SNEAK PEEK: New Essay

I ask the important question: Are leftists retards?

Grand rising, my friends. Here’s a new essay I wrote yesterday. It’s called “Are Leftists Retards?” It’s a question we’ve all probably asked ourselves, and probably more than once. In this case, I was prompted to ask it again by some of the scenes I witnessed from the Gaza campus protests that have taken place over the last couple of weeks. I’m sure you probably know exactly which scenes I’m talking about.

In the essay, I consider the relationship between biology and political orientation, taking in everything from Oswald Spengler to Roald Dahl’s wonderful children’s book The Twits, which I loved as a child.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments below the piece.

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Are leftists retards?

I found myself asking this familiar question once again this week, as I surveyed the carnage taking place on university campuses across America.

Now, when I say “retard,” I don’t just mean “stupid” or “poorly organised” or “inept.” Of course these people are stupid, poorly organised and inept, however much money and training George Soros has thrown at them. (If The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal are correct, that’s a lot of money and training.)  

You don’t need to study these people for long to see this—whether they’re issuing absurd demands about being provided with Plan B pills, dental dams and HIV medication, or attempting, farcically, to break out of a police cordon wielding shields made from old bins and wearing paintball masks.

Yes, the Gaza encampments are definitely more than a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

But I mean something deeper. I’m talking about the type of people who are leftists. I’m talking about biology.  

I realise I’m on dangerous ground here. The last time I gave strong voice to my opinions on this subject, in a podcast appearance in 2021, the doleful agents of left-liberal orthodoxy swang into action, as they do, to put me back in my place.

How can you say those things? Do you know who else said those things?

I think you can guess who they were referring to. He had a little moustache that went out of fashion in the 1940s and has never come back in again since.

Even so, I’ll say what I said then. Look at the mugshots of the arrestees from the Columbia and New York Gaza protests. What do you see? Be honest.

These people are ugly, ill-formed. They send the lizard brain haywire—the parts of your brain that are so old, that have persisted so long, because the notifications they send pinging to your conscious mind prevented our ancestors from, literally, going extinct.

These people are not just ugly. They’re bad too.

These people have the faces and the bodies they deserve. They are literal physical manifestations of the ugliness of leftist ideas.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to tell you that ugly people are bad. Roald Dahl nailed it in The Twits. People who are not conventionally attractive—people who are overweight or have buck-teeth or a big wonky nose and jug ears­­, or all of these things—can still be beautiful if they are good. The goodness shines out of them.

These people are different. These people are physical avatars of chaos, and their physical form is not incidental to that fact. And you know it.

Listen to your lizard brain.

In the 1930s, in the aftermath of Spain’s bloody Civil War, a Spanish psychiatrist listened to his. He wanted to understand whether there was a particular type of person who became a radical leftist of the kind that would—oh, I don’t know—dig up and publicly defile the bodies of monks and nuns when they weren’t bayoneting and bludgeoning all the living ones they could find.

Dr Antonio Vallejo Nagera classified a third of the English members of the International Brigade he examined as “mental retards.” Another third were categorised as suffering degenerative mental illnesses that were making them schizophrenic, paranoid or psychopathic. Many of these people were “social imbeciles,” he deduced, which made them prey to Marxist ideology.

“Once more we see confirmed that social resentment, frustrated aspirations and envy are the sources of Marxism,” Nagera wrote.

“The persistence of the ideological attitude of the English Marxists is the result of their closed minds and lack of culture.”

Like James Lindsay, you might feel squeamish when a certain period of Spain’s recent history is mentioned, despite its obvious importance for understanding the depth of the evil we face today and the terrible price of failure if we don’t defeat it. Thankfully, there are plenty of other very clever, very perceptive people who looked at leftists and saw the same things as Dr Nagera did.

The great Oswald Spengler, for example, described, in The Hour of Decision, how the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was not some great victory of the working classes, but of “the work-shy rabble of the cities which is ready at any time to plunder and murder”—of the lowliest, worst, most resentful people in Russian society. Legendary White Russian general Pyotr Wrangel tells us, in his memoir Always with Honor, that one of the first things the Bolsheviks made sure to do when they entered a town or city was to empty the jails, because within their cells lay the Bolsheviks’ true demographic: the criminals and the insane. These people didn’t need to be told to rob and murder. They didn’t even need to be told who to rob and murder. They would just do it, and be thankful and loyal to anybody who gave them the opportunity.