call a president who is a great friend of the Jewish people and Israel Hitler, and he can demand that the country prioritize unassimilated illegal foreigners over homeless veterans. Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said in his famous 1978 Harvard address, A World Split Apart, that the root of most social problems in the West was the decline of religiosity and the rise of materialism. Many see religion as a source of division, hatred, and at times, violence. But they don’t see that religious life can give meaning, purpose, focus and values. I can go to less than 1 percent of all of the restaurants in the world; a nonreligious Jew would allow himself to eat in any and all of them. Sure, I drool when I pass an amazing restaurant, but I’ll go with a kosher peanut butter and jelly sandwich over a Michelin starred filet mignon dinner. Kosher offerings have improved markedly over the decades, but the fundamental question remains the same. Do you put yourself or God first? Everything falls into line with that basic question.
There is no question that much of the protesting exists due to external funding. Lefty billionaires pay protesters to destroy the right and the fundamental underpinnings of working societies. Black Lives Supposedly Matter actually had on their manifesto website their opposition to Israel and their goal to destroy the nuclear family. What does Israel have to do with a white cop shooting a black criminal, the only event category that interested them? And why would they want to destroy the family, the basic building block of successful Western societies? People like George Soros want a world of chaos, one in which they can both profit and establish control. The combination of paying oligarchs and internally empty young people has yielded the violent protests of Antifa, pro-Hamas students and climate zealots. As we saw during Covid, society is a fragile thing, and it does not take much to weaken or destroy it. The West’s centuries of success have been based more on builders like Charlie Kirk than on destroyers like George Soros. I feel sorry for that protester who comes back to his rented flat, looks in the mirror, and then realizes if only for a fleeting moment that his life is empty. There is no there, there. No wife to cherish, children to bring up, community to support. Maybe a beer, a drag on an electronic cigarette, and then those fleeting thoughts are put back in the vault. It’s time for a protest against the end of DEI at the local DMV.