Our Armchair Revolutionaries
by: Alan Joseph Bauer
Published: April 22, 2024
Our left-leaning revolutionaries are involved in the cosplay of their lives.
At Harvard, in order to get honors on a bachelor’s degree, one would generally have to do a research project. Mine involved studying one of the first genetically engineered enzymes for its catalytic properties. A friend of mine told me of a fellow classmate of ours who chose to live like a homeless person on the street. He hoped to learn from other Boston homeless about their lives and combine their experiences with his own during his brief undercover effort. I told my friend that the baseline problem in being homeless is not knowing when a hot shower or warm bed will be in the offing. The fact that he knew that whenever he so chose, he could duck into a subway station and return to his former life as an Ivy League student made his efforts more acting than research.
Riddhi Patel is sitting in a Bakersfield, California, jail. In an amazing performance, she threatened to murder the entire city council. She was arrested for her comments of threatening to go to members’ houses to murder them and is currently facing 18 felony counts. My wife played her Oscar-level performance in which she demanded that the city council pass a resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, accused the local police of being “literally murderers” and lamented the installation of metal detectors in City Hall. She described her organization as the “United Liberation Front”. I guess they want to liberate public buildings of metal detectors.
When I saw Ms. Patel crying during her first court appearance, I was reminded of my street-acting Harvard classmate. Today’s self-described revolutionaries are a sad lot of spoiled children and adults who would not last a minute in Gaza or in any place where daily survival is not a near given. I always got a chuckle out of multimillionaire Bernie Sanders describing himself as a socialist. Having three houses, including one on a lake, is always a good starting position when you want everyone else to share a gray, drab life. AOC joined him in the millionaire socialist club, while every march or riot of BLM, Antifa, or pro-Hamas students features a sea of iPhones, designer clothes, and North Face vests and jackets when the weather turns cold. It’s never been so good to be a revolutionary.
Our Hamas-loving college students and liberal adults support an organization opposed to everything they hold near and dear. If some of those “Trans for Palestine” folks would come over to Gaza to show their support, they would return home in the belly of the plane. There are two organizations here in Israel whose activities include rescuing Jewish women married to Arab men. The story is always the same. The young woman is swept off of her feet by a dashing young man, they marry, and then they move to his town. Her being Jewish means that she is the garbage of the family. Oftentimes, she is beaten, not allowed to leave home, or separated from her children. Some such women try to reach out to these organizations and in military-type fashion, they get her out while her husband is at work or out of town. They have safe houses as the women get divorced and start new lives. Not in every case do they get out with their children, and that is the most painful part of their attempt to make for a new life. If one of these sorority sisters holding an “Intifada Revolution” tried to live in Gaza, she would be running to the Israeli lines to save her before her cashmere sweater got dirty. It’s always easy to support genocidal, misogynistic brutes when you are living thousands of miles away on a beautifully-manicured college campus.
With our lives generally not requiring us to forage for food, fight off Indians or wild animals, or wonder if we’ll live to our 40th birthday, we are a bored people. Much of the inane public discussions of pronouns, bathrooms, and Bob-is-now-Betty winning the decathlon is due to our not being busy with raising families, enjoying meaningful work, fighting for our country, or being part of larger communities. Our students are bored living in a wealthy country at peace, and so as to find meaning in their empty lives, they prevent others from getting to their planes or they march for the right to sterilize young children or demand a ceasefire for the benefit of barbaric rapists and mass-murderers. Then when they are done, they cozy up in their comfortable homes or dorm rooms with their smartphones to watch themselves demanding justice or equity or whatever the buzzword of the day is. They have no skin in the game and for them, while they claim to be involved in very important world-relevant activities, it’s just one more way to get over the ennui of empty lives, devoid of true meaning and direction. The left did not get rid of religion; it simply replaced dogmatic ideologies for fulfilling religious meaning.
Do you remember all of the beautiful people who promised to leave the US if Donald Trump were
to be elected? Amazing that none of them left the comfort, plenty and beauty of their home country. How much did Rachel Maddow’s stock portfolio go up during President Trump’s first three years in office? It’s easy to grandstand when you don’t mean it. And when you hear at BLM or pro-Hamas marches how awful and racist the US is, you would almost expect a huge line of cars heading from the march directly to the nearest international airport to get out of such a horrible place. But they never leave and they also encourage millions of others to come to the supposedly terrible, racist US illegally. Again, they are play-acting. Let them denounce the government in Russia or Turkey; they can look for their body parts after the authorities are through with them.
When I came to Israel at the end of 1991 to find a lab for my Fulbright Fellowship, I ran into an Israeli from whom I needed directions. He saw that I was an American and while pointing left with his hand, he told me in English to go to the right. I learned then and there that if I have to choose between action and words, I’ll go with the actions, so I went left and made it to the Hebrew University, where I started my post-doctoral research the following year. Our students and countrymen on the left talk a good game, but when the day is over, they love everything that the US has given them. And for their inability to express thanks for the great good of their home country, they are not revolutionaries but rather spoiled ingrates.
