You’ve wondered this. Whether or not you put the question into words. Don’t worry. That’s my job.

Why have leftists gone so completely bonkers?

You know they have. Some of the very same Democrats today embracing open borders, trans therapy for preteens, and virtual socialism … 20 years ago backed immigration enforcement, traditional marriage, and welfare reform. It’s not as if human nature has changed. “Science” hasn’t made any discoveries that would drive such radical changes. No, but the leaders of the mainstream left in America have embraced ideas which if you’d tarred them with in 2008 they’d have called you a panic-mongering nutcase.

It’s as if you’d moved away for 20 years, then come back to visit your old hometown. And your childhood pastor came to Christmas dinner. Only now he is a “she,” wearing a pink tutu, with a face tattoo of Rihanna. When you stare a bit, “she” asks you: “What happened? When did you become so intolerant?”

As the villain of the greatest film ever made, Zoolander, asked himself, “Am I taking crazy pills?”
 

 
No, but liberals are. And I’m here to identify the substances they’re high on. No, it’s not just a single drug. That might be easy. Instead the left is flying high on a dangerous cocktail — like those “speedballs” some poor souls used to take, blending cocaine to get them wired, and heroin to take the edge off.

Like good forensic scientists, let’s examine each drug separately, then turn to their interactions.

Cult-Level Religious Hysteria

We’ll give this drug a nice corporate pharmaceutical name. Call it Hysterion™. It’s all the rage on college campuses, from the faculty lounges right down to freshman dorms. It’s a type of speed. We might even call it the thinking man’s crystal meth.

No less a figure than gay liberal writer Andrew Sullivan has warned that the left’s cult of victim worship is turning into a puritanical, witch-hunting religion. And religions feed on zeal. It’s part of human nature that (up to a certain breaking point) we value something not so much for what we get out of it as for what we put into it. One-time Communist turned Catholic Douglas Hyde pointed this out in his crucial book Dedication and Leadership. He noted that the more the Party asked people to do, the more devoted they were to it. Conversely, a group where membership is easy and duties nominal generates less commitment. The same is true for churches, which is why those which confront cultural change by shouting “Uncle” as loud as they can tend to die out pretty quickly. (See “Mainline” Protestant churches and liberal Catholic orders.)

You can keep on escalating the moral demands you make of people and society, well past the point of prudence, reason, or even sanity.

But most religious movements know where to stop. If you believe that God made the world and it is good, you also think that human life is good. So you’ll draw the line at escalating the demands you make on people, somewhere well short of where your demands make life unlivable. Or threaten the future of the species. So even the most zealous monks in the early Church knew better than to urge apostolic poverty, celibate chastity, and religious obedience on the whole population. As I’ve pointed out before, that would solve all social problems in 70 short years. But it doesn’t fit in with the orthodox teaching that God made the world and found it “good.” In fact, one way to test some novel theory of the “real” and “radical” message of Christianity is to test it against this standard. (Read more about my “brimstone test” here.)

Let’s say you’re not bound by the trammels of orthodoxy. You’ve adopted a Gnostic notion that the world as it now exists is evil, and you’re part of an elite whose secret knowledge can redeem it. Well, then, all bets are off now, aren’t they?  

The Stronger You Make the Kool-Aid, the More People Want to Drink It

You can keep on escalating the moral demands you make of people and society, well past the point of prudence, reason, or even sanity. Whatever Higher Power you’ve decided to treat as a god (equality, sexual freedom, utilitarian hedonism, or the ever-popular false god Payback), you won’t find any speedbumps slowing your race to the bottom. You are perfectly free to make outrageous, unthinkable claims and impossible demands. That won’t make you seem crazy, at least not to your fellow true believers. Instead, you will seem more virtuous, even “purer,” more consumed by righteous zeal. So instead of being restrained by considerations of mere “reality,” you’ll be goaded by gnostic zeal. The more counter-intuitive and savage the demands you make, the better.

That’s why Jim Jones’ followers drank the Kool-Aid. And it’s why today’s feminists feel free to denounce heterosexuality itself. It’s why socialists disgusted by lingering inequality can double down on their dogmas, even in the face of tens of millions murdered by Marxism, and the poverty hounding Venezuelans today. And it’s why Queer Theory proponents can defend gay male promiscuity, and blame the AIDS epidemic on … the Reagan administration. It’s how multiculturalists in Europe can skip lightly past the plague of rapes, anti-Semitic attacks, and violent extremism which Muslims brought to their countries. The more scrupulous leftist believers are in ignoring reality and punishing human life, the deeper, stronger, and purer they prove their faith. Perfect imperviousness to arguments or evidence is the surest sign you’re among the Elect.

Endzone Dancing on the Faces of Your Enemies

The other drug in the contemporary leftist cocktail is more like a steroid. Like massive doses of testosterone, it elevates aggressiveness and the urge to dominate. It also suppresses the moral reasoning centers of the brain, causing a kind of induced sociopathy. Since it replaces empathy with vicious glee, let’s call it Sadistica™.

If you’re mainlining or even just snorting Sadistica™, you have a different and stronger reason for grabbing outrageous ideas. You take them up mainly to impose them on your enemies. The more outrageous and sickening your opponents find them, the better. In fact, that’s the point. Anybody, weak or strong, could spread reasonable, persuasive ideas. That’s sophomore stuff. But if you can force people to obediently repeat blatant absurdities on the pain of losing their friends, their jobs, or even their freedom … Now that’s intellectual power, my friends.

George Orwell knew this. The political system he concocted for 1984 was titled “Oligarchical Collectivism.” Its vision of the future was simple, as Party enforcer O’Brien explained to Winston Smith: “A boot, crushing a human face, forever.”

Think about it. Big Brother didn’t have any tangible interest in undermining mathematics. The Inner Party demanded that people not just repeat, but come to believe that 2+2=5 for one simple reason. Because it was absurd. To prove to itself, once and for all, that no corner of the human mind could escape its power.

That’s got to be part of the reason that leftists try to ban, silence, or destroy us if we won’t admit that men can breast feed or menstruate. Why they want to destroy Christian bakers, but cover up for Muslims who train children to be school shooters. It’s why Twitter bans Laura Loomer as a bigot for denouncing bigotry. But leaves untouched the bigots whom she complained about. It’s not so much that Twitter’s executives have any sympathy for the likes of Louis Farrakhan. But they can display their power by openly flouting their company’s terms of service, any time they want. And there’s not a dang thing we can do about it.

The interaction of two such powerful drugs is especially dangerous, and intoxicating. It allows you to preen as a saint, while performing an endzone dance on a human face, forever.