This is a longish article based on a very short quote.

The Left in the Western world has to all intents and purposes gone completely mad. No longer does the Left represent those who toil in manual jobs or trades, something that the UK Labour Party used to do. Instead the Left as an ideology now represents the forces that would wreck Western society and replace it with a contradictory mess of identity politics and destruction that would hurt the very working classes that the Left came into being to protect and serve.

But what of the people that join the Left? If the Left has become evil are those who join the Left also equally evil when they join the Left? The writer Nick Monroe appears to think not and his short post on the Parler platform sums up many those who join the Left and become its fellow travellers very well. His view is that those who join the Left start out as decent people but are warped by the Left to become evil.

Mr Monroe (@nickmon1112 on Parler) said:

The real tragedy of the Far Left is that there’s those who had good intentions. Genuine good intentions. But turned rotten and into evil. By forces beyond their control.

I’ve met some of these people with good intentions who’ve joined the Left but who have gone bad. I’ve encountered those who got into Leftism because they were genuinely caring, empathic and driven by anger at injustice, but who’ve ended up, through being continually propagandised, to lose those positive virtues and have ended up supporting Leftist monsters.

One older guy springs to mind here. This man, who I will call ‘Bill’, was the nicest most caring individual that you could possibly wish to meet. He’d suffered great hardship and whilst fighting against it the hardship that he and those around him faced, came into contact with the Far Left. Over many years his involvement with the Far Left robbed Bill of his empathy and his ability to see that any story has two sides.

The last I heard of Bill he was a vocal supporter of one of the worst Communist monsters that the world has seen, the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Bill didn’t start out rotten, or a wrong ‘un who supported oppressive mass murderers like Castro, the Far Left made him that way. The Left persuaded Bill through propaganda both subtle and unsubtle that Castro was not a mass murderer who enslaved his people, killed gay people and impoverished his nation over decades, but instead was a hero.

Leftism, especially the Far Left, may indeed be a recognisable evil, but that description may not apply wholly to some of those who involve themselves in the far Left. They may be merely deluded, propagandised or naive. Because there may be deluded or naive people in the Left I believe that the Left must be debated openly and have the flaws in leftist thought exposed. Only by open debate will those fellow travellers who may have been naive or temporarily deluded be peeled away from the Far Left. Maybe this fear of losing support is why the Far Left is so hostile to the ideas of free speech and open debate and why so many platforms that are run by or have been infiltrated by the Far Left, are so enthusiastic about purging their political opponents from them?