I've got to get ready for work very soon, so let me leave gentle readers with this piece from the American Thinker by Lewis M. Andrews entitled How to Help Recovering Progressives. I have noted many times here that one should not repeat a lie that one knows to be a lie. It demoralizes you if you do, and that is the strategy of the Left. For if they can get you to tell the lie, they have you. But if you have been telling lies, you can stop, repent, and begin to tell the truth. It is never too late. But you don't always have to call out the person lying to you, as Andrews makes clear:
It was Winston Churchill who once said, “You can always count on America to do the right thing, after it has exhausted all other options.” I don’t know about all the other options, but when it comes to progressive ideology and its various manifestations -- net zero environmentalism, Critical Race Theory, anticolonialism, DEI hiring programs -- the country does seem to be gradually coming to its senses.
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More recently, it has become clear that a large number of voters have reevaluated just how much they want to sacrifice to end the use of fossil fuels. Not only has President Biden’s misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022 to provide hundreds of billions in electric car subsidies, failed to produce a demand for such vehicles, but is widely viewed as responsible for both the recent bout of inflation and the Federal Reserve’s unwillingness to lower interest rates. Tellingly few constituents complained in early June when Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin determined not to abide by California’s Clean Cars II standards, which require 35 percent of new passenger automobiles sold in 2026 to be either electric or hydrogen fueled.
Even some liberal journalists have begun turning against their own colleagues for excessively hyping a woke agenda. On April 9, National Public Radio’s senior business editor Uri Berliner wrote "I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust," in which he described NPR’s evolution from an institution founded to provide listeners with multiple viewpoints to an instrument of left-wing propaganda. And in May, former New York Times correspondent Nellie Bowles published Morning After the Revolution, which, among other things, details how young journalists are constantly pressured by their editors to attack conservatives and to treat any criticism of progressivism as “right-wing fascism.”
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Not that one had to be belligerent or confrontational to have a liberating impact. (Indeed, being too outspoken in the old Soviet Union could lead to arrest, a career demotion, or even a death sentence.) All that was necessary, Solzhenitsyn and his fellow writers believed, was to subtly acknowledge the other person’s own half-conscious doubts with a bemused smile, a blank stare, a cocked eyebrow, or some other gesture of disapproval. In effect, to magnify the authority of the unspoken against what was being said.
As Solzhenitsyn himself put it in “The Smatterers,” defeating a flawed ideology “doesn’t mean going around preaching the truth at the top of your voice.” It “doesn’t even mean muttering what you think in an undertone.” It simply means not allowing one’s passivity to imply consent. In other words, “don’t say or let stand what you don’t really think.”
So, there you have it. You don't always have to shout at the other person. Indeed, destroying him on the spot may just harden his heart toward your way of thinking. Don't ask how I discovered this. A gesture of disapproval may be enough to set him thinking, and repenting. Try it today.
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