Hey, Matt Margolis: George Carlin Wasn't a Leftist. Here's the Irrefutable Evidence Proving It
It's so annoying how so many political pundits choose to shoehorn seemingly everything and everyone into their Right-Left tunnel vision.
So, as many regular readers of this publication may have observed,
and I are on a serious George Carlin kick. We’ve been going through all his HBO stand-up specials in order, and reading his trio of humor books (Brain Droppings, Napalm and Silly Putty, and When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?), as well as his posthumous memoir, Last Words (which Sally has already finished, fast reader that she is).And in getting this heavy dose of Carlin - which for me began almost two years ago when I acquired his complete DVD box set to try and cheer myself up after my mentor, Jack Saltzberg, died in summer 2021 - I think Sally and I have also gotten a pretty good handle on the man’s overall philosophy and creative approach.
Given the affection I’ve developed for Carlin during this time and how I’ve embraced a number of his positions, it really fucking pisses me off when people choose to misrepresent him. (Yes, I’m writing about Carlin, so I’m going to use his “dirty” language more than I usually do.)
This brings me to one of the right-wing pundits who has impressed me the least over the years,
. I got to know Margolis from his work creating covers at the evil, corrupt publishing company Liberty Island Books, where I was previously an editor. This was, of course, before I attempted to relaunch it as the company's new CEO, only to discover that it lacked proper bookkeeping and had failed to pay me, the other editor, and the authors the royalties we were owed - there was literally no actual “company” to launch. It was a front: a fucking scam created to enrich its two godless, lying con artist founders — just like most right-wing operations these days.Margolis wrote a really shitty recent post at his Substack
(oh, what a fucking creative name) in which he attempted to praise a Carlin routine he'd seen and enjoyed: a routine in which the perpetually shitty results of American education are exposed and explained. I’m also a fan of this routine and shared it not long ago on Substack Notes!So it’s irritating how much Margolis misrepresents and butchers what Carlin says. Here’s how Margolis began:
I responded to Margolis in his comments and he replied with a stupid answer - that I did not get an alert for - which I rebutted this afternoon:
Matt, you're simply wrong about Carlin being a leftist or a liberal. He wasn't - he was more of a counterculturist and an anarchist whose views transcended Left-Right stereotypes. He said explicitly that he didn't bother voting. He didn't support either party and criticized both. How can someone be a liberal or a leftist if they are not advocating one vote for left-leaning politicians?
You really need to dig into him deeper to understand him properly and stop trying to squeeze everyone and everything into your boring Left-Right obsessions.
He then provided this brain-dead non-answer:
If you listen to Carlin's political material, there's no question he's left-wing. He may have felt disenchanted with the political system and didn't vote, but that doesn't change where his views fell.
To which I respond:
He's not left-wing. He's anarchist. There's a huge difference which you are apparently too fucking stupid to understand.
Someone who is disenchanted by the political system and doesn't vote can't by definition be a leftist. If someone isn't actively pushing for big government they're not a leftist.
I'll be publishing a post about this soon presenting the evidence for how wrong you are.
Margolis then just restated his position without arguing for it at all. I’m so used to far right writers doing this. They just don’t know the difference between making an argument and burping out their opinion:
Again, his political views fell on the left side of the spectrum. If you want to quibble about technicalities because he didn’t vote then spend as much time as want writing about it because that won’t change what his views were.
I answered again:
Anarchism is not on the left side of the spectrum. There are different kinds of anarchists across the spectrum and many not on it at all. Not all political views fall on the Right or the Left. Many views transcend just that oversimplified model of ideology.
It isn't a technicality that he discouraged people from voting. It means you're wrong and using an absurdly broad definition of "the left." If someone is not actively working to forward a leftist agenda then they don't really have political views.
Can you even consider for a second that you may be misinterpreting him because you just haven't studied him deep enough and are oversimplifying his views?
George Carlin wasn’t a fucking leftist. His ideology was a combination of anarchism and nihilism. He wasn’t interested in supporting any group or political movement. And one doesn’t need to just glean this from his comedic routines. He spelled it out clearly in the beginning of his first book Brain Droppings right here:
“I sincerely believe that if you think there’s a solution, you’re part of the problem.”
That’s a clear rejection of both Left and Right.
I won’t bother to embed the video of Carlin at the end of his “Back In Town” special, declaring that he doesn’t vote and discouraging others from doing so, too, because the politicians who suck are simply a result of the fact that “the public sucks.” I put that into a post practically every week, it seems.
But the above should be enough to make it more than clear to even a fucking moron that Carlin wasn’t a leftist. If someone actively discourages people from voting at all, for any candidate, if he doesn’t advocate for bigger government, and if he repeatedly makes clear that he doesn’t see any hope of humanity actually improving itself, how can he be labeled a “leftist?” Is the desire to view him this way born merely from the fact that, as an atheist, he disagrees with Christian fundamentalism and the obnoxious political activism it inspires?
It’s similar to how, nowadays, right-wing populist nationalists just want to label anything and everything they don’t entirely agree with as “leftist,” “liberal,” or “woke” whether it actually is or not. They have that limited and simplistic an understanding of politics and the world.
But that’s not all Margolis chooses to lie about. Here’s how he mischaracterizes Carlin further:
In the clip, which was recorded in 2005, Carlin talks about politicians who don’t want to improve education, despite always calling for more money to support it. Carlin also criticized the education system’s approach to addressing poor test scores by suggesting that instead of improving the quality of education, they lower the passing grades, a common practice in many schools.
WRONG. It’s not “politicians” who Carlin identifies as those who don’t want to improve education. Carlin says this, in text which Margolis himself quotes, my emphases of course added:
Because the owners of this country don’t want that.”
I’m talking about the real owners now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. They get the politicians — politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies. So they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
It isn’t “politicians” which are stopping America from getting better - it’s the ultra-wealthy who own most of the country. Hacks like Margolis spend all day idolizing, defending, and outright fellating this very top 1% of the population with their poor writing and bogus “activism.”
Margolis is so confused by this:
Imagine a liberal saying this today. I can’t. Liberals today think public education is superior to any other form of education. The public education system is where they indoctrinate kids to be leftists, teaching them their version of history, beliefs on gender, race, and sexuality, while scores in reading, writing, math, science, etc., get worse all the time. That’s why politicians, particularly liberal politicians, keep talking about public education as a sacred cow. You can’t give parents the freedom to choose a different school. You can’t give parents the right to question the curriculum. That’s because it’s all about the public school system’s power. It’s ironic because the same lefties who worship public education are the ones who would instead lower the bar and make excuses for poor student performance than improve the system, just like Carlin pointed out. So yeah, in many ways, Carlin sounded like a conservative in this one.
Nope, Carlin was not a conservative at all here. But neither was he a liberal! Conservatives would never talk about the country’s “owners” and blame our shitty education system on them and their desire to maintain power. Instead, they blame leftist teachers and Democrat-donating teachers unions for it and obsess over stupid shit, like teachers who don’t despise trans people, as today’s right-wingers are so fucking obsessed with doing 24/7.
I’m so fucking tired of this bullshit. At this point, the Right is mostly just a corrupt business to line assholes’ pockets. And it’s among the reasons why I no longer choose to participate in it after dedicating over a decade of my life to “the cause.”
And Margolis, don’t you dare call me a leftist now too. The Left sucks as much as the Right does. Idolatry is idolatry no matter where it falls on the political spectrum. As I wrote in this post here earlier today, I’m post-partisan and post-ideological at this point. I’m both a liberal and a conservative. I’m both pro-choice and pro-life. I both embrace and defend many traditions and call for many radical changes. People can contain multitudes. It doesn’t take much digging to realize that the oversimplifications and stereotypes of both ideologues of “the Right” and “the Left” are worthless caricatures of what politics and the broader world actually are, distorting the truth much more than illuminating it.
I have seen people argue back and forth multiple times on whether or not Carlin was on the right or the left. He was a comedian. His primary job and purpose was to make people laugh. Is there truth to what he says? Yes. There is often times truth in humor. If a person can't laugh at something as absurd politics then I feel sorry for that person.
There are two political parties in the US each of them is trying to manage a coalition of supporters, and they often have contradictory desires. So politicians generally talk in ways that panders to a lowest common denominator. Most voting Americans don't actually agree with the party they vote with 100% of the time. Instead they are part of an uneasy coalition of voters.
This situation leads to a huge amount of material for comedians. It's not hard to expose how dumb it all is.
One of my favorite Carlin bits is making fun of the generally right of center refrain "think of the children!" He retorts with "F#@k the Children!" this brash vugar expression is funny on multiple levels. One it's a juxtaposition to the language normally used by politicians and activists, it's also poking fun at the absurdity of basing every opinion you have on "thinking of the children" when clearly the very same people concerned about the children are not at all "thinking about the children" in other aspects of their views. Carlin then goes on to point out how both left and right wing people actually don't think about the children. But he does so quite brilliantly and hilariously by positioning himself as "anti-children" but what he is really doing is pointing out how little people actually consider children, thus exposing the whole phrase in question as fraudulent.
Carlin is an "unreliable narrator" his actual views are hidden in many ways, but he also through comedy exposes the absurdity of the narratives thrown at us on an everyday basis.
If you are listening to Carlin and want to claim him as right wing you are wrong. The same goes if you are left-wing. Really the best thing about Carlin is while you are watching him at his best you can drop your pretentions and just watch him work. Just let his comedy make you laugh. He is one of the most cathartic comedians because he lets the audience kind of cast off their own partisan armor and laugh at themselves and others. He brings people of different political stripes together in that way.