What Am I For?

Over at

Racket Staff

, Matt Taibbi, answers a reader demanding Which side are you on?

Matt could have turned around and given this speech by Kevin Costner (profanity warning), but he gave a thoughtful answer, as he always does:

They come at Matt all of the time from the Left (and the Right) because they know he is a great writer and an honest person. Are there any good writers on the Left now? Not really. They’ve all been stuffed into the same conformist box and have become mostly unreadable. I’ll take a writer I don’t always agree with, but who thinks freely over whatever it is the Left has become.

Unlike Matt, I knew nothing of Communism growing up. I was that dumb girl who dated the guy with a Che Guevara poster on the wall. Growing up on the Left and in California, the only thing I knew about Communism was that it led to the Red Scare and McCarthyism, which I knew was bad. Nothing about Stalin, nothing about the Cultural Revolution, nothing about Cuba.

I also complained about Capitalism. The root of all evil, I would conclude, as I happily basked in its riches without even realizing it. It wasn’t until I traveled overseas to France and Italy that my sad little brain started to crack open. I realized that the business I built was something I never could have done anywhere else. I was free in America. FREE. I could see class division in these other countries. It was, and is, still there. It’s in America, too, but only if you play along.

I went to Italy in 1997 (and got pregnant), then brought my daughter to meet her father in 2006. The town he lived in remained unchanged. Not one building. Not one business. We went back in 2009, it was the same thing. America is always evolving. Businesses sprout up and die. Houses are remodeled. That’s unique to this country.

Most of us on the Left grew up admiring socialist countries like Sweden, Canada, and the UK. We also wanted free college and healthcare. Why couldn’t we have that? Most of us worked jobs that fortified someone else’s business. Once you run your own business, the whole idea of America takes shape.

I grew up without healthcare for most of my adult life. I couldn’t afford it. I would use clinics if I had to. I once visited the ER for a heart problem and walked out with a $14,000 bill. It wasn’t until I got pregnant that I was able to secure healthcare at an affordable cost. I was lucky that Kaiser allowed me to do that, but they were the only ones who would take me as a pregnant woman, because otherwise, that was a pre-existing condition.

I don’t have the solution, but where healthcare is concerned, I kind of like the Kaiser model - one big place for all of your needs. I am not as fond of a clinic here, a doctor there. I prefer Kaiser because you don’t have to make endless phone calls to various doctors, only for them to tell you they don’t take Obamacare.

No one should have to worry about a $14,000 bill when they are worried they just had a heart attack. As a taxpayer, I don’t mind my money going toward that kind of safety net, but you can’t do that and have an open border. You have to draw the line somewhere.

It’s funny that, even now, politicians like Zohran Mamdani and AOC don’t put together that the only way to have Medicare for All is to secure the border. Now they find themselves in an uncomfortable position, having to argue for both borderless migration and Medicare for All. How’s that gonna work?

I’m with Orwell when it comes to Communism. No thanks. Socialism? Whenever I hear any of them talk about their plans, I roll my eyes. Yeah, right. Please. Americans are Capitalists. They just don’t realize it. All of them are, especially the white girl/Manson girl vote that put Mamdani in power and crushes hard on Luigi Magioni. Just make our lives easier, they whine.

As with the Bernie Sanders movement, the problem I always had was that it was a rich kid’s game, not a working-class American’s game. They’re drawn to Trump because they don’t want to live their lives as poor people in a Capitalist country. They want the dream. Rich kids don’t. They want the Che poster on the wall without having any clue of who he was or what he stood for, much less the horrors of Fidel Castro.

Here is a montage of designer label socialists:

What do these women stand for? Designer glasses, fashion, influencer culture? They worship at the altar of Capitalism every time they use Door Dash, every time they post a TikTok, every time they use their phones. They walk around with a computer in their pockets and have no idea how it even got there.

So, what am I REALLY for?

If I could wave my wand, plastic would not exist. There would be no factory farms. Nuclear weapons would be abolished. Intelligent animals would be left alone - chimps, elephants, whales, dolphins, pigs — yes, pigs. I would love for there to be no child abuse ever. I prefer no abortions ever. I would love it if we could see each other as people again. I would love it if we had art, movies, comedy, and good journalism again.

I think the Left in its current state is a threat to everything I hold dear, but in my heart, I still feel like my DNA leans left, old left. When satisfying one’s bliss leads to children being sterilized, we know something has gone very, very wrong.

Socialism? Eh. Not a believer and don’t care that much.

Working on a podcast for later…