The Postpostmodern Progressive Left in Yet Another Nutshell: Steve Schmidt, Postmodern Hermeneuticist

When you adopt the method of free-form literary interpretation, anything can mean anything:

.@SteveSchmidtSES on Trump saying he needs “six months to a year” to reform the federal govt: “This is a racist code whistle to every white supremacist in the country because it’s how long it took Adolf Hitler to take Weimar Germany to a complete and total dictatorship.” pic.twitter.com/PGQPzH5eT8

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 26, 2023

 It's really the lunatic philosophy/epistemology underlying this madness that concerns me most. This isn't just some isolated instance--this is how the left reasons now. It's no longer isolated to the weaker regions of the humanities and social sciences. It's seeped in so deep as to have infected formerly-not-so-crazy people like Schmidt. One of the leading ideas that has driven the academic left mad is that "everything is a text." Worse is the idea that all reasoning can be conducted in the manner of bad poetry interpretation: a free-form rummaging through vague hints of suggestions of implications, looking for bits and pieces and fragments of thoughts that you can string together into some vaguely suggestive hogwash of a pseudo-conclusion that you wanted to "prove" from the get-go. Add leftist politics--which doesn't really have to be added, because it's basically inseparable from this nonsense--and you get what we see today. Six months??? You know who else took six months to do something once???? HITLER

   As loony as Trump is, he is, by far, less insane than these people.