Living as I do in the People’s Republic of Sacramento, California, I am virtually surrounded by the people who like to call themselves “liberals” or “progressives.” I know them all too well, and, I must confess, there is another reason I understand them better than they understand themselves (they are not given to introspection). Like many other patriots, including such luminaries as Bill Jasper (a senior editor for the John Birch Society’s New American magazine and Joseph Farah, creator of World Net Daily, I, when I was young and foolish, was a liberal. Incidentally, both of these men also lived in the Sacramento area at one time, as did well-known patriots Devvy Kidd and Rush Limbaugh — there must be something in the water. But some of us former liberals actually grew up, actually learned from reading and experience, actually thought about the issues. My liberal friends, like Peter Pan, never really grew up, never changed, never learned. And they have no desire to learn anything; they live in a bubble, an echo chamber, where they hear only their own opinions, never ever backed up by anything like a reasoned argument based on facts. Indeed, it is amazing how few facts many of them know; they are almost as willfully ignorant as the airheads interviewed by Mark Dice or Jessie Waters. They are careful to watch only NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and Public Television. They listen only to NPR. Fox, to them, is a nest of right wing extremists, and Rush Limbaugh is the Devil incarnate. If (as I rarely do) I dare say anything in their presence that would not be approved by Karl Marx, they all but sneer openly, and ignore my opinion or the facts I present to them. Sophisticated people in polite company do not speak or listen to anything so beyond the pale as the truth.

I cannot turn my back on these people, some of whom I have known for over half my life, although our friendship is increasingly limited by a lack of respect in each direction as America becomes ever more polarized and we all become more desperate and angry. When I was young I joined the Sierra Club, although I eventually became disillusioned and quit the organization, run by phony environmentalists with a political agenda. Most of my friends are members, and there is a certain degree of bonding that occurs when you negotiate steep slopes, do dangerous stream crossings, push yourselves to the limits of your strength, or carry injured comrades for miles to safety and medical help. We did all of that when we were young.

I have written previously of the way that leftists are manipulated by appeals to their vanity, and of the fact that they tend to be symbol-oriented, to see words as more real than deeds — and the leftist elites are masters of rhetoric, telling the prettiest lies imaginable. But there is something else about the psychopathology of leftists — they are utterly conventional in their thinking, and absolutely obedient to, and trusting of, authority. And this is a group of people who see themselves as “rebels,” as “intellectual freethinkers.” They are the sort who sport bumper stickers advising us to “Question Authority,” but they always believe authority and never question anything. They always think and believe exactly what the government, academia, and the controlled media tell them to think and believe. They believe devoutly in global warming, although they have no idea how the greenhouse effect works, or what percentage of our atmosphere is CO2 (it is .04 percent, or four parts in 10,000), or what the other main greenhouse gases are (methane and water vapor). They believe that America will benefit from the arrival of tens of millions more immigrants, many of them semiliterate and unskilled and uninterested in learning English. They believe that we can spend far more than we earn and keep doing it forever. They believe that Muslim terrorists who oppress women are nice folks and that Christians (who murder and oppress no one) are bigoted, intolerant monsters. They believe these absurd things because they have been told to believe them.

By contrast, I have another group of friends who belong to MUFON (Mutual UFO Network). They dare to consider the existence of things denied by the government and the controlled media, but not because most of them are “true believers” like my liberal comrades. They are essentially doubters and questioners, unwilling to accept the party line. I write for an offbeat magazine, Atlantis Rising; my leftist friends are utterly unimpressed by this and have absolutely no interest in the magazine, which regularly questions and challenges their faith in neo-Darwinism and conventional science. Unsurprisingly, many of my MUFON friends are conservative patriots.

As America becomes increasingly polarized, the gulf between those of us who doubt and question and those who believe and obey will soon become unbridgeable.