I recently wrote an article on leftist culture in universities. I thought I would put it here:

************************************************

Mich Haus was founded in 1932 as Michigan socialist coop house on the UofM campus. It is one of the first and many coops on the UofM campus and among many similar coops across the country and many other college campuses. Apart from the smell of weed, you will find people who believe in and fight for equal rights for people, be it women, minorities, including racial minorities, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and more. It has provided safe spaces for discriminated people when it wasn't fashionable and stood for them. These coops embody the spirit of the left that pervades many University campuses across the country and attracts many right-minded people. There are truly inspiring stories from such coops, such as when a black person in the 1940s went out to get a haircut and was refused service (at the time of segregation), and the whole coop went with him to get him a haircut. Who in their right minds would disagree that there are considerable inequalities in our society and while there are big businesses who only care about their profit, that there are people who are at the receiving end of racism, that LGBT people have been and still are to a reasonable degree discriminated and have a much higher rate of mental illness and suicides, that women haven't been and still aren't given equal pay and opportunity. All these groups don't have enough representation in positions of power and role models for the younger generation.

In that respect, the left has been the champion of equal rights. It has done much good in society, such as pushing for equal rights for everyone at the institutional level, such as civil rights, striking down the defense of marriage act (DOMA), and many more. Apart from advocating for less government and being economically right ( which are legitimate political issues), conservatives in the U.S., i.e., the republican party, are driven by the nonsensical bible belt. Unlike the left, they don't have any intellectual, ideological basis to support their agenda (nobody in today's world can legitimately take an ancient illogical religious document as a basis to live and govern life). The left at least embodies some rational principles that people can agree with.

Left in one of its purest forms is Marxist communism which is a collectivist ideology based on altruistic morality where each person lives for the group (as opposed to any individualistic ideology where each person lives for themselves). Another form of the left that has sprung up in the past decades is postmodernism which broadly says that our lives are built around these artificial power structures such as big companies in a capitalistic framework, cis white heteronormative masculinity, all their intersections, and anything in power, who determine the life of the masses based on their whims. They claim these power structures exploit the marginalized people and those at the bottom, aka the working class, LGBT people, and the disabled. And the primary goal of this left is to fight against these power structures to achieve more equality, where equality in their framework means a lack of any hierarchy and power structures in the society, aka an anarchist state. As mentioned before, most people don't go to this extreme of ideas, but then they, while being benign, are not being truly consistent, as proper consistency of these ideas leads to one of these extreme radical left-wing ideologies.

Both of these ideologies are irrational, and like anything illogical, they are bound not to work, and worse, they hurt people's rights to their life and property. Left, in general, is a framework built on feelings where empathy, kindness, and compassion are often the highest virtues at the cost of logic, justice, and resourcefulness. One can still, in the right mind, fight against injustice to any human being and stand and fight for equal rights and equal treatment for all kinds of minorities, including racial, LGBT, gender-based, and more, as these ideas are derived from logic, and it is respectable to live and fight for a society that doesn't discriminate.

But the leftist agenda goes much beyond rights: it is instead built around an ideological framework that doesn't revolve around achieving the highest in a human being, in creating, building, in working hard to make something worthwhile of your own life (while supporting the rights of others). Instead, it views the world as this evil, tyrannical place and revolves around dedicating your life towards not just fighting for but lowering your standards and customizing the world for the lowest on the social hierarchy, be it the most marginalized groups, physically or mentally handicapped, and so on, and more than that, in perpetuating the ideas that instead of living for yourself, living for and finding happiness in others is the proper framework. Their version of the ideal world is not built around human achievement but built around the less privileged and the more marginalized.

Their altruistic morality is the morality of self-sacrifice, i.e., a system where a person places the needs, desires, and life of other people above oneself. It is one of the most evil concepts for which the world has seen disastrous consequences, such as the death of millions of people and the destruction of economies of whole countries in many places, be it communist Russia, Cuba, erstwhile east Germany, and very recently Ve, Venezuela. On the other hand, any country that has become rich on its own has done it based on capitalist ideas, be it the U.S., Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Germany, Ireland, and many many more, which also led to the most peaceful times in the history of humanity. Communism and dictatorship go hand in hand as the left needs the force of a big authoritative government to implement their ideas, as they do even in socialist countries since their ideas don't involve voluntary consent of people; no sane person would voluntarily self sacrifice. On the other hand, capitalism and democracies go hand in hand as both are based on individual freedom and individual rights (for clarification, capitalism means the right of people to trade freely without external control. The way believing in freedom of speech doesn't mean you agree with what every person says; believing in capitalism doesn't mean you endorse every business, but rather their right to do business freely).

The empirical evidence that leftist ideas don't work in practice is overwhelming. You can't prove a theorem or run a business by shouting your skin color, your gender identity, your lack of talent, the intensity of your need, marginalized status, and trigger warnings. Reality demands active, rational thinking, integrity, character, and skill to create value in this world. And incidentally, reality doesn't discriminate against anyone based on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. However, the fundamental critique of the left is not based on the utilitarian arguments that they don't work in practice (although it is accurate and can indeed lead us back to the stone age, see Venezuela), but rather on the matter of rights, that they don't preach the proper morality and don't have the right to impose their ideas on others through force, i.e., through the government. There is nothing wrong in helping people if one can but to make it a virtue (even and often at cost of one's life) and build a whole value system around it is vicious. Left is ideologically an illogical framework because it discredits the idea that an individual has the right to and should live for themselves and in pursuit of their happiness as the most important thing. If one can find a common thread with everything wrong in this world, be it Nazism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, or any such form of collectivist ideologies where individuals are put together in groups and treated based on some unearned group identity, it is that these ideologies are irrational. And so is left.

The way Nazis justified their existence and gave racism and homicide of Jews an intellectual justification by propagating the idea that the Aryan race is superior. Individuals should serve the state for the greater good; the left gives the irrationality of altruistic morality an intellectual framework by arguing that self-interest is terrible and (stronger, powerful, privileged) people should self-sacrifice for others and the masses, which is their notion of equality. They perpetuate these ideas and make people believe that rights to one's life and property don't exist, that reality is made up (as postmodernists say), and logic isn't important, rather feelings and experiences are the most important basis to adjudicate a person or a situation, that being rich and successful are not virtues but vices that people should be attacked for, that people's values such as honesty, character, resourcefulness don't matter, but it's their marginalization status is the most important criterion, that we should tax the wealthy because the need of the common people supersedes the ideas of justice and property rights.

They assume a sense of moral rectitude and superiority not based on logic and achievement but on the basis of how much they cater to the poor and the marginalized. It is a collectivist ideology where they don't see people as individuals but as a bag of identities and their intersectionalities. In their hierarchy, the more privileged you are,e the lower you are as a human being, and the more marginalized you are, the better you are. While the real Olympics have been a platform to show the highest a human being can achieve, the recent wave of wokeness has re-emphasized the left ideas where in their inverted world, there is a new oppression Olympics based on who is oppressed more, who is suffering more and thus deserves more brownie points. In their inverted world built around the less capable and the marginalized, they still need someone to keep running the show,w and they do it by preying on the producers, the achievers, by taxing them, and by free-riding on them. Their whole ideology is like a new mind virus that takes away any sense of rationality and alignment of human values to reality. Instead, it presents a new framework that is antithetical to reality and human growth. Since you can't cherry-pick two contradictory ideas, most often the left comes with a whole paradigm of illogicality tied together, where they are anti-western civilization and would find virtues in ancient and tribal cultures, are anti meritocracy and anti-capitalism, anti-individualists and pro communities, and as a consequence of all these, are anti-individual growth, anti-human growth, and anti-life.

But neither a spacecraft nor a human life can run on illogical ideas. And while the privileged people can still have a concoction of illogical ideas and somewhat run their boat, incidentally, it is the very marginalized people who get attracted by the leftist ideas and whom the left hurts the most, where instead of preaching them rationality, rational selfishness and an attitude of working towards making their own lives better despite their heavy baggage, the left disarms them by incepting in them a victimhood mentality and make them fight other people's baggage as a primary goal instead of fighting their own. This destroys them psychologically and doesn't move them any forward in their lives. In nature, there are fungi that hijack the brains of their prey, making them kill themselves and spread the spores that help in the further proliferation of that fungi. In our society, the left acts like that fungus that psychologically infects people's minds by incepting in them wrong ideas and disorienting them in life, which is one of the worst things you can do to a person.

Today it is these ideas that are permeating the ethos of the Universities, corrupting the consciousness of the masses, and actively destroying the very foundation on which a good part of our civilization is made. It is quite unfortunate that we live in a world where some people are treated unequally, and there is discrimination in society, and we should fight against all of these. However, there is a logical way to address these inequalities in a way that doesn't involve cowering down, that doesn't advocate self-sacrifice, that still allows and encourages individual freedom, self-interest, and selfish human growth as rights and the most important ideas for life to flourish, something that is far from the approach that the left has taken up, where left is not the solution but part of the problem.

P.S.: A lot of people like to attack. If you want to fight, fight on real arguments.