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The ‘Complexity’ of Idiocy

Often, yours truly has expounded (okay, ranted) upon the term “narrative,” which is just an artful euphemism for “lie.” A device drawn from fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, it facilitates lying by eliding the need for providing the facts and proving the truth of one’s assertions. Consequently, it is a boon to propagandists, who can harp on a “narrative” ad nauseum to provoke and persuade the public to do as the purveyor of the lie seeks.

For the Left, one oft used word signaling an impending narrative is the word “complexity.” Usage of this word allows the Leftist to cull and, importantly, dispense with whatever facts or allegations they choose to create a narrative. This is critical in instances where the facts at hand lead to an ineluctable conclusion – i.e., the truth – that is antithetical to the Left’s aim. Let us explore four instances of the Left’s “complexity” of idiocy driving a narrative harmful to America and the world.

In American domestic policy, the Left is not content with foisting cancel culture upon the country and coopting the corporate media to control the political debate. The Left wants to silence any dissent to its authoritarian aims. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution recognizes and protects the God-given rights to each citizen of “political rights,” such as free speech. One would think the constitution’s prohibition would be the last word on censorship; but one would be underestimating the Left’s power to pretend the clear prohibition of government censorship is, instead, “complex.”

Consequently, as they have on college campuses, the Left has been weaponizing federal and state governments both directly and through colluding with private entities to censor free speech.  Creating the camouflage of “complexity” by pretending there exists a transcendent right not to be “offended” and purporting to be promoting “safety,” the censorious Left’s aim is to cloud the truth that the supreme law of the land prohibits the government from infringing upon Americans’ free speech and all political rights. And no amount of faux complexity can obscure the fact that there is nothing more dangerous than a censor.

In the realm of American foreign policy, a classic example is the Left’s obstinate determination to appease the terrorist regime in Iran. Citing imagined “moderate” mullahs, ignoring the Iranian people’s courageous efforts to be free, and abiding the delusion Iran’s nuclear program can be managed for solely energy purposes and separated from the regime’s exportation of terror, the Left has manufactured the complexity it hopes can convince someone other than themselves that this barbarous, tyrannical government does not really mean it when it screams, “Death to America!  Death to Israel!”

Spoiler alert: they really mean it.

The Iran Deal, too, also affords the opportunity to examine how the Left uses their other “prog whistles” of “nuance” in conjunction with “complexity.” After ginning up sufficient “complexity” regarding an issue, the Left then breaks out “nuance” to both preen about their alleged intellectual and moral superiority and to justify an otherwise obviously imbecilic policy decision. Once that imbecilic policy decision results in the expected disaster, the Left regurgitates how the situation is “complex” to avoid the bitter fruits of their “nuanced” lunacy. In sum, this three-legged fool of policy making it is nothing but a formula to escape accountability for the consequences of their actions and ideology.

On the world stage, far from dissipating as it metastasizes from the domestic Left into the global Left, the complexity mounts to more egregious heights of hypocrisy and willful blindness.  Consider rogue regimes’, the global elite’s, and the United Nations’ sympathy and/or outright support of the terrorist organization Hamas against democratic Israel. This is manifested in the “complexity of idiocy” in the mealy-mouthed objections to Hamas’ terrorist atrocities against Israelis and their tourists that never fail to include a tacit or implicit “but.” This is merely the hypocritical version of the vile declarations of Hamas supporters who claim “resistance” – i.e., the killing, raping, torturing, and kidnapping of Israeli civilians and tourists – is “justified” because Gaza is “occupied.” Gaza is not occupied by Israel. But the Left’s narrative requires its protagonists to be victims, so they can justify any action, however evil, against their imagined “oppressors.” And, because of their hubristic belief they are better than anyone else and, ergo, empowered to propagate the “noble lie” to attain their allegedly “altruistic” aims – voila! – the Left transmogrifies the terrorists into “liberators” and their victims into “oppressors.” While seemingly lost upon and/or callously dismissed by the global Left, the perversity of their global Left’s “complexity” and “nuance” is not lost upon nor capable of being dismissed by the Hamas terrorists’ victims.

Equally, it is also instructive what the Left deems not complex. Ponder their Manichean, paranoiac narratives of “us good, them bad” that (to them at least) justify their every indulgence and excesses.  The Left has no compunction in pronouncing a former duly elected president as an abject threat to their fundamental transformation of “democracy” into anything but; brand nearly half the country who voted for him as potential domestic terrorists – especially if they “cling” to their religion and rights.

The Left’s “complexity of idiocy” is the bitter fruit of a disordered soul. As a result, the Left is less a political movement than a neurotic clown collective arrogantly spouting toxic imbecility under the threadbare cloak of intellectual “complexity” to foist its radical, extreme, and dangerous policies upon Americans. Then again, in fairness to the Left, amidst these chaotic times most things are “complex” for tiny, bigoted minds.

Oh, that fourth instance where the facts belie one of the Left’s “complex” narratives? “The Democrats are the smart party.”

An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) represented Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003-2012, and served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars; and a Monday co-host of the “John Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media appearances.

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About Thaddeus G. McCotter

An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) represented Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003 to 2012 and served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars, and a Monday co-host of the "John Batchelor Show" among sundry media appearances.

Photo: WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 13: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (L) and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (R) listen as U.S. President Joe Biden meets with Indonesian President Joko Widodo in the Oval Office of the White House November 13, 2023 in Washington, DC. Biden and Widodo were expected to discuss a range of bilateral issues during their meeting. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Notable Replies

  1. Hmmm. While I do applaud the sentiment, I see the Left as engaged more in obscurantism and being deontological than merely stupid. One way of putting it is that the Left has merely taken what their professors taught them seriously. From the trans/gender lunacy to climate change, the activist in and out of govt it merely acting upon what they have been taught. Greta Thunberg to Ibram X. Kendi to Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac (she a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, a lesbian, obese Marxist), they are all acting upon the theories presented to them as ‘truth’ in university.

    Just take the ‘Decolonization’ movement. Most students at university studying politics or sociology or history will read Franz Fanon’s work on Decolonization which includes how the society and colonized person’s psychology are to be healed. Killing the colonizer is a necessary catalyst for the catharsis of the mindset of the colonized. It’s not enough to merely free them from colonial oppression, without the expiation of the destructive identity imposed on the colonized via the action of oppressing and killing the colonizer that new Decolonized self cannot be realized.

    So, slaughter of the colonizer makes sense to them. In the case of the Zionists, it’s really too bad that they have been colonizers. It becomes really inconvenient for my fellow conservatives to face this. Which is so daft and dense and intentionally blind, it’s hard to understand. For those who think calling Zionism a colonial movement isn’t accurate, just ask what Zionism’s aim was and is? To create new state in Palestine that didn’t exist that is majority Jewish, governed by a Jewish government that will maintain Israel as the homeland for Jews worldwide. Today, it’s about maintaining and expanding that state.

    It could be the example cited in the dictionary of a colonizing exercise. One does not have to even acknowledge the 750k Arab Muslims ethnically cleansed in '48 to create the Jewish majority state to see Zionism as an innately colonizing effort. What makes this so hypocritical to the Arabs and Muslims is this: The U.N. created the partition that gave land to the Zionists, not some colonial power. The U.N. Charter makes clear that the U.N.'s primary purpose was Decolonization and to bring about a post-colonial world order. But one of its first major actions was to ignore the ‘right of self-determination’ the West brayed on and on about for the Arab Muslims who’d been living there for over 1000 years. Jews had lived there peacefully for as long as 1000 years in some places. The 25,000 Jews in Palestine in the late 1800s when Herzl started his program of mass importation of Jews into Palestine pleaded for him to stop. They stated publicly that this would result in endless war. Our State Dept, military and intel services made this clear to Truman.

    You don’t have to know any of that either to know it’s colonizing. So, folks, who’s the ‘idiot’ in this dialog?

  2. Today’s article by Mr. McCotter rings true as it sort of dovetails with something I’ve been pondering a few weeks. It springs from the book Ecclesiastes, 3:8.

    The idiocy, or if you prefer, unadulterated evil of the left (and the Democrat Party) simply cannot be abided any longer. The ideology and all its adherents, defenders, supporters, enablers, financiers, etc., must be defeated. But to do that requires a certain mindset.

    Thus, we turn to the book of Ecclesiastes.

    We are now, at this very moment, facing a time in our lives–and in the life of our nation–where we are literally facing extinction; as the left likes to pedantically intone in reference to Donald Trump and those phantom “white supremacists”, an existential threat.

    And while the left is correct about an “existential” danger, the “threat” is neither Trump nor white supremacy, it’s leftism, globalism, fascism–call it what you will–embodied in Democrat Party and supported by powerful institutions and federal agencies.

    With this threat / challenge in mind, we return to Ecclesiastes:

    There is a time for everything,

    • and a season for every activity under the heavens:*

    2 a time to be born and a time to die,

    • a time to plant and a time to uproot,*
      3 a time to kill and a time to heal,
    • a time to tear down and a time to build,*
      4 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    • a time to mourn and a time to dance,*
      5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    • a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,*
      6 a time to search and a time to give up,
    • a time to keep and a time to throw away,*
      7 a time to tear and a time to mend,
    • a time to be silent and a time to speak,*
      8 a time to love and a time to hate,
    • a time for war and a time for peace.*

    It is time to hate; to hate with an anger that cannot be described and cannot be contained. We must hate those who rejoice in evil, that call evil good and goodness bad. That lie with arrogance, and shriek and agonize in the face of truth.

    It is that time.

  3. Jews have been in the area for thousands of years, since they followed Moses into the area and were known as Hebrews. Yet I can’t think of any English colony in India prior to colonization, nor any Belgian presence in the Congo in, say, the 1500s, much less in the time of the Romans, nor any Dutch in South Africa. Just because someone wrote a book arguing that the only way to escape the mindset of colonial oppression is to kill the colonizer doesn’t make it so. India still uses English as one of their official languages and governs itself via the English parliamentary system. It wasn’t the Brits the Indians chose to kill once free. It was the Muslims. Which was reaching back pretty far to rid themselves of that dratted mindset.

    I’m old enough to remember Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which became all the rage on college campuses in the 70s. It argued that the population of the time could no longer be fed. Yet here we are. And there are even more of us.

  4. There is no compromise with the actors of October 7th. There is no middle ground between the savage murder of babies and civilization.

  5. Odd reply as it does no damage to my argument. Jewish ‘nations’ existed over 1800 years ago, and they were also tribal just as most of the world was, even under imperial control. So, from a standpoint of a historical ‘nation state’, there is no argument. Also be clear that the post-Westphalian conception of a state was new idea and that the entire world, not just the Jews, were trying to organize into such nation states. No people at that time had 1800 year old land claims honored by the U.N. and member nations. None. Also note that I did not claim Jews didn’t live there, they have, and for a long time in very small numbers.

    Let me reprise my case for calling Zionism axiomatically colonial in that it asserts a right to impose a state upon people by another people who were unwilling to be part of that state. Can we agree that colonizing is what I’ve stated? The imposition of a government on a people by another people? Let me cite the strongest proof for my case. Fyi, I did not provide it initially as I thought it was so basic to see Zionism as a colonizing enterprise…Brace yourself, this is going to be rough for you.

    • In November of 1923, the founder of something called “Revisionist Zionism” (a strong segment of the Zionist movement), Vladimir Jabotinsky, wrote the following. “There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs […] it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority,” Jabotinsky wrote.

    “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised”. NOTE HE USED THE TERM COLONISED. NOTE HE REFERRED TO AN ARAB COUNTRY CALLED PALESTINE. THESE ARE WORDS ZIONISTS REGULARLY USED, NOT JIHADIS OR LEFTISTS.

    • In 1890 there were about 300K people living in Palestine, about 24k were Jews who’d lived there in peace with their Arab neighbors for hundreds of years. Fyi, these native-born Palestinian Jews were in large part opposed to Zionism, claiming it would bring war on. By 1939, there were over 450k Jews in Palesting. They were brought there in a conscious program of emigration by Jews around the world, sometimes involuntarily as refugees of various spots had no other choice. Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, raised millions upon millions to import Jews into Palestine with the stated goal of creating a Jewish nation.

    • Israel claimed more than the '47 U.N. partition granted, and then ethnically cleansed 750k from that territory to create a majority Jewish state in which Arab Muslims were a minority. Benny Morris, a Jewish, Israeli Zionist historian and a member of the ‘young historians’ who analyzed the de-classified Israeli archives in the '90s and 2000s stated “it amounted to ethnic cleansing” when forced to answer the question in public finally.

    • Today in the West Bank, the illegal appropriation of territory continues by radical, armed, Zionist ‘settlers’. The former head of Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, stated that the West Bank is run via an apartheid system. Tamir Pardo’s fully statement can be seen here - it’s damning. Israel imposing apartheid on Palestinians, says former Mossad chief | Palestinian territories | The Guardian

    Other folks always ask me to not be insulting or nasty, so here you go. What they miss is that I didn’t start out that way. When I wrote comments that were factual and well argued, i didn’t have any effect. My fellow conservatives are super ‘dug in’ on so many positions now, it’s hard to move them with just arguments. I find that triggering people doesn’t work immediately, but over time it lingers that they were dead wrong.

    Please, anyone here, factually refute the case I’ve made above that Zionism and the state it produced, Israel, is axiomatically a colonizing effort. I will not call anyone names or be insulting, but I will use reason and facts.

    Be honest with yourselves. How many of you even know the above facts I’ve cited? How much do any of you really ‘know’ about this war? Most of my fellow conservatives know very little actual history of it but rather seem to have cherry picked factoids that favor the Israelis.

    We have to do much better as conservatives if we are going to claim to be ‘empirical’, yes? Facts matter to us, yes?

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