Making Sense of the Chaos. Part Twenty-Five

The Two Faces of the “Left:” Warm Fuzzy vs. Cold Creepy

The so-called “Left” has been with us since the French mob stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789. As I’ve written in earlier posts to this series, to understand what the “Left” really is, and has always been, it’s necessary to refer back to the old Medieval institution of the Estates-General, a functional and political division of society into three categories or “estates” — the clergy, the aristocracy, and the “everybody else” category, the folks who did all the productive work, the so-called Third Estate.

The “Left,” after the storming of the Bastille, consisted of everyone who claimed to be on the side of the Third Estate, and who opposed the First and the Second Estates, the established clergy and the established aristocracy.

At the time the mob took the Bastille, the First Estate was the Roman Catholic Church, and the Second Estate was the King, his court, and all the titled aristocrats whose land ownership had accrued to them over the centuries.

And, as I’ve also written before, in our current times the First Estate has shifted to the power structure of the universities, not a traditional church, but its replacement. I call them, for convenience, the Preachers of Woke. A sterling example of today’s First Estate is the former President of Harvard, Claudine Gay.

What, then, is today’s Second Estate? No, they don’t have titles like duke, or earl, or marquis, or baron. They have security clearances. They are not granted plots of agricultural land or castles, but government positions and NGO positions which never really go away; and instead of titles, security clearances are their reward. This new, contemporary Second Estate I call the Deep State.

What, then is left of the Third Estate, the “everybody else” in all of society, the productive workers? The original “Left” of the French Revolution claimed to be champions of the Third Estate. Does the “Left,” now, during the third decade of the 21st Century, still really support the Third Estate?

The short answer is no. Today’s “Left” is invested in the success of the Preachers of Woke and the Deep State. Today’s “Left” has abandoned all concern for productive workers.

But in the hearts and minds of the average person these days, the “Left” lives on basking in the afterglow of a reputation that began to be built for them when the first French revolutionary set foot in the Bastille.

This “Left” is what I call the Warm, Fuzzy Left. It scarcely exists in the real physical world, but only in memories, imaginations, legends, stories, and propaganda.

Not all of us, but most of us, have buried or not-so-buried memories of the Warm, Fuzzy Left. We only need recall World War Two, when the global conflict was between the Allies and the Axis. Who were the Allies? The USA, Great Britain, and… yes, the Stalinist USSR. “Uncle Joe” Stalin was thought of as warm and fuzzy back then, and his warmth and fuzziness has never completely worn off, though the US Deep State and allies tried to extinguish it in the Cold War.

While the actual Stalinist “Left” was ruling Eastern Europe with an iron fist, in the “free world” the “Left” was seen by many as the defender of the unionized working man and woman, and as the opponent of Jim Crow racism. That reputation still exists; one only needs to read Facebook posts to see how firmly embedded it is in the collective memory.

But let’s go back to the French Revolution again, because we all know that there was a very cold and very creepy “Left,” even back then. To focus in on the cold, creepy Left of the 1790’s it helps to recall a painting by Jacques-Louis David, called The Death of Marat.

A man is slumped over in an old-fashioned bathtub, the tub covered with bloody white sheets. He is holding a bloodstained note. Who was this, and what was going on here? (Link to the painting.)

The man, who is indeed dead, was a journalist named Jean-Paul Marat. As depicted, he has just been stabbed. By whom? A member of the aristocracy? A hit man sent by a secret occult society of the Church? No.

Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed by a young middle-class woman named Charlotte Corday. She was a member of the warm fuzzy Left of the time, called the Girondins. The Girondins were systematically executed by guillotine following the incident, as the original version of the cold, creepy Left began their trail of torture and murder, a trail which never really ended.

Why did Charlotte Corday kill Marat, and what happened to her after doing so?

In September of 1792, France was under external threat from other kingdoms who were terrified that the revolution would spread. All kinds of suspects of counter-Revolutionary leanings had been imprisoned by that time, such as priests, “moderates” and genuine Royalists, and during that grim September, the majority of those prisoners were released from their cells and massacred.

Marat was a rabble-rousing journalist known for making extreme threats in his newspaper articles and pamplets, and Charlotte Corday considered him to be a traitor to the Revolution for that reason. She sentenced Marat to death at her own hand, and she herself was guillotined only four days later.

No, after the September Massacres, the Death of Marat, and the execution by guillotine of Charlotte Corday, the “Left” wasn’t warm and fuzzy any more. It had become very bloodthirsty, and… still is.

That brings us to May of 2024, the month when I am writing this.

Perhaps I can sum up the current situation by asserting that today’s “Left” is all Marat, all the time: very cold and very creepy.

Let’s take a look at the alphabet soup, and at the steady flow of propaganda.

DEI, ESG, WEF. And now SJP, that’s “Students for Justice in Palestine.”

Guillotines?

No guillotines.

Drones. Loitering munitions. Dog-like robots with machine guns on their backs… have they been deployed yet, or they only in development?

And bioweapons… have bioweapons been deployed? Was COVID a bioweapon? Was the COVID vaccine a bioweapon? Are suppressed drugs like Ivermectin and promoted drugs like Paxlovid bioweapons or weapons of psychological warfare? Look at other posts on Substack and try to figure out which might be an answer you believe.

Sure, some of you can remember when the “Left” was the good guys, and many of you still think so. Warm and fuzzy lasts a long time in the heart.

But, if you’re like me, and shiver from time to time, it’s understandable. There’s a lot of cold and a lot of creepy out there.