Oh So Close!

I don’t pretend to understand what liberals are thinking, mostly because so few of them are interested in or capable of anything resembling critical thinking.

Having said that, there certainly are more than zero left-wing types who are actually pretty smart. I used to run into some in college and my earlier days on the internet. A few of my poli sci professors were on the far left and could at least articulate their arguments. This was back in the days of yore when at least some liberals could respond to an argument with something other than screeching “racist!” or “fascist!”.

Non-retarded liberals, an admittedly small group, have found themselves over the last decade facing an unpalatable choice.

a) They admit that some of the leftist crap is over the top, wrong headed and dangerous.

b) They just keep going along with whatever comes in order to keep the money flowing.

J.K. Rowling is an example of the first. An ardent “feminist”, her legion of lonely, homely girls and gay dude superfans lived life through the lens of Harry Potter. Now I enjoyed the books and the movies for what they were but these people considered them holy writ and when Rowling pointed out that pretending men were women and giving a dude access to women’s private spaces because he was wearing panties was wrong and dangerous, most of her rabid fan base turned on her. Fortunately for Rowling she has “fuck you money” and has held her ground, often openly mocking her detractors.

Recently Emma Watson who played Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movies and became stinking rich and famous as a result, but who had been nasty to Rowling because Watson took option b, sort of tried to pretend she had always been pals with Rowling despite publicly shitting on her. Rowling wasn’t having it and eviscerated her on social media. It was delightful. I won’t embed the video but The Critical Drinker recorded a video about it here: Crash And Burn – The Emma Watson Story. With her looks fading fast, watch for Watson to try to get a last big payday by getting nekkid in a film soon.

That brings me to the liberal in question, one Matthew Yglesias. Yglesias is a blogger, which isn’t a real job although it can be time consuming. Believe me on that. Still he reportedly pulls in well over a million bucks per year via Substack. He wrote a book in 2020 calling for “One Billion Americans”, a goal to be achieved by mass non-White immigration. While his last name is Yglesias, his early life sez:

Yglesias is the son of Rafael Yglesias, a screenwriter and novelist. His paternal grandfather, novelist Jose Yglesias, was of Cuban and Spanish Galician descent, while his paternal grandmother, the novelist Helen Yglesias (née Bassine) was the daughter of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from the Russian-controlled portion of Poland. His mother, Margaret Joskow, was a daughter of Jules Joskow, the founder of National Economic Research Associates; the economist Paul Joskow is Yglesias’s uncle. His maternal grandparents were also of Eastern European Jewish descent.

Say it with me:

Even so, little Matt is showing some signs of taking option a. He left Vox in 2020 at least partially, so he says, because the modern Left treats any disagreement with The Current Thing to be tantamount to a violent assault. His most recent piece, archived to deny him any extra clicks, is something of a mea culpa: The paradox of progressive racial politics.

In the post he laments that maybe banning fracking wasn’t that smart, that letting boys play in girl’s sports leagues is damaging women’s sports and that Medicare for all isn’t really practical at this time. He called the people running the Chicago Teacher’s Union dumb for celebrating the life of domestic terrorist Assata Shakur. It is a subtle walking back of some of the more loony positions the Left has adopted and even a slight admission of the horrible idea of framing everything as RACIST.

One thing he wrote caught my eye, mainly because Steve Sailer pointed it out as I don’t read Yglesias. I don’t have time to read most of what people I enjoy reading are putting out much less liberals. Yglesias wrote this about gun control/gun violence:

If all the privately owned firearms somehow vanished from the United States tomorrow, that would do an enormous amount to bring down the murder rate. But that goes against every tradition that we have in this country, and it’s not something that people want. I think it makes Democrats look silly when we start talking like regulating exactly which kind of rifles hobbyists can buy is going to make a difference to a crime problem that is overwhelmingly about small, easily concealed handguns, most of which aren’t even purchased legally. The kind of “gun control” we actually need is to arrest people carrying illegal guns, and to crack down on the people selling them. I think we really need to bend over backwards to reassure law-abiding people that this is not a slippery slope to gun confiscation, and that means not even nibbling around the edges of restricting people’s Second Amendment rights.

The maximalist position from the Left is complete civilian disarmament. That makes for an easy job for 2A advocates.

Arresting people who are committing crimes? What a novel idea! I wish I had thought of that! Notice that last bit carefully:

….that means not even nibbling around the edges of restricting people’s Second Amendment rights

Damn son. He is talking about focusing on the people committing gun violence rather than the tools they use to commit gun violence. Bravo Matt, you sort of figured it out!

What cracked me up, especially in a post titled “The paradox of progressive racial politics” is that he still missed The Big Picture. Look at his first sentence again:

If all the privately owned firearms somehow vanished from the United States tomorrow, that would do an enormous amount to bring down the murder rate.

As I pointed out on Sailer’s post, if you changed the sentence slightly to this:

“If all the non-Whites somehow vanished from the United States tomorrow, that would do an enormous amount to bring down the murder rate.”

Fixed it for him without infringing on the 2nd Amendment.

I am sure even Yglesias knows that gun violence in America is mostly a black thang. It is that right in the open taboo topic that liberals still won’t talk about. Walking back a fracking ban is one thing but naming blacks as the main perpetrators of gun violence is still a bridge too far for Matthew. He comes about as close to it as you can without saying it though, the reason why so much attention is focused on the tool rather than the criminal is that everyone knows that if you focus on the criminal that means a lot of blacks in jail.

What I don’t know for sure is if Matthew Yglesias is really coming to his senses and recognizing the overreach on the Left or if he is just carefully tacking back to the center for purely monetary reasons. I suspect mostly the latter but even if that is the case, it says that for many people the Left has just gone way too far. We saw some of that in the 2024 “election” and even more with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I doubt it will last long but at least for now it means more people are waking up to just how insane the Left has become, especially in contrast with the still wrong but at least reasonable liberalism of decades ago.

It won’t change the overall trajectory of the near future but it ought to mean more people at least willing to listen to what /ourguys/ have to say.