Good Gawd. I was planning to ignore this silly diatribe, but I can't help myself. There is so much wrong with this piece, it is so full of false and dishonest statements. Where to start?
How about at the beginning. This whole article is just one long example of the logical fallacy Appeal to Authority. Except that the authority is - Ted Kacinsky. Really? Yeah, when I want to illustrate my views on something, I always look for quotes from serial killers and terrorists and psychopaths. Wisdom of the Unabomber. What a concept.
Next, define "leftist". The author and Ted throw the word around like everybody knows what that means. But we don't. It is just a label, and the variations of views of people the author brands are way too numerous for it to have a definitive meaning. But wise Ted lumps everyone from socialists to homosexuals under the same banner. I'd love to know how my multi-millionaire gay friends Randy and Steve how they feel about being called leftist. According to this author, and the Unabomber, if you care about disabled people, or women's rights, or stopping animal cruelty, you are no different than Karl Marx. This is not only false, it is grossly dishonest. With a lack of any real understanding, a trite simplistic soundbite will do.
Then the author embraces Ted's idea that leftists are power-hungry, authoritarian wannabe dictators, and of course the examples are USSR, China, and other communist countries - even implying that Hitler was a leftist. This is so absurd it leads to the conclusion that this is a high school English assignment. Really lazy and overly simplistic.
So, it is leftists who are authoritarians? Right. So the leaders of Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Brazil, the Philippines, these are all leftist dictators. The Taliban and ISIS are leftist fanatics. But the democracies of the world, such as countries in Western Europe, must be right wing libertarians.
Hell, let's just stay here in the US. It is leftists who want to control women's bodies; it was leftists who stormed the capitol in order to override a legitimate election and install their chosen dictator; it is leftists who are on a fervent and even violent campaign to rewrite racial history, ban books, and overrun school boards; it is leftists who are working feverously to make everyone in America conform to Christian religious dictates; it is leftists who threaten everyone who disagrees with them with violence or imprisonment, it is leftists who threatened to hang the VP. It is leftists who are on a tear to restrict voting rights for millions of Americans, and of course it is leftists who are gerrymandering Black voters into insignificance.
It is that quintessential leftist, Donald Trump, who leads his followers to attempt a violent overthrow of the government, after 4 years of ignoring nearly every law, rule, or norm that protects our society from unscrupulous, corrupt, unethical and criminal acts by people in power.
The ultimate irony is that the source of so much wisdom about leftist authoritarians is the rantings of a madman who dealt with people who he thought were leftists by killing and injuring them.
And leftists are hell bent on collectivism as opposed to individual selfishness - it was those leftist Republicant politicians who censured two of their members for trying to get the truth about the attempted insurrection by those other leftists. The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Nazi sympathizers, White supremacist groups, such individual thinkers, these leftists.
And, of course it was those leftist multi-billioinaire corporate masters who have stolen $50 trillion from the American middle class, and uses a small part of that to buy leftist politicians and control American policy. Right.
What a gigantic, steaming pile of horse manure. Not an original thought in this article, unless you consider gaslighting to be original thinking.
