Senator Elizabeth Warren, one-time Indian and beer drinker, would make a very dangerous president. This isn’t just because of her policies, which include ending the Electoral College, banning fracking everywhere, regulating a naturally occurring gas (CO 2 ), being radically pro-abortion, decriminalizing illegal border crossing, and free health care for illegal aliens. It’s not only her complete phoniness, which is in one way actually reassuring: it informs that the aforementioned policies are surely as pliable as her family history narrative. No, it’s also because she’s frightfully out of touch with reality in a largely unrecognized way, one common to leftists.

Approximately 25 years ago, I attended a local feminist conference concerning how our “patriarchal” society supposedly hobbled girls’ academic performance. Because I’d articulately refuted the speakers’ thesis using facts and reason during the commenting period, some of the organizers approached me afterwards, suspicious, wondering what organization I represented (only myself). The group, perhaps four middle-aged women, remained civil, but the arrows shooting from their eyes betrayed their thinly veiled feelings. Anyway, uninterested in my thoughts, they quickly begged out of the conversation by offering to mail me literature on their positions. I said, jokingly, sure, “as long as you don’t send a hit squad to my house.” The response?

Very seriously and sternly they replied, “We don’t do things like that.” They didn’t get that it was a joke (and, mercifully, I didn’t get the literature).

But perhaps those feminists graduated from the Patsy Schroeder School of Comedy. To wit: Engaging in demagoguery during a 1990s budget battle, the Democrats claimed the elderly would have to eat dog food to afford medicine if the GOP prevailed. Radio host Rush Limbaugh then spoofed this in a GOPAC speech, claiming he’d bought his mother a new can opener so “she can get the dog food easier when she has to eat it.”

Taking this seriously, liberal congresswoman Patsy Schroeder (D-Colo.) appeared on the House floor the next day and emotionally exclaimed that “this is what it’s come to! …Rush Limbaugh actually said he's going to buy his mother a can opener so she can have dog food. Wow!” The point?

These women exhibited a drastically poor grasp of man’s nature, a profound illiteracy with respect to reading others. They also are Elizabeth Warren; she is them. This is plain.

Consider Warren’s livestream broadcast from her home, last New Year’s Eve, in which she tried to sound downhome authentic and said, “Hold on a sec, I’m gonna get me a beer.” She consequently was widely mocked, with even left-wing columnist Joel Stein calling it the “worst impersonation of a non-elite since John Kerry entered an Ohio grocery store and asked, ‘Can I get me a hunting license here?’”

Even better was the top-rated comment under the below YouTube video of Warren’s beer gambit. “Another Native American succumbs to alcoholism,” “Shepface XL” plaintively remarked (you won the Internet that day, sir!).

Then there was Warren’s response to an endorsement by an obscure, fringe activist group calling itself “Black Womxn For.” “Black trans and cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy…,” she tweeted November 7th.

Now, maybe ol’ Liz was drunk on beer, or firewater, but as one Twitter respondent put it, “The ‘backbone of our democracy’? They aren't even the backbone of the alphabet soup community.” (In fairness, though, how many politicians have acquaintance with the concept of “backbone”?) In fact, I went far down through the Twitter responses and didn’t even see Warren’s followers defending her puffery. It was that bad.

The issue is not that Warren was marketing herself with the livestream and pandering with the LGBTQ praise; such is typical of politicians. But it’s normally done with some finesse and sophistication, giving wanna’be believers some plausible deniability in their own minds.

Warren’s inability to do this -- her obviously total ignorance of how ridiculous she’d look and her inability to read how others would read her -- speaks volumes. Call it extremely low emotional IQ, dislocation from reality in the given area, poor people skills, stupidity or something else, but it’s a fatal defect in a leader.

Remember, for a president to effectively deal and negotiate with others, manage geopolitical crises and keep our nation safe, he must be able to interpret foreign leaders properly and send them the right messages. Thus, a deep grasp of man’s nature, which should involve a great ability to read others, is imperative -- especially when your “finger is on the button.” Elizabeth Warren clearly, abjectly fails in this regard.

In fact, being only human, even the relatively discerning can stumble here. Just consider how in the early ‘80s President Ronald Reagan reportedly remarked, upon hearing that the Soviets genuinely feared a surprise attack by the U.S., “Can they really believe that we’re about to launch a nuclear attack?”

However accurate this report, I’m certain the Soviets could have. Note that people tend to project their own mindsets and priorities onto others; thus would Reagan never think that another government could suspect utter madness from his, and thus would the utterly mad absolutely suspect it.

Note here that leftists are characteristically godless, and to paraphrase Belgian poet Émile Cammaerts, “When people cease believing in God, it’s not that they start to believe in nothing; it’s that they’ll believe in anything.” Leftists occupy an inverted moral world, a reality perhaps best illustrated by what an American defector learned about Marxism while spending decades in North Korea.

“In North Korea, when you lie they think you are telling the truth, and when you tell the truth they think you are lying,” said ex-Army Sergeant Charles Jenkins. “You learn real quick to say no when you mean yes, and yes when you mean no.”

The North Koreans are obviously an extreme example. But this all raises interesting questions: How do people get this way? Does the dislocation from reality lead to the embrace of the unreality of leftism? Or does the unreality of leftism lead to wider dislocation from reality? I’m quite sure it’s both, actually. But now I’ll briefly outline Descent into Unreality 101.

Man has a great capacity to rationalize, which, of course, is when you lie to yourself, twist reality for yourself. People do it when reality isn’t what they want it to be. This especially characterizes leftists, whose agenda is wholly contrary to reality, to Truth.

The problem is that when you lie to yourself over and over again, bending reality year after year, you fall further and further out of touch with reality. Not only can rationalization then become entirely habitual, but you may reach a point where you can’t “find” reality even when you want to (Warren certainly didn’t want to make a fool of herself). Once severe enough, this may be called being crazy.

It’s like continually feeding bad data into a computer. How will the output be? In fact, people can reach the point of having “corrupted files,” more commonly known as character defects or dysfunction (though I dislike psychobabble terms reflecting the atheistic lexicon).

By the way, this habitual rationalization likely begins in childhood, when parents (often “liberal”) enable it by not holding their kids responsible and forcing them to face reality. “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree” -- and in this case it’s not the tree of liberty.

And in reality, being human, we all have to guard against rationalization and ask ourselves, honestly, if we’re ever and always seeking Truth above all things, even our passions. What is for certain, however, is that the people we today call leftists surely don’t — and they belong nowhere near the levers of power.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab (preferably) or Twitter, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.