Pulitzer Prize winner and Academy Award nominee David Mamet is a prolific author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and film director. In this book, he strives to achieve clarity on several big societal questions, such as how we came to the place where the Left has taken over our schools, speech, and children, as well as how we’ve lost our ability to discuss differences of opinion.

“Shakespeare called actors ‘the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.’ But, in my time, it had been the newspapers.” 

Journalists capture time and history in a way similar to how actors once did, making societal issues accessible to the public. Journalism was once a renowned field for covering opposing sides of politics and wars, distilling these complex situations into language anyone could understand. They learned to cover a topic clearly, concisely, and effectively, to inform and interest the common man, and give him a grasp of matters in which he may not have direct influence. That grasp provided the foundation that some used to develop a voice on such matters. 

The world of news moves fast, and the pace and purpose of journalistic writing provides  invaluable skills that journalists can carry into other occupations. At one time, many of the great playwrights, novelists, and activists came out of journalism. Eleanor Roosevelt herself is considered one of the great journalists of the 20th century, and wielded her words to advocate for women’s rights and civil rights. Martha Gellhorn is renowned for writing about war from the front lines of Spain and Vietnam. W.C. Heinz, another war correspondent, eventually used his experiences to write the film M*A*S*H. Carl Sandburg, Eugene Field, Ida B. Wells, Frank Norris, Ben Hecht, and Charles MacArthur all began as journalists. The list goes on. Journalism has always been a profession of great influence.

Education, politics, and journalism have long been the mediators between our society’s differences, providing us the chance to discuss and understand our conflicts. Unfortunately, the three are fading fast. Education and universities have succumbed to cowardice and greed, and while politicians have always been guilty of colluding, journalism has now followed suit, weaponized by the Left to incite hatred and panic. 

Gone are the days of professionally discussing and exploring our differences; now, the slanderous term “haters” covers any who disagree with what’s set forth by the liberal Left. But how did we fall so far from what journalism was originally intended to be? How are we now a people who accept and even praise this fall?

Bullying, at its heart, is the unmerited use of power. Among children, we see this in physical altercations, slander, mockery, and name-calling. Among adults, society has recently added “microaggressions” to the list. Bullying spreads across every walk of life and age, whether you’re a child on the playground, or an adult working for an aggressive boss. But back in the day, children learned to deal with bullying in the school yard. Children would weigh their possible options, ranging from holding their peace, informing an adult, or even self-defense, and learn to take the appropriate action based on the severity of the bullying.

 But today, bullying sends schools into a panic over legal action from parents. Rather than students learning to resolve matters themselves, parents hold the school responsible, and what results is so-called peer moderation: a discussion over a conference table where both parties share how they made each other feel. There are no real consequences, but rather, a reward in the form of skipping out of class.

 Fast-forward through the lives of these children, now adults. Without the threat of any real punishment, thugs, rioters, and thieves run unchecked through our cities. Capitulating to these bullies, California, for one, has decriminalized petty crime after petty crime, and—shockingly—the crime rates only go up. There is no reverence for the institutions meant to govern us and hold our behavior in check. Why is this the case? Because children are not witnessing reverence in their families, schools, or places of worship. Without reverence, enjoyment of a thing all too easily becomes abuse of it.

 Without an understanding of consequences, responsibility or reverence, a child grows up listless, siding with whatever way of life coddles and shields him from true responsibility and action. It’s no surprise that many young people raised in this society flock to the Left, which promises the avoidance of hard-working self-sufficiency through erased college debt, welfare, and endless laws to limit one's responsibility.

 Civilization is built on an ambition to achieve, an intention to create, and a longing to grow. But as we are seeing it in full swing, it is also prone to self-delusion, folly, and eventually, self-destruction.

So how does this happen? How do liberals turn our own children into complacent enablers? What do liberals have to offer them?

Over the decades, society has come to believe that schools are responsible for raising children, not families. Now, school mottos refer to their institutions as “complete homes” and entire communities, cutting out the family or the place of worship. But the school was never meant to function as a parent or religion. We’ve often heard the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child,” but nowadays, education’s mantra is that it takes a school—and a school alone—to raise a child. We’ve allowed the schools to take over our responsibility of raising our children, abdicating our roles as parents. 

School education has slowly expanded to topics previously taught in the home. In the 1960’s, hygiene classes morphed into sex education, seeded with Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s ideals of controlling conception, euthanasia, and sterilization. Our history textbooks are being changed to focus on the horrors of America, in place of the many great things our nation has achieved. The fruit of this is that our students are indoctrinated from a very young age on what to think, how to vote, and even how to approach sex. 

But this use of school as a complete community doesn’t end when a student graduates—it continues through the denial of self-sufficiency. By not providing students the skills they need to support themselves, institutions are ensuring their graduates’ complete dependency on the government. In fact, this dependency has developed into a false sense of community—a herd mentality, guided by the selected few in charge. In an attempt to keep control of this herd, the Left has ensured that to even question those in charge is to risk losing your whole community. 

This might also be the answer as to why Jews tend toward liberalism. Jews have commonly been discriminated against and left on the outside, embracing a community of self-sufficiency. Despite criticism, they’ve forged their own successful paths in fields such as entertainment and family law. So while Jews may not be enticed by the financial support the Left promises, liberalism does appeal to them because of its promise to outlaw prejudice. For a people whose main community has been themselves, this promise of community and inclusion is attractive. But not only that—the machine of liberalism further presents Jews with anonymity. For centuries, a Jew noticed was a Jew in danger, but under the shield of liberalism, they’re able to melt into the crowd, no longer forced out on their own and pitted against everyone else. 

What’s the Left’s narrative about where our current problems come from? Liberalism seeks to weaponize microaggressions, and tear down the successful, hard-working, and wealthy in the name of “sharing” the success with the less fortunate. One way they do this is by constantly pointing back to how America’s successes were built on the backs of slaves, and so shouldn’t be acknowledged or celebrated. Rather, we have to make reparations for the sins of our ancestors. 

Those who work in transportation safety have coined the term “the accident chain.” It’s the idea that we can backtrack an accident to the conditions that led to it happening. Let’s say there was a car accident—was it the driver’s fault for looking down at his screen at the wrong time, or was it the phone’s fault for ringing just then? Or was it the fault of the person on the other end of the line? 

It’d be ridiculous to blame the caller—but do we realize that in effect this is what we are doing when we shun America for having slavery 160 years ago? Should we burn down all of the homes built before slavery was banned, because of the chance that they were constructed using slave labor? 

Our society is constantly asking whom we can blame, or who can pay the price for what was done. And while there are certainly some contributing factors that are more important than others, proposed “solutions” such as reparations don’t address the problem. Instead, they function as public statements, shifting the blame somewhere so we can have some action to take.

Instead of combing through the past so we can point fingers, maybe the past has another purpose: to inform us of our failures, so we can practically and rationally learn from them to improve our future.

What tactics does the Left use to cloud our ability to think and speak freely? One thing our society’s fond of doing is dressing something up with a new name, and trying to pass it off as something else—or at the very least, blur its definition. But simply calling things by a different title does not change their nature. We can, however, confuse the issue, and make it seem like its nature has been changed.

One example is health—we’ve renamed it “wellness.” While health is something we have a pretty good picture of, “wellness” is much more vague, and thus limitless. Any number of products can be marketed under the heading of “wellness,” and no matter how many you buy, there’s always another product on the shelf that promises to fill that gap in your wellness. Another example is “shareholder,” which has become “stakeholder” over the years—ironic, considering a stakeholder is an audience member at a gambling event, not a participant.

A more concerning example is social justice, an oxymoron in itself. Justice is the unbiased standard of conduct by which we operate, including the penalties for violating those standards. The very purpose of it is to be blind, not looking at all of the inevitable biases (which every culture has), but merely judging compared to the standard set. However, many people in our society say that is no longer enough—now, we must have social justice. Social justice is determined by bias—in fact, all it does is look at the biases, never mind the actual behavior. Slander, protests, riots, vandalism, even terrorism have all been accepted and even praised under the banner of social justice, because it was a “minority rightfully rebelling against oppression.” There are no limits on social justice, nor even a goal post to follow; it’s never enough. Social justice isn’t justice; when allowed to grow into its adult form, it is merely another word for anarchy. 

When faced with this renaming, we have three options: raise, call, or fold. As in poker, to call means to go along with it. To fold is to withdraw and refuse to participate. And lastly, we can choose to raise—to heighten the stakes, and take the moment to the extreme. An example of this, let’s say, would be encountering someone asking to be addressed as A or B, and in response, you ask to be addressed as Your Majesty. The other person is then faced with the choice to either quietly go along with it, or confront you about it. Going along with you would be absurd—but confronting you risks backlash. 

By allowing the Left to rename anything they see fit, we are giving up our freedom of speech. Now, disagreement is called hate speech, love means total acceptance, and tolerance means mandatory agreement. How can we have open discussions where we compare and contrast ideas, when one side insists that any such disagreement is hate, and must be eradicated? We are left wondering how we became haters, and indeed, what exactly it is that we are said to hate.

The liberal masses would have us believe that racism is in our very DNA—that it’s inerasable, following after us in every area of life. This idea tells us that one race must be genetically inferior, and by default, that the other race is superior. By accepting the role of abuser, white liberals are accepting themselves as superior and actually having that power over Blacks. The Left sees reparations as justice, but those paying reparations haven’t even committed the racism they’re accused of. White guilt is a form of self-punishment, perpetuating the lie that one race is superior to the other. 

But, as with the renaming of health to wellness, social justice and white guilt have no achievable goal or tangible success. No course of action will ever be enough to purge our nation of racism; no amount of repentance or activism will purge a white person of all his guilt or culpability. Even with designated scholarships and Black-only opportunities, even with reparations paid, even with all the statues of the Founding Fathers removed, the Left gives no opportunity for absolution. Whether a person ascribes to views on the Left, Right, or somewhere in between, by the color of our skin, we are either racists or victims of racism.

This polarization has seeped through our society, painting anyone who disagrees with this assessment as influenced by this systemic racism. And so the liberal Left runs unchecked, escalating their activities from protests to vandalism, demonstrations to riots—all in the name of opposing racism. Just like the high taxes liberal states like California employ, no amount of “give” will be enough to satiate the Left. 

The various Leftist groups squabble for power amongst themselves, but how do they gain power over others? The election of Donald Trump threatened the liberals’ power, and as a result, the Left diverted their energies to tearing him down and silencing those who supported him. Now, whites could pay for their ancestral guilt by heaping all their self-loathing onto Donald Trump. Someone still had to “pay”—it just no longer had to be ourselves. 

But when America was not unanimous in the demonization of Trump, the liberals found power in a different way: through the weaponization of fear. One clear example of this is the COVID-19 mask mandate. The authorities mandated we all wear masks, but they didn’t abide by their own rules. If the masks were so vital to the preservation of life, why wouldn’t even the worst officials take the mandate seriously? Clearly, the authorities doubted the effectiveness of masking—so what was the point, then? Who benefited from making all of America follow their orders? The Left turned a blind eye to the hypocrisy of the mandate makers who skirted the mandate. 

Liberals took up the cry to “mask up to love our neighbors,” indicating that anything short of following all of the COVID policies would be foolish at best, and malicious at worst. Regardless of how the COVID pandemic started, the response in the United States quickly became a way to tear down the middle class. 

Trump, not a politician by his own admission, had started giving power back to the people. In response, the Left positioned the COVID pandemic and the subsequent outbreaks as his fault. This effectively equated any support for the president, the Right, or the lowering of COVID restrictions with a willful disregard for human life. As a result, we weren’t just Republicans or Democrats; we became haters of fellow humans or self-sacrificing heroes, respectively. And so as the divide grew, and we let Liberals claim that their way was the loving, self-sacrificial way, we lost the ability to even express our differences in a civilized manner. The COVID pandemic gave the Left license to limit our freedom, cancel our economy, and stifle our free speech. Employing every weapon in their arsenal, the Left used the media, politicians, and mandates to isolate us, taking away our ability to work and provide for ourselves, and thus our independence.

Those who followed the government’s mandates without question were submitting to the very thing they claim to hate: slavery. And those who questioned or pointed out the hypocrisy of our leaders were vilified, portrayed as hating humanity and having no regard for human life. The goal of the Left is terror—that we would be so afraid of what they might do to us, that we wouldn’t dare question them. Such fear not only keeps any dissenters quiet, but also motivates them to accept and endorse the opposing views in the name of self-respect. Capitulating to the Left gives the illusion of choice, even though the truth is that cowardice is often at the heart of the change. This is what our society has come to: You’re either complacent under the government’s reign, or you’re ostracized, canceled, and demonized.

We shouldn’t strive for a nation entirely united—that would only be possible in a slave state, where difference of opinion is completely repressed. That’s why we have the Constitution, and why our elected officials swear to uphold it. Our society was built on a set of agreed-upon standards that would allow for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Adherence to those standards should supersede any party politics or allegiances to other parties, but the freedom to express differences of opinion is at the core of our nation.

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Recessional here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.