Software Download

You can’t put it better than this:

NR senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke blasted Democratic New York City mayor Eric Adams who suddenly sounds like the immigration hawks now that illegal immigrants are burdening his city.

“This is a side of progressivism that I loathe,” he said. “It is hypocritical, and it illustrates the capacity of the professional progressive mind to move between diametrically opposed hyperboles without any loss of enthusiasm.”

“These people,” he continued, “go from, ‘Have you seen the Statue of Liberty? Have you read the poem on it?’ They go from crying at the border. They go from spreading lies about border agents. They go from lionizing Ellis Island to proposing that the influx of a few thousand of the people that, until yesterday, they were suggesting could fit quite happily into tiny border towns in Texas, is going to strain the social fabric to such an extent that it represents a crisis. And there’s nothing in the middle. There’s no acknowledgement that they’ve changed their mind. There’s no slow transition from one to the other. They just turn on a dime, as if overnight they had downloaded the latest patch to their software.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cooke-theres-no-way-around-it-democrats-are-useless-hypocrites-on-immigration/

It’s really like people get new software downloaded onto their brains when they go to sleep at night. Even when I was a leftist, I always wondered, how do my fellow travelers simultaneously arrive at the exact same talking point? And how do they manage to whip themselves up so fast into a frenzy of enthusiasm for a completely new idea?

Changing your mind is great but it can’t happen if there’s no mind involved to begin with. To change your mind, you need to receive new facts, try to understand them, then slowly, haltingly evolve towards a new way of thinking. The process is painful because the brain values nothing more than it does the status quo, whatever it happens to be. But this is not an intellectual process with these people. It’s an overwrought emotionalism whipped up around unconnected, often garbled and weird ideas.