Reject the Marxist Mind-Games
Save your time and energy: rather than discussing why their crazy and lazy bad-faith arguments are bad, just call them out for the liars that they are and move on with your life.
The pro-censorship crew is gunning for Substack now,1 and you’ll never guess which historical figure they’re using as their inflatable bogeyman to try to scare everyone into going along with their latest censorship campaign . . .
What’s that? You said, “Hitler?” Must’ve been a lucky guess! Because I swear, I had never heard that one before. Who knew the Nazis were such fans of free speech!2
Last night, I ran into a Marxcissist3 moron in the comment section of
’s excellent essay in defense of free speech on Substack. This young commie, whom I’ll call Don Quixote de la Marxcissism, was so stunning and brave in his efforts to fight authoritarians by demanding that we give the authorities more power to censor views they don’t like.Apparently, if we don’t let the ruling class place limits on the things we proles are able to discuss, it’ll be “Springtime for Hitler” all over again. (And “winter for Poland and France” — just like in The Producers.) Because the only possible reason you could have for not wanting to censor “hate speech” is that you want another Nazi genocide.
I wonder if Don Quixote de la Marxcissism has tried raising that argument with the unapologetically Jewish Ira Glasser? (Glasser led the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) back when that organization sought to protect civil liberties, instead of undermining them as it does today.)
It’s the same argument made recently by the ADL (which apparently stands for “Always Destroying Liberty”) in their recent article labeling Substack a home for “Antisemitism, False Information and Hate Speech.” As an example of the Nazi propagandists operating on Substack, the ADL listed Chaya Raichik, who operates the Libs of TikTok account. And who is also an Orthodox Jew.
did an excellent essay on the ADL’s absurd agitprop here:Anyway, back to Don Quixote de la Marxcissism. I stayed up later than I should have debating this troll, who of course wasn’t making any good-faith arguments with me or with anyone else who disagreed with him. Just the usual Motte-and-Bailey bullshit and similar equivocations that we’ve all seen before when Leftists argue for censoring viewpoints they don’t like.
These “debates” follow a predictable pattern, going something like this:
I believe in the First Amendment and Free Speech! I really do! All I want is for Substack to ban “hate speech!”
Hmmm . . . you mean like they do on all those other “free-speech” platforms like YouTube and Facebook?
Oh, so you think that it's problematic to ban "hate speech?" So you mean to tell me that we should allow Nazis to call for genocidal violence against groups of people they don't like?4
You know that the term "hate speech" is applied to all kinds of other statements besides actual threats of genocidal violence. Why are you pretending it’s not?
Well, Leftist politicians have not passed any laws banning “free speech” in America, so this ‘censorship’ you’re so worried about is not even happening.
Yeah, because the First Amendment prohibits them from doing so directly. But surely you know about the Twitter files? Federal law enforcement has been coordinating censorship efforts with private companies to suppress viewpoints and information that the government doesn’t like. You’re telling me that’s not a violation of free-speech rights?
They’re just stopping people from engaging in hate speech. So what? It’s good that’s happening! If it wasn’t, Nazis would be calling for genocidal violence against groups they don’t like! You think that's okay? You’re obviously a Nazi!5
And so on. If try to engage with them and have a good-faith debate, you’ll just end up going round and round, responding to the same circular arguments, over and over, all while they deny that’s what they’re doing.
Here’s what I should have done, and what I recommend that you do, whenever you encounter one of these Marxcissists in the wild. After confirming that you are, in fact, dealing with a Marxcissist — i.e., they hit the usual Leftist talking points and use Leftist dialectical methods like Motte-and-Bailey, Kettle Logic, or the “ICACA Method” of crybullying6 — you stop trying to debate them, because they are not arguing in good faith. Instead, save your time and energy by simply cut-and-pasting the famous quote from the great anti-communist and survivor of the Soviet Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying.
Like the Supreme Court once said about “pornography,” you know it when you see it. And you know the kind of bad-faith arguments I’m talking about, the kind that Marxcissists love to make. Whenever you see that happening, just disengage and start cutting-and-pasting Solzhenistyn’s words in response to everything the Marxcissist says, from then on out. Maybe even tweak it, so that it reads in the second-person, pointed directly at the Marxcissist in question, and add “bold” typeface to every occurrence of “you are lying”:
“We know that you are lying, you know that you are lying, you even know that we know you are lying, we also know that you know we know you are lying too, you of course know that we certainly know you know we know you are lying too as well, but you are still lying."
You’ll save yourself time and energy — hey, your Marxcissist interlocutor isn’t wasting any of his time and energy formulating good-faith arguments, so why should you bother formulating any arguments in response? — and you will get under the Marxcissist’s skin. Because one thing that Marxcissists absolutely, positively cannot stand is when people refuse to play along with their childishly malevolent mind-games, because childishly malevolent mind-games are all that Marxcissists have to offer, and by rejecting these mind-games, you are rejecting them. And Marxcissists7 (i.e., Marxist narcissists) cannot stand public rejection.
This post was originally published back in April. Here it is December, and the same Marxcissist morons are up to the exact same shit.
has the scoop on the most recent craziness from these crybullies:
Only, surprise surprise, the Nazis were very pro-censorship, as this article from the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website makes clear: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-propaganda-and-censorship
“Marxcissist” is a term coined by
, perfectly combining the terms "Marxist" and "Narcissist:"
Interesting that the Leftists who demand restrictions on free-speech to prevent “calls for genocidal violence against groups of people” never seem too concerned when their fellow Leftists call for and celebrate violence against Christians over abortion and transgenderism. Or about black supremacists calling for and celebrating violence against whites. Or about Black Hebrew Israelites calling for and celebrating violence against Jews. But as so many people have pointed out, if it wasn’t for double standards, the Left would have no standards at all.
The same folks who invoke the mustachioed menace from the Third Reich (murderer of 6 million people) as justification for giving them the power to censor views they don’t like, are the same folks following the same ideology, Marxism, that another mustachioed menace, Stalin, used to massacre 25 million people (and that Mao used to murder even more). It’s like a serial killer demanding stricter gun control and swearing that it’s only because he is so concerned about gun violence, when what he really cares about is disarming his future victims. These Marxcissists are simply psychopaths trying to use your moral concerns, which they absolutely do not share, against you in order to seize power, which they will then happily use against you, in complete contravention of the moral concerns that they had formerly pretended to share with you. Learn how psychopaths operate, so you can spot their schemes.
has a whole blog on this theme:
To read more about the Marxcissist Mania sweeping the nation right now, read:
Blue masking tape over the mouth? Please, that girl is just playing. That shit hardly sticks to trim, much less lips. You need a high quality duct tape to really adhere to a mouth, especially under duress when perspiration is a factor.
... wait, what were we talking about?
Oh right! Excellent essay. It is amazing to me how just straight up piss poor argumentation has become standard, and even applauded, in our society. I am always happy to see people pushing back against it, if only to improve the average level of discourse!
I like the advice in the subhead. For lots of reasons that I could give, arguing against the Leftists is a waste of time, or worse. Feeding them attention, as if their statements deserved it, probably just encourages them.
We need to "refuse to play along with their childishly malevolent mind-games", as the post puts it, and find ways to defeat them. And then defeat them!