The Truman Left

Originally published on Goblins Under the Apple Tree.

One of the many ugly things about the Trump era has been watching so many hippie woo woo spiritual types turn into crazed transphobic QAnoners, because those were my people. It’s kind of an embarrassing admission at this point, but they were.

Caitlin Johnstone

Oh Caitlin. Was there ever a writer who so embarrassingly displayed such lack of self-awareness?

The above tweet dates from October 1st 2025. I thought I was inured to this kind of flaccid uncomprehending pseudo-Leftist drivel by now but the word “transphobic” so casually thrown in at this late date just triggered me. And although I recently wrote a piece on Johnstone’s ferocious dupery (or paid up hackery – it’s so hard to tell!), this latest egregious effusion has driven me to confront this entire preposterous puppet show of pseudo-prole posturing.

Going by the dupe theory (which I think is more likely) I reckon that Caitlin may be experiencing severe anxiety attacks through a suppression of the awareness that the comfy Left/Right charade that has served well since WW2 is over. The reference to transphobia signals a steepening desperation over a formula that no longer works.

The formula that no longer works is what I shall refer to as The Truman Left. This I name after the movie The Truman Show in which Jim Carrey plays the title character who doesn’t know that his entire life is a fraud and is being filmed as a show on TV.

Thus The Truman Left who are all playing a part in a movie that they are unaware of. They serve as an extension of the various Leftist parties of the mainstream political spectrum and their purpose is the same i.e. not to challenge the system but to provide an oppositional gloss which, ironically, is the most important pillar for the system. They are the “dissident” faction that make a big noise about being dissident. I used to be a happy member of them myself. But alas, certain ominous developments have impinged and I have been forced out of my complacency.

I had to emerge from the ranks of this …umm…revolutionary battalion and I found that what was so impressive viewed internally lost quite a bit of its sheen when viewed from the outside.

The most important aspect of The Truman Left was to forcefully reject the idea of “underhanded” manoeuvring, demonised as – of course – “conspiratorial thinking”. This Left allowed for a fundamental rot in the system but it was always a matter of abstraction and never manifested in any actual manoeuvres. That there was a measure of truth in this insofar as the capitalist system did indeed have lethal tendencies didn’t make up for the wilful blindness towards definite specific operations – ironically, operations which indeed fed into that general tendency itself.

And this led to the crowning irony: that it was this Left who most firmly insisted on maintaining a wide-eyed innocence regarding the mainstream media. For this Left to take up its glamorously oppositional stance, the media had to be taken at face value. And this applied no matter how increasingly idiotic their assertions were.

In The Beginning ….

Exactly how and when this Left was formed extends back into the roots of our Western societal bubble for which World War 2 was the crucible. Now that is a vast topic since it involves what is our entire self image rooted in what might be called our “origin myth”. This might be seem as a hugely contentious term but I intend it as neutral in the sense that history is, as always, written by the victors and truth being the first, second, third and so on all the way through to the last, casualty of war, our lords and masters were presented with a richly malleable proposition.

The scene was set for all manner of artistic opportunities. Not least being the redirection of the roots of fascism away from the rich who funded it to the poor who were massacred by it. This was the birth of that peculiar cross breeding between an almost contemptuous token gesture at Marxist jargon and the ever-fruitful baroque posturings of Freudian psychobabble.

But that was merely the beginning. The true psycho-sculpture is illustrated by this most peculiar anecdote involving the pivotal figure of Noam Chomsky and the topic of the JFK assassination. See here:

….in early 1969 Mr. Chomsky met with several Kennedy experts and spent several hours looking at and discussing assassination photos. Mr. Chomsky even cancelled several appointments to have extra time. There was a followup meeting with Mr. Chomsky, which also lasted several hours. These meetings were ostensibly to try to do something to reopen the case. According to the Probe article, Mr. Chomsky indicated he was very interested, but had to give the matter careful consideration before committing.

After the meeting, Selwyn Bromberger, an MIT philosophy professor who had sit in on the discussion, said to the author: “If they are strong enough to kill the President and strong enough to cover it up, then they are too strong to confront directly . . . if they feel sufficiently threatened, they may move to open totalitarian rule.” According to the author, Mr. Chomsky had given every indication that he believed there was a conspiracy at these meetings. However, Mr. Chomsky never got involved with trying to reopen the case.

The comments of one Vincent Salandria are astute:

I agree that Professor Chomsky is not a CIA agent. But with respect to his pronouncements on the JFK assassination he is worse than a CIA agent. Without being an agent, with his enormous prestige as a thinker, as an independent radical, as a courageous man, he does the work of the agency. … He is unconvinced by the evidence of a conspiracy, but his (sic) is utterly convinced that JFK was a consummate cold warrior who could not have changed and did nothing to irritate the military industrial intelligence complex.

https://cassiopaea.org/forum/threads/noam-chomsky-supports-the-official-stories-of-9-11-and-jfk.8625

(Good luck with trying to open the original documents linked to on this page. I couldn’t!)

The above scenario is richly provocative in interpretive possibilities. Despite Salandria’s comment, we may ask: Was Chomsky an intelligence agent all along and he only called the meeting to act as an information gathering scout to see what the opposition had “on the assassination”? OR did he come to the same conclusion as Bromberger and back off? OR was he, in X Files fashion, approached by a shady figure afterwards and made the offer he couldn’t refuse?

In any case, Chomsky played the conspiracy-phobic card forever after. In this he was helped enormously by that ever-lucrative Freudian psycho-jabber with its update on the demonic possession meme via a deliciously condescending pseudoscientific veneer. Anyone who didn’t believe the Warren Commission just had to be a nut. And probably with major sexual dysfunctional issues.

But behind all that gratifyingly supercilious dismissal lay the central device of the media’s information management: “Don’t watch that! Watch this!” The JFK assassination wasn’t a “real topic”. Nothing to see here! Move along please! This was a formula that would be repeated over and over. Most obviously with 9/11.

Speaking of which, the “Don’t watch that!” aspect of 9/11 was of course any dispute over what really happened and who was really behind it. The “Watch this!” part was that this Arab attack – though, of course to be condemned for its terrorism – was nevertheless a case of the anti-Western underdog getting its own back. Note how this Leftist spin agrees entirely with the mainstream account of 9/11.

And that’s pretty much what the Truman Left were all about: Giving a “radical spin” to the mainstream propaganda. Hey look! You can believe the media AND be a funky revolutionary dude as well!

(Oh and needless to say, when covid broke, Chomsky became a vax pusher of Hitlerian proportions, pretty much saying that vax refusers should be lined up and shot.)

But to return briefly to those pre-9/11 days, the theatrical presentation of The Truman Left in that “golden age” of 50s to 90s was fairly stable. And a lot of fun was to be had from those posturing “rock ‘n roll” decades. This was Chomsky’s halcyon time. And indeed, I can fair get misty eyed over it myself.

But 9/11 was a sore trial for Chomsky. After the now automatic pilot routine of vilifying alternatives to the official account and denouncing the idea of the “inside job” thesis, he turned around and said that, even if it had been an inside job, it didn’t matter anyway!

Ominous Chord Signalling the Final Collapse of All Credibility!

It didn’t matter? Really? It didn’t matter that the US government led a massive attack against its own people and on home ground? It didn’t matter if the act that inaugurated the “war on terror” was a massive fraud?

This was where my head started to spin. The most insufferable prospect that Chomsky was suggesting was that I then blandly shrug my shoulders and just carry on with what was now revealed to be a huge game of cops and robbers, goodies and baddies etc. The puppet strings had been revealed but I was supposed to ignore the figures directing the show … in order to return to the show!

“Don’t watch that! Watch this!”

Now in any sane world, Chomsky should have been finished then. And yet I recall one member of the Leftist public saying, “My God! Chomsky is right! It really doesn’t matter!” And I realised that that commenter had, as it were, “adjusted to the rules of the game”.

And that is what this article is really all about.

Self-hypnosis

The truly curious move here is not so much the “spook dimension” whereby intelligence agents, as it were, shovel the shit knowing it to be shit. It’s the dupes who are unwittingly “trained up” and perform the requisite rhetorical manoeuvres themselves.

This surreptitious training involves absorbing the limitations of discussion, knowing what you can and, more importantly, what you cannot discuss. The rhetoric of dismissal must be learned: “conspiracy nut”, “reactionary”, “Right Wing” etc. These are ever subject to change but in our new Leftist dispensation, these are the favoured terms of abuse.

As you can see from the magnificently frothing Johnstone tweet at the top of this article, Caitlin has certainly mastered the verbal volleying with the aid of that impressively villainous prop QAnon.

But the one I really want to talk about is Bill. “Bill” is a pseudonym for someone I had an affable relationship with in the dear old pre-covid days. Bill was one of the old school Marxists, very intelligent and knowledgeable. But alas totally welded to the Chomskian model of Leftist. Since I still feel bad about Bill I’m going to keep on referring to him as Bill.

When covid broke, Bill had the charmingly naïve notion of acting as referee between those who accepted the covid tale and those who didn’t.

And this is where the fun began. He seemed to see the controversy in terms of one of those quaint old debate sessions at a university student union. The kind that featured the old “level playing field” where one side gets up and talks followed by the other. With both observing rules of decorum.

This wasn’t a realistic proposition. To see how, imagine now that one side was equipped with control over all channels of communication and armed with battalions of loud speakers that screamed constantly 24/7 into everyone’s ears. Imagine also that this side had commandeered the entire arena of social activity and had imprisoned everyone in solitary confinement.

Now imagine that the other side was …nowhere to be seen and nowhere to be heard! Apart from the very occasional squeak that was soon suppressed and followed by denunciations that amounted to character assassinations.

And – well you’ll never guess this next bit: Bill felt that the covid sceptics were a jolly rude lot! So aggressive! He was appalled at their lack of civility!

There was another aspect of Bill’s behaviour that was interesting. Even as he started his most agreeable selfless referee work, he posted an article on covid that was prefaced with the news that one of his most beloved relatives had “died of covid”.

See what he did there? At this point, very early in “the pandemic”, that little word “covid” already automatically implied the entire narrative of the “deadly bug”. And Bill comes along and says, “I’ll chair a discussion on whether covid is real. Oh, but before we start, let me just say my beloved relative has just died of covid!” Fascinating! This is what he’d been told and he unhesitatingly echoed it. And so, even before he started to discuss the controversy, he effectively precluded any skepticism by what amounted to a huge dollop of emotional blackmail – an assertion that the “deadly plague” narrative was sacrosanct.

I saw all that and thought, “Yes, you know, don’t you!” No question mark needed. He had absorbed the propaganda so deeply that he automatically used the very devices required. This isn’t to minimize his loss but merely to query his use of the bereavement to push the covid narrative by ruling out in advance every alternative interpretation.

And this is why the oft used term “covid cult” is applicable. The narrative surreptitiously “enlisted” helpers to replicate the propaganda.

And one final anecdote about Bill: It was approaching the winter of 2020 and the first vaxxes were being rolled out. In the midst of lockdown, I had been reallocated to a different kind of work and was feeling extremely vulnerable. I was looking for some indication of solidarity with others who wanted to refuse the vax. So, I turned to Bill and asked him about it. I’ll never forget his response. He said he was writing about “other things” but invited me to give my own views by writing my own article. I didn’t want to give my own views. I knew my own views. I wanted to know about others’ views. I wanted to know what they thought of the vax.

This was the moment of betrayal. This was the moment of turning away with “Nothing to see here!”, “Move along now!”, “Never mind!”

And it was Caitlin’s attitude too. I recall reading tweets and articles where she too complained about those “fixating” on covid and the vaxxes. As if that was important! But the entire Left had “other things” to think about, “other things” to examine, “other things” to fret over.

(Oh, and not surprisingly, Bill thinks the sun shines out of Caitlin’s arse.)

And just to make sure you grasp what really happened here with these Truman Leftists so totally unconcerned with covid, let’s just have a recap:

This truly was one of the darkest periods of propagandist terrorism in all history, a whipping up of hysteria unlike anything else in our lifetimes. Every channel saturated with screams and thunderous cataclysmic pronouncements of doom. And all to prepare for the most invasive attack ever staged by any government on its own population: a mass demand that all submit to injections of a never-before used substance to protect them from an alleged menace that was shamelessly hyped to the heavens as could be demonstrated by even the most casual glance at the statistics – not to mention the embarrassingly obvious psychological manipulations.

Also note: When faced with vaccination, we actually had some power. This wasn’t a case of going on a splendidly impressive protest march in which we get to wave a few flags and make a lot of noise, only to be ignored by the media – unless it’s a protest that is sanctioned by, say, a camera crew turning up to film two young women throwing tomato soup over a painting that’s protected anyway.

Imagine if enough had said no to the jabs. Imagine if we had a Left that told them to refuse.

But now that I’ve highlighted what Caitlin and Bill and the rest of this “Left” don’t want to talk about, let’s examine what they do want to talk about.

Well, it was the usual: various grand historical projections of the tectonic movements of economic and political forces, usually situated either in the past or somewhere else. Indeed, by the time of early 2022 (In the Third Year of Our Lord Covid), and Russia invaded Ukraine, you could practically hear an immense sigh of relief as, for the first time since the bug began, there was a major story on which The Left were indeed free to voice an oppositional stance.

And not before time. The recent emergence of the Canadian Freedom Convoy that was protesting against covid vaccinations and restrictions was causing a major embarrassment. This movement had to be deprived of any grass roots aspect and given a “Right Wing Reactionary Fascistic” makeover etc. Which led to a major problem: those decrying the convoy were, by implication, siding with Trudeau’s hated government. The World Socialist Web Site (a bastion of Truman Leftism if any organisation ever was!) found itself going through increasingly painful gyrations to hide this fact.

Thus, with Ukraine, this Left was once again free to give full rein to its self-righteous outrage in the nearest thing they had to “good faith”. They could loudly talk about Western complicity in shady interventions in pre-invasion Ukraine. They could be similarly “up front” with Gaza.

Speaking of which, Caitlin is practically orgasming over the utter lack of restriction with her wrathfulness over Israel. “Oh, I can do it now!” she is thinking. “Thank God!”

The fact that she is right about Gaza should not distract from her appalling compliance with direct and unprecedently deadly attacks by the Western governments on their own people – attacks which the population could actually do something about by simply refusing to go along.

And when she gets stick from some pointing this very thing out, she goes on the defensive. Her tweet notes the dismaying “degeneration” of her old pals:

….with Covid a lot of them went full-blown wingnut and started posting crazy right wing shit about trans people and Muslims and immigrants and China. I saw it happen to people I’d known in person my whole life, transforming from the barefoot peaceniks I’d always known into stuffy reactionaries in just a few years.

Now isn’t that a revealing statement? Oh, what happened to the dear old hippies? They knew how to rebel “properly”!