Many Treepers have read David Mamet’s story, I have read links to comments about his awakening shared on this site and others, and his position has appeared on many blogs and conservative sites as an example of a rabid progressive lefty who has incurred some kind of “come to Jesus moment” and evolved into a conservative.   Now he appears to have evolved into a Sarah Palin supporter.  However, I’m sorry, but at this moment I still regard him with questionable distrust.  Mamet’s conservative leaning came quickly because the facts for him could not be ignored. Unfortunately, he’s still operating and associating with those that don’t get it. These are probably his colleagues, friends and family he depends on and loves.   I’m sorry but eventually he is going to have to make a choice.  He truly cannot serve two masters.  (Recent Article Via Slate) – …I ask whether anything in particular prompted his change of heart and he cites the 2007-08 film and television writers’ strike and The Unit, a TV show that Mamet created and produced. “All of a sudden, the show was off the air and everyone was thrown out of work—the stagehands, the grips, the costume designers, all the people who worked 16 hours a day … I realized I had been screwed by unions as much as I’d been helped by them.”

The experience led him to start reading the work of free-market economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Adam Smith and philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hobbes. He also talked to Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell, two conservative writers at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “My dad was a labor lawyer and the ideas that I grew up with—bad management, bad capitalism, robber barons—when I applied this to my own life, I saw that we are all on both sides of the coin.”

Mamet’s book, with its dismissal of global warming, objections to state-supported spending programs and scathing hostility to liberals, often reads like someone who is grappling with these well-worn topics for the first time…

The Secret Knowledge has had some hostile reviews, including one from John Lloyd in the FT, and Mamet stands accused of turning conservative as he has grown older and richer. When I mention this, he bristles. “People say, Oh, Dave just wrote this book because he made a couple of bucks or because he believes in the state of Israel and he cast his liberal beliefs aside, but what about the arguments?”…

We return to politics and I suggest that his intellectual journey from liberalism to neoconservatism has been traveled before by Jews such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. This triggers a long reflection on his own Zionism and how he thinks Israel has been betrayed by the American left.

“The speeches that Charles Lindbergh made and Oswald Mosley made in the 1930s are the same speeches that are being made today, only slightly more politely: ‘The Jews are bringing us to war. Perhaps we should give their state away.’ The liberals in my neighborhood wouldn’t give away Brentwood to the Palestinians but they want to give away Tel Aviv.”…

What does he think of Barack Obama? “The question is can he run on his record in 2012 and the answer is no, because it’s abysmal. He took a trillion dollars and where it went, nobody knows. He dismantled health care, he weakened America around the world, he sold out the state of Israel. All he’s got to run on is being a Democrat and indicting the other fellow.”

So who would he prefer as president? He replies that he is “not current” with the Republican contenders until I mention Sarah Palin. “I am crazy about her,” he answers immediately. “Would she make a good candidate for president? I don’t know but she seems to have succeeded at everything she put her hand to.”   (read more)

I sincerely wish I could be more like some of those who would embrace these lost souls. Personally, I have become so cynical and suspect of the intentions of progressives that I can only see them establishing some point of leverage on me or setting me up for some colossal back-stabbing or sucker punch.

As a target of scorn heaped on me and my beliefs by seemingly endless sources, I must admit that I often respond to these “transitions” with a certain amount of sarcasm and cynicism.  After being such mean-spirited pricks for so long, and using things I value as a punchline, I find that I am slow to forgive and embrace them as kindred souls.

I think I would like to see a certain meek hat-in-hand mea culpa where apologies are expressed for being a smug, disrespectful know-it-all.   In other words, just because you had an epiphany (generally because some progressive idea or plan finally got to your level of social-strata and now YOU are the bad guy/target) and finally figured out that you were a frigging idiot with illogical beliefs does not make you the prodigal son.

The difficulty and awesomeness of your struggle to break from evil is offset by how long you were part and parcel of that evil and how you denigrated individuals who had never hurt you ever, in any way. Progressivism IS evil.

Yeah, standing at that crossroads has to be a seriously frightening event for somebody who has spent a life ignoring the truth for whatever reasons.   I can sympathize to a certain extent, but the reality of decades of progressive tyranny and immoral social engineering, that has purposefully consciously led to the horrible decline of my Liberty and the 5000 year leap of our Republic, to satisfy some radical or political chic is a far greater nightmare.  It seems to me while this fellow has valid points worth consideration, he is holding the hand of the kind of people who throughout history have consistently been either instruments of, or directly responsible for, terror, death, mayhem, slavery, pogrom, dictatorship, genocide, what have you.  Never Liberty and Prosperity.  Always a supposed moral superiority where this elitist class is never accountable.

Well you know what, I don’t feel the tiniest bit sorry. Their predicament is both of their own doing as an adult, and why the world is such a fucking mess right now.  Boo Hoo.
Let me point out some really scary stuff for you, for the fence-sitting progressives:

Scary is watching progressive judges whittling away at our actual Constitutional rights. Not the fake socialist rights like healthcare and collective bargaining.

Scary is having served our Country; always taking the high ground and saying, “Hey I disagree with you but defend your right to say it” while Obama and your progressive pals chuckle at my ignorance and leapfrog over me to suppress MY views and opinions.

Scary is having to watch people flee from one of the most beautiful climates and States in the Union because of the oppressive business environment and the persecution of citizens, ie people with documentation and money, while everyone pretends that illegals are a small minority and look the other way.

Scary is having to plan to provide for your family and future while the popular/handsome/charismatic empty-suit tells you clearly that under his leadership, “energy prices will necessarily skyrocket”.  Let’s see, what aspect of every other product on the planet is directly effected by energy cost again?

Scary is having my own Judeo-Christian beliefs ridiculed by progressives while they elevate radical Islam, environmentalism and climatism to a superior and irrefutable position in my society.

I sincerely wish I were as forgiving and accepting as some moderate conservatives, and I try, Lord knows I try, but this crap is just too dangerous now.  We are at the precipice and damn near beyond the point of return. I want to be kind to those who are just now ‘finding true enlightenment’ about the collectivist group think, however I no longer believe we can take the ‘baby steps’ approach:

1)  We can neither afford the time, money and energy for another decade of ‘baby stepping’ in order to accommodate those with tender sensibilities to awaken to the world about them.  Over the past ten years a whole lot of good people have been crucified, obfuscated, diminished, attacked and lost their resolve while this ‘baby-step’ approach was undertaken.  Simultaneously the very fabric of our republic has been torn.

2)  If we are to truly understand the vicious leftist group think which is a permanent  revolution of the state, then those marxists who believe in the permanent Revolution of the State are never going to have an epiphany no matter how gracefully and poetic are those converts like David Mamet.

I no longer desire to defend any progressives’ right to run down my culture, my religion, my beliefs and the Constitution.  Screw them guys.  Get on board, wipe your ass and your nose and join the fight. Don’t come to me with a pathetic sob story about how you have to pay for private school for your elite brood because 2/3 of the public school population is either 1st or 2nd generation illegal.   You created this shit.   Do your internal moral discovery on your own time, but right now you need to get on board and help us adults fix the problem.

Lastly, if you really mean to change your thinking, I mean if it truly is the new fire in your belly reality, then do the right thing, pull up your diapers, put your boots on, fix bayonets and put the same kind of energy into the fight for Liberty that you did to destroy it.