Warning: today’s post is very purple. Some might even find it violet blue.
Our comment community’s
posted a link to this video the other day, and it struck me as worth sharing.I recently had an unpleasant experience with my daughter, who is disturbed, baffled, and offended that I don’t seem to have the same moderate, Classical Liberal political principles I raised her with (I do, but—just as when I was in graduate school—the behavior of Leftists has pushed me further to the right than I really want to be). So this video from a woman who is to the Left of me, and yet has rejected the Left’s current toxicity, really resonated. A transcript and my own reactions are below.
So, this woman is a bit woo-woo. I know a lot of people all over the political spectrum who are. Please don’t let that distract you from the key points she’s making.
This is how much of a progressive I am: I wrote this book about the origins of Patriarchy—Before War: On Marriage, Hierarchy, and Our Matriarchal Origins.
My name is Elisha Daeva. I live in western North Carolina, and the media isn’t telling you how utterly insane and devastating this hurricane has been. And there’s been a complete failure of our Democratic leadership in my county, my state, and at the federal level, where Biden didn’t even know what storm he was talking about, and he said, “Everyone is happy,” when people are still stranded without food.
If you haven’t seen that clip, you should look for it. It illustrates just how unfit Biden is to remain POTUS. I was surprised that the media showed it. I thought maybe it might be part of a gear-up to an ‘October surprise’ in which Biden is removed completely in favor of Harris, so that she has the strength of running as the actual incumbent. But it seems to have been suppressed pretty quickly, so maybe the Democrats decided that wasn’t such a good idea after all.
I’ve been a progressive ever since I could think. I always will be. I’ll always be in favor of equal opportunity for everyone, anti-war, pro-free-speech, and about protecting our ancient forests. I’m a child-free cat lady, a hippie, raver, burner, feminist, Pagan, witch. I lived in San Francisco for 20 years and marched in the Pride marches every year.
I know a lot of conservatives will cringe at the things she’s saying, but a lot of it resonates with me. I’m anti-war as a general rule, despite thinking that wars of survival are very worth fighting. Obviously I’m in favor of free speech and equal opportunity. I think environmental protection is vital, but as an overall principle, not to protect a subspecies of frog while allowing humans to suffer as a result. I’m a cat lady with hippie (or at least crunchy) inclinations. My feminism is not of the variety that has been current for the last 40 years, but I’m very earnest about it. I have friends who are Pagans and/or witches.
I could sit down to lunch with this woman and find something meaningful to talk about.
And I’m voting for Trump. I’m walking away from the Democrat Party.
I don’t particularly like Trump; I would rather have had Tulsi Gabbard or Kennedy, but when Kennedy dropped out, I have no choice. I have to vote for Trump. I fear the Democrats more.
My values haven’t changed; the Democrats have.
As I’m sure most of you remember, I was for RFK Jr. I’m just as unhappy to be stuck voting for Trump as she is. But she’s right: I have no choice.
This is how much of a progressive I am: I wrote this book about the origins of Patriarchy—Before War: On Marriage, Hierarchy, and Our Matriarchal Origins. Patriarchy is a trauma response. It’s a system. It’s not about blaming men, as both men and women are harmed by the system, and both perpetuate it. And now I believe that the left is perpetuating Patriarchy more.
I studied Patriarchy in grad school, and while the concept makes some interesting points about the way problems get perpetuated in our society (Mary Wollstonecraft, in “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” way back in 1792, wrote very plainly about the way women themselves perpetuate women having a second-class status in society), it’s a questionable theory. Particularly since it is almost always used to attack men.
I haven’t read this woman’s book, but it’s free on Kindle Unlimited, so I intend to. I expect it will make a lot of silly assertions (the idea that there was a time “before war” is, itself, rather absurd, considering that other primate species engage in war-like behaviors). But perhaps she will have interesting things to say about matriarchy (which I think has value).
In the ’90s, I do believe the Right were the ones who were acting authoritarian and on the wrong side of history and that Fox News were the propagandists. But the elites must have realized that the Left wing was becoming more popular and they needed to work through the Left instead of the Right. They needed to control and infiltrate the populist movements for equality instead of suppressing them. And now the Left has turned fascist.
I believe this started happening a long time before she realizes, with the Long March. Surprisingly, later on, it turns out that she is anti-Communist.
In 2016, like all good Liberals, I didn’t speak to my mom for months for voting for Trump. (Sorry, Mom!) But as the Trump years went on, I started to notice that nothing bad was happening, nothing fascist was happening.
A lot of us realized that. And realized that the people who were ranting as if it was happening were increasingly divorced from reality.
In 2019, I went to a conference—it was a alien disclosure conference in California. I was actually more there for the alternative archaeology rather than the aliens. But I was in this big auditorium, and there were thousands of people, and the speaker said “Trump 2020!” and like three-quarters of the people cheered, and I was so blown away.
I always thought, hey, we the Left, we’re the conspiracy theorists, and the Right-wing, they’re the conspiracy doers. They’re the Establishment; we’re the Freedom Fighters. I was so confused that I ran out of the room, went straight to the bar by the pool and shot back three shots. I don’t even drink hardly, and never during the middle of the day, but I just couldn’t process that information. So I filed it away in my brain.
Then, of course, 2020 happened. And the moment they announced the lockdown, my bullshit detector went off—I’m a human bullshit detector—and when they used words like “two weeks to flatten the curve,” I just felt like this is weird. So I told all my friends, “All right, I’ll stay home for two weeks, but this is not the end of it; something weird is happening.” And I spent that two weeks researching viruses. And I found out that nobody actually knows how viruses are spread or has any real information about them; it’s all actually theories. But I got kicked out of virology groups for asking questions.
So then, came out of lockdown, immediately saw the creepy towers that had popped up everywhere while we were dutifully holed up in our homes. I thought, this is creepy. And then the arrows to go one way in the grocery store. This is creepy. The Orwellian, jingoistic propaganda, like “We’re all in this together.”
I think the “creepy towers” she’s talking about here are the 5G cell towers, which is another indicator that she’s got some woo-woo going. But she’s not wrong about the creepiness of the impositions placed on people in the name of Covid.
But my real come-to-Trump moment came in May 2020, when Trump defunded the WHO. By this time, I was convinced that the WHO and the FDA and those three-letter agencies were totally captured, and if Trump was defunding them, maybe he knew something.
So of course, I had noticed that the media hated Trump, and by this time the media had lied about so much about this Covid stuff that I was becoming convinced that they were completely captured—total propaganda. So I thought, well, maybe if they hate Trump so much, maybe there’s something to pay attention to.
So I started fact-checking everything the media said about Trump, starting with the “All Mexicans are racist” thing. And I was watching the videos of what he actually said compared to what they cherry-picked and distorted what he was saying. And I realized that all of it was a lie: he wasn’t racist—I didn't see any evidence he was racist—he wasn’t fascist. He’s kind of crude, and he doesn’t know the difference between Baltic and Balkan. But he wasn’t all these things the media was saying he was.
Once you start to realize that the media is lying, it’s hard to unsee. Or to trust them again.
Okay, he’s sexist. I guess all the politicians are sexist. He made a bunch of crude remarks like 10 years ago, which he apologized for. Yes, I would like to live in a non-sexist world, but at this point, Trump is all we’ve got.
Then, January 6th. All my Liberal friends were clutching their pearls like, “Oh, the the precious, sacred Capitol building!” I was like, wait a second, weren’t we all about Occupy Wall Street, Occupy the Government, Smash the Patriarchy? Aren’t we the Freedom Fighters? Wait! All it took for the Leftists to become pro-war, pro-corporate military industrial complex was for their side to seemingly be in power. Talk about hypocrisy!
Yes, it’s hypocritical. But this sort of thing was going on way back in the Obama Administration. I don’t know if anyone remembers Cindy Sheehan, who was a big anti-war protestor during the Bush years, but she kept protesting after Obama became POTUS, and the Left was essentially telling her to shut up now. It was very illuminating to see supposedly anti-war Leftists cheering for us bombing Libya.
Over the past few years of the Biden years, I’ve seen a true attack on Democracy: colluding with Facebook to censor free speech? mandating injections while saying “my body, my choice”? Talk about hypocrisy! Weaponizing the justice system against the political opponents? jailing people for posting videos? removing a president from power, and propping up a puppet no one voted for?
I had always assumed that the Left were always the good guys. Leftist ideology is better, but it’s too prone to weaponization. It’s too easy to weaponize empathy, because it's easy to justify doing evil if you're convinced you’re the good guy. But this is not the first time in history in which the Left have been the bad guys: the Communist movements in Russia and China, we saw the same things we see today—the celebration of hate and viciousness and snark and ignorance.
I’m a little confused about how she always assumed the Left were the good guys when she also realizes that Communism is crap. I wonder when she came to that realization?
Here’s what Communism is about: if you can identify yourself with or pretend to be speaking for the darling victim of the moment—the working class in the old communist movements; now it’s BIPOC and Queer people—you have the moral high ground, even if you’re being a total asshole. If you’re doing it to an oppressor—back then the bourgeoise; now the cis het white men.
However, it’s not just white men, it’s white women, too. White women are not only painted as oppressors, but are ridiculed and Karen-ized. So communist movements aren’t about equal opportunity but about forcing equal outcomes. You can’t force people to do the right thing. It just doesn’t work. That’s what DEI is about.
Secondly, we have to base society around merit. It’s unsafe to have unqualified people in power, and that’s how I feel about Kamala Harris. Everything she says when she’s not reading off a script is nonsense.
I want a woman president so bad, because—as I show in my book, Before War; check it out on Amazon—the research shows that having more women in power leads to better outcomes for everyone. But I would never advocate for putting women in power just because they’re women. They need to deserve it or they can do great harm. Having an unqualified woman like Harris could empower the sexists to say, “See, women aren’t fit for power.” This would set the cause of women’s leadership back by a long time.
I’m really curious to see her research showing that having women in power leads to better outcomes, because I am skeptical. Recent proliferation of women in positions of power has demonstrated the opposite of better outcomes. Which is not to say that it’s not possible for women to create better outcomes (I think it is possible); only that the women who have been placed in positions of power in the last couple of decades have, for the most part, created worse outcomes.
But more importantly, another 4 years of undemocratic leadership we have now—they’ve gotten us on the brink of nuclear war and totalitarianism, digital surveillance, and a total crackdown on basic human rights and free speech. I’m not a big fan of Trump, but if you live in a swing state, I beg you vote against the people in power now.
Thoughts?
Really good essay Celia! So timely and so glad to have time to respond this am and so glad to have you back! Alot to unpack-- I see a basic lack of trust between people all the way around which seems to have definitely settled along race and gender lines, not just political. Years ago I was privileged to do ceremony with the Sami people in Lappland. A traditional female lineage shaman from Siberia was also there and I was so impressed and amazed by her complete claiming of power and authority without having to be the slightest bit aggressive about it. I have known many powerful caring women of several different races and traditions, but they have always had to fight in some way to maintain enough power and authority to be effective. They have also often, in numerous ways had to 'apologize' or downplay that power in order to be accepted by the world around them. This Siberian woman did not have to do that, in any way that I could see, because her culture, her community and her family, as well as generations of tradition had invested her role as a female shaman, with full power and authority. As she shared about her life and people, I realized how much deep respect and trust and dependence on each other was necessary in a Siberian reindeer herder group, just to survive the harsh lifestyle. Also they had to survive the genocidal Soviet policies etc. I am sure there were many things under the surface which I did not see, but she had a long lasting impact as she exemplified for me personally what true inherent power as a woman can look like. American culture is obviously different and power for a woman will look different here. I believe part of the attraction with Kamala for other women, is not just that she is female, but because they see themselves in her in other ways. It is almost de rigour in American culture in general for powerful women to apologize for that power and downplay their authority in multiple small and often unconscious ways This is what Kamala basically does every time she opens her mouth and she reinforces that apologetic demeanor with her body language, while at the same time she is desperately attempting to claim the power and authority suitable to her role. Very frustrating mixed messages and exactly what many women feel and act out every day. This to me appears to be all mixed up with the need to be seen as a 'nice' person that so many women are forced to believe in and is especially reinforced by the political left message of 'We are the good guys, the rational reasonable caring inclusive people'. Recently a man of long time acquaintance went off on me and got really angry when I respectfully refused to back down. His parting shot was, " and I thought you were a nice person.'. He said it as tho I had failed some basic litmus test. I didn't respond because I did not want to escalate the situation, but I really wish I would have said what I was thinking which was, " Whatever gave you the idea I was a nice person? And why the hell would you ever expect me to be effective if I was only 'nice' all the time? I believe that many women are trying to push back against that outer and inner messaging and too often go too far the other way. In otherwords they become bossy and bitchy and aggressive to try to feel empowered, because they don't actually feel empowered at all.
Chris Rufo has posted the biggest fraud of Kamala Harris to date. She plagiarized huge chunks of her book on crime( until yesterday I didn’t know she that she published a book)
https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1845856003205796165?s=42
There is no doubt that the claims are true. The NYTimes is trying to smear Rufo as they did when he broke the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal, by calling Rufo a racist and trying to minimize the stealing of other pol’s work. Harris actually lifted verbatim from Wikipedia
The Free Press did cover it in a small mention in their list of news items but this too is dishonest. Harmeet Dhillon’s testimony on T Carlson was not covered at all and alone should have been enough to have Harris resign .Rufo never breaks a story without hard proof to fortify the claims he makes.
Harris is an incompetent fraud and should resign as VP and as candidate for the corrupt DNC