I was minding my own business, watching Alastair Crooke, when I noticed --

Late in the video, Crooke turns his attention to the "far right" in Europe. Well, the problem with this label, "far right," is that most of what makes them "far right" is that they don't like further war in Ukraine, an effort to prop up a bunch of Banderites (read: N*zis) in power in a portion of semi-Russia that was invented as a separate country ("Ukraine") by 1) Lenin and 2) Khrushchev. And somehow the war "against" Russia and Putin has been made into a property of the "center-left"! Opposition, in the US as well as in Europe, is regarded as a "far Right" property.

Of course, the Europeans have a much earlier claim on left-right confusion, since back in the Eighties they elected "Socialists" who gave them neoliberalism.

And then you have this video:

Briahna Joy Gray's self-definition as "on the left" appears (in this case) to be part and parcel of her opposition to the genocide currently transpiring in Gaza. That's fine, though it leaves out the "left" Zionists. Sure, they don't populate the universities, but, trust me, they're there. And the anti-genocide forces in the world certainly don't have any power to affect events. Their powerlessness would explain the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth approach one sees at the universities.

And, speaking of Krystal and Saagar, wasn't it true until recently that Krystal endorsed Joe Biden's re-election? And if Saagar is anti-genocide, how does that make him a "conservative"?

At this point I'm going to trot out my standard counter-argument to the "left-right" confusion. There is one general family of political arguments reigning in the world today, and its name is pseudoconservatism, or pseudo-conservatism if you will. (The second term does not get a red line in autocorrect.) There are different varieties, to be sure: the one endorsed by Team Biden is not the same as the one endorsed by Team Putin. But they're all an amalgam of various beliefs that would be imagined as "conservatism" were there anything left to conserve about the current political situation.

The trick, then, in our current political situation, is to be something other than a pseudo-conservative. It appears, at this point in the game, to be a difficult trick. So, until the revolution, pseudoconservatism. It's hip to be square, as Huey Lewis and the News once sung, though of course people learned to hate that song because Huey Lewis was saying the quiet part out loud and thus revealing the all-levels bankruptcy of our civilization.