On Regressive Leftism…

Dear Mr. Michael Brooks (and, of course, everyone else in the world),

After watching your recent “debate” with Sargon of Akkad regarding to the Regressive Left (hereinafter called “the Subject”), I am generally disgusted with your person and very manner of speech — and you have sadly reflected poorly on the entire political party for which you purport to speak by making it painfully obvious which fallacies and biases are your favorite; and with the flawed, rudimentary argument model you present with these fallacies you expose the underhanded “debating” techniques that have become more and more popular among leftist and liberal pundits, over the last sixteen years. While I do not doubt you’ve read many a history book and policy report, I will herein prove that you have no respect for logic itself, let alone debate or anyone who might disagree with you.

I will be skipping the first three and a half minutes of the video, as your attempt to reiterate your points from the original video to which Sargon responded was interrupted by your own rather dismissive aside, and Sargon attempting to address both the point and your use of Bernie Bros. as a straw-man to minimize the perceived social impact of the Subject, devolving into the first of many arguments you could have avoided by treating your debate partner with the respect of equal footing, and remaining on-topic and within the scope of discussion.

Your Three “Variables”

1. “The prime people driving it are people who seem to be like yourself unfortunately, who want to claim the term “Liberal” but also engage in lazy, a-historical generalizations about Islam.”
2. “It seems to appeal to the people who do not want to do the actual homework, as in studying history, studying policy, understanding where we are with regards to terrorism and radical Islam.”
3. “It’s reductionist to speak poor of Islam, is not because it’s ‘PC’ or Liberal or any other mishegas (which is Yiddish, by the way); the reason is because we need to be very smart, precise, and strategic in these issues as they relate to terrorism, as they relate globally. When we make dumb generalizations of Islam, we undermine the work of people like Fatema Mernissi, Islamic feminists and democracy theorists.”

You then went on to conclude that the Subject is, in fact, merely something that exists in tiny pockets, something that is greatly inflated in terms of its importance, and as a result of not wanting to put in the time and research leads to bad ideas, bad policies, and simplistic, delusional understandings of things. You also felt it important to impress upon Sargon and the audience that you do not play video games, as if that decision bears some additional weight or implication within the context of the debate.

However, it seems you are projecting just a bit, in your haughty, dismissive tone: in your first point you yourself contradict your second and third points, by attempting to use Bernie Bros. and the single political perspective on Islam to create a straw-man which would be far easier to knock down. However, in doing so, you are undermining the work of people like Emma Watson and Anita Sarkeesian, who have spoken at the United Nations and have very powerfully changed the dialogue on the subject of women’s rights, as well as the intersectional feminist and #BlackLivesMatter-supported protests in universities across the United States. It’s also an example of confirmation bias — something we’ll address soon. First, we need to take apart your supporting statements.

People trying to claim “Liberal” but are uneducated on Islam

This statement is both reductionist, and a straw-man. The Subject is used to refer to anyone who supports the disassembling of our freedoms and rights, whether they be feminists, queer, college students, people of color, as well as those who you would describe as being uneducated on Islam; it does not exist in small pockets but rather has become a pervasive trend among the “Millennial” generation, and is congressionally-supported by, among others, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders through remarkably illiberal political stances on civil rights, social justice, terrorism, and the ongoing quagmire in the Middle East. To call any of these people uneducated on Islam, and present that as evidence that the Subject exists only in small pockets, is inherently false.

People who don’t want to do the history and policy homework

This is actually disproved by the above statement, but it does give me space to analyse the situation just a little bit deeper. While it is ad hominem through generalisation to say that the small pockets of people you attempt to describe are just ignorant and willingly so, it also exposes to us the zealotry through which you speak: indistinguishable from the RNC Republicans of yester-decade, you inherently believe that entire groups of people whom you have not nor will ever meet, share the common trait of willing ignorance on a subject. The answer to why is, though, just a simple question; “Why don’t you understand? You mustn’t have read what I’ve read!”

And in many cases (in fact, statistically, almost all cases), there is a chance that the person whom you have described has had access to the same internet, the same news outlets, the same YouTube and Twitter, and has, as you so strongly imply you have, done their homework; however, is it impossible that they could come to a different conclusion? After all, there are no assurances we are actually right — merely supporting an accurate and tested theory while ignoring the existential dread that we might just be imagining all of this. But with the existential dread pushed aside, one can not generalize about any one group of people without being wrong about more than half of the individuals that make up that people. By reifying the Subject, you make implicit statements that are categorically untrue, and do so in a manner which would make Bill O’Reilly proud.

Making dumb statements of Islam undermines good Muslims

It was actually here that I found myself in need of writing a response to the “debate”, as you actually make a great point, but very poorly in the process. One could probably call it a reverse No True Scotsman (hereinafter called, “No Good Muslim”) by the way you present it, but the conclusion which I drew after listening to you say this far more times than I’m proud to admit, is that we should not judge the individuals of the Islamic world through the lenses of racism or disrespect, because there have been many great minds, in the present and past, that come from that culture. I wish to expand on this point for you, and state that we should, in fact, not judge others, including those who would fall into the category of, or oppose, the Subject, and judge individuals on their actions and words of present and only recent past. Please do not undermine the work of any of the people enumerated in the previous points, or of Sargon of Akkad, Karen Straughan and Alison Tieman, Adam Baldwin, John “TotalBiscuit” Bain, and Milo Yiannopoulos amongst millions of others, for their work in preserving the enlightened freedoms we all share within the bounds of constitutional wording and intent.

Having hopefully completely addressed the, dare I say, insulting manner in which you choose to argue when Sargon came prepared to debate (as proven by his taking notes of your words as you spoke, slowly and steadily presenting his evidence and points in his manner of speech and presentation despite your interruptions and always saying “Sorry, go on.”), I can move on to the other forty minutes of this video.

Sargon’s response was admittedly poor in choice, but after the battery of exaggeration and fat-packing your sentences with as many intelligent-sounding words as possible, it is easy to see why he might be a bit impatient with you. He asserted his belief that you are part of the Subject, to which you scoffed with an inflection of offense taken. You then ask him to go into detail, not resorting to “silly” ad hominems; however, you have not earned that respect, as you have used ad hominem through generalization and even against your own perceived straw-men.

This is where the “debate” completely disassembled. By your impertinent interruption to ask how you could be part of the Subject, and refusal to allow Sargon to make his points by continuing to repeat your question and assume malicious intent in his words. Another straw-man is constructed of people who disagree with Glenn Greenwald and yourself because you do research on history and policy and, as you put it, “they” think that doing said research is avoiding the point. This statement only barely makes sense in the context of the modern world, though; support for intellectualism and support of meritocracy are on the rise in the United States and other first-world nations, and though they may be a minority now, they make up a large part of the workforce and political network that are becoming junior Senators and Lieutenant Governors and other representatives now, and the political Right has mostly stepped away from anti-intellectualism after the fallout from John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Tina Fey’s comical exaggerations and political commentary on people like Bill O’Reilly and Sarah Palin, and inunciated by the appalling number of disagreeable and ignorant candidates who showed up for the first 2016 Republican Debates.

I think what you fail to see, here, through the pride you hold in having done the historical and political research and contextualizing all of the events that led up to the catastrophe that has been the first half of this decade, is that some people instead accept that they are ignorant and cannot understand certain things, and instead do as social animals would do, and observes others with whom they find themselves agreeing. There is nothing inherently wrong with accepting you’re ignorant, or even with accepting that ignorance — most people do not have the time to produce average-quality political podcasts with a stark and sometimes aggressive Leftist stance, and instead listen to you on their phone while they work because there are far more important things that need to be done to keep things secured for them and theirs. Though you haven’t said it yet, I get the strong impression that you hold biases against the working and fixed-income classes. In addition, with the number of times you take the chance to troll by asserting your Jewishness, it’s hard not to see you as racist and supremacist.

As a person of Hebrew pedigree, I am utterly disgusted that you would use your Jewishness to attempt to “trigger” your debating partner. Feigning ignorance of media outlets such as the New York Times and Salon does not a Socratic method make; at this point in the discussion, you are not even engaged enough to allow the man to complete a thought. This is why you are a part of the Subject: you refuse to accept that there could be a different perspective or understanding of the facts at hand than your own, which you expose through bias after attentional bias after confirmation bias after Dunning-Kruger effect. You entered the debate presuming you couldn’t lose and your debating partner was unlearned in history and policy, and refuse to allow your debating partner to speak through constant interruption and muting to carry your point across. Such arrogance is disgusting, no matter who presents it.

It was never meant to be a debate at all, was it? It was meant to be a public shaming for all your audience to hear, listening to you while they work. With that mute button at the ready and zero respect for journalistic ethics, the art of debate, or even anyone who might disagree with you on the facts and their political implications.

But, to the argument at hand…

Fortunately, through being as thoroughly southern English as he can be, Sargon is able to navigate and poke you into actually expressing some actual facts — and unfortunately, you present these facts with bias and fallacy as well. Wahhabism is the next straw-man you present, described as a result of Saudi and Western foreign policy. For those unaware, Wahhabism is an ultra-conservative, extremely orthodox Sunni branch of Islam, for whom the term “Wahhabi” is considered derogatory — so do please mind the cultural sensitivity next time and refer to them as Salafi, as they would wish. It was formed around a man named Muhammad ibn Abd-Wahhab in the 18th Century over the subjects of idolatry and perceived “corruptions of Islam” which was given power originally through a local leader, Muhammad bin Saud (from whom we get the term “Saudi”), and greatly expanded throughout the Middle East in the 1970's with the formation of OPEC and the export of petroleum. Such strong adherence to the words of Muhammad the Prophet meant that what we in the post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment, post-Moon Landing world would consider atrocities such as throwing homosexuals off of buildings and recording it for the posterity and imposed terror it provides, or treating all people within their domain as slaves given temporary freedom until they are either needed to expand OPEC’s interests or die to retain the purity of Islam. We know the Saudi families that buy up the second-largest stock investments in international companies and directly influence policy in the United States and other “Western” nations, and we know the population of devout Salafists in every country in the Middle East.

But Salafi is not the only problem — it is merely the most extreme of problems. It cannot be proven that the attacks and rapes that occurred in Koln, Germany and other cities in Europe on New Years Eve, for example, were undertaken by Salafi; it can, however, be proven that in those cities that accepted large numbers of migrants, rape convictions spiked to nearly six times their average in some places, and it can be further proven that the subjugation of women through the influence of Salafi and the very words of the Qur’an promoted this general cultural affectation which led men to believe that all of these women around, wearing so little and wearing make-up, want to be their whores. Have you sat at five prayers and listened to the way Shi’ites and Kurds, even the Qur’an itself, speaks of women? You may know the history, but can you empathize the weight and terror in which that culture lives, every day? In their culture, the rift between men and women is extremely great, and the common slang would translate to “taking a woman” when referring to anything we would consider intimate — to them, it is a woman submitting to a man and carrying his child. It does not matter where they are from, it is a part of how Muslim cultures and subcultures function. The man has his farm, ranch, work, and dominates one or many women, while engaging in competition with the other men. The woman has the children and the community of other women, enforcing the theocratic laws and impressing upon the children their future roles doing the same as their parents. This maintains the status quo, and the status quo is so much better than the alternative.

This is a place that has been a historical nightmare. For centuries, the West has fought the Middle East, and yes, the last couple centuries Europeans and Americans have been remarkably proud of the number of brown people they have killed. In addition, Saudis and the dictatorial individuals who were able to capture power with the assistance of the US and European intelligence agencies. Western influence has been absolutely influential on the hardening of Salafi zealotry, however that does not mean they will just forgive these nations because they opened their gates. These are individuals, immigrating into Europe and possibly soon to North America, selfish for a free life as they understand it. Taking in large numbers of economic migrants and refugees will always bring the worst of the culture with the best — not terrorists, but individuals who commit crimes like grooming, statutory rape, and the production and distribution of child pornography, because in their culture, it was not a crime. It isn’t the big, scary terrorists that your opposition fear: it is the quiet crimes committed out of pure culture-clashing ignorance; the same people whom you support in Islam fear.

Here’s where things divide. You are so deeply focused on the influence of Salafi and, through punditry and activism, support the amazing and brilliant Islamic activists pushing back against the well-funded Saudi and dictatorial influences, that that is all you can see — the extremes. But there are a lot of people in the middle, there, that you’re ignoring in everything you say. The average people do not have those extreme perspectives or views… however, they do hold some level of orthodoxy in their Islamic faith, including those beliefs that are extremely backwards by modern standards.