The events a week ago in Berkeley, California are sinking in, and maybe opening a few more minds.  Police there stood aside and allowed hundreds of uniformed, masked, armed-with-clubs thugs beat-up a handful of harmless free speech and anti-Marxist demonstrators. All of this recorded on countless cell phones. Reporters, including a local TV anchor, were attacked and intimidated along with other helpless people surrounded by the club-wielding militia.

Neoneocon has a fascinating example of one such person undergoing political change, who has posted a YouTube video:

The quote begins around 1:06 or so, and I’ve transcribed it:

So it became fairly evident very quickly that these people [many of his fellow progressives, who he describes as being proponents of “an authoritative sort of progressivism”] weren’t actually standing up for anything relating to liberty. They were just standing up for a divisive brand of politics that would tolerate no dissent whatsoever.

I’ve always tried my best to think as clearly and logically as I can. And that necessarily entails poking as many holes as I can in my own beliefs, until I’ve managed to narrow in on the beliefs that best model the world, or at least that model the world a little more accurately than my beliefs did before.

Neoneocon has a lot of good analysis of the video, and of what she sees as an emerging fault line:

 What I think is so marvelous about that quote is that it describes two elements very well. The first element is that it’s quite obvious that this man sets a premium on liberty. I’ve referred to liberty as “the great dividing line,” and noted that some liberals value it and others don’t, and that this particular difference is an enormously important one (snip)

The second element the man in the video talks about is also key: the desire to poke “as many holes as I can in my own beliefs, until I’ve managed to narrow in on the beliefs that best model the world.”

Both points would appeal to whatever is left of old Democrat liberals, people like Alan Dershowitz. The party has surrendered to the left, who are interested in power. They believe that they know the path to produce utopia and standing up to them means preventing utopia.  That is what animates the thugs.

The national media studiously ignored antifa, even though it has been a highly visible and destructive left-wing militia for some time now.  Antifa was judged harmful to the approved narrative that right wing neo-Nazis are the preeminent threat to civil order. When Milo Yiannopoulos’s address to a sold out crowd of thousands was violently shut down, a masked, black-clad militia marched into Berkeley from Oakland and participated in the violence that ensued. The national media yawned and moved on in the face of the specter of an actual private extremist army inflicting major property damage and shutting down free speech, while beating up innocent bystanders.

There is always the question of who is funding these militias. But nobody is even asking. If AG Sessions has a grand jury investigating, it is a well-kept secret.

Anyone who actually values liberty has to be alarmed. But it still takes a searcher, someone who meets Neoneocon’s second element, a questioning mind to break out of the imaginary narrative the media and left push as our political drama, with conservatives the eternal villains.

Our education system has been more interested in indoctrination than in training questioning minds for a generation or more.

The best personal account of a leftist becoming conservative remains David Horowitz's brutally honest book, Radical Son, has turned many a leftist into a conservative. 

Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt, Instapundit