Years ago, like many college students, I flirted with left-wing politics before life delivered enough lessons to set me straight.

Actually, my good parents had taught me many life lessons that I had to relearn after being swayed by left-wing professors and a corrosive popular culture that mocked my parents’ timeless values of faith, family, hard work, patriotism and community.

The first reality check came with my paychecks. How could the government take so much of what I earned?

It also helped when I emulated Yogi Berra’s sage advice: “You can observe a lot by watching.”

That’s my hope for young people who have been seduced by the Democrats’ “something for nothing” siren song of socialism and their cynical charges of “racism” to smear anyone who disagrees with them.

They’ll also become aware of the left’s hypocrisy, so abundantly on display at the moment. New York State legislators recently erupted in applause when they legalized abortion right up to a baby’s due date. How this squares with their constant virtue signaling about “compassion” is anyone’s guess.

Which brings me to another thing that brought me around when I was still on campus: Watching male leftist leaders repeatedly lie and treat other people poorly, particularly women. While preaching “equality,” they treated their “old ladies” like serfs and ho’s. No wonder many of those women defaulted to radical feminism.

The creeps who took over campus buildings in the name of “peace” enthusiastically embraced the cause of abortion because it not only gave them feminist credentials with which to impress clueless women, but was clearly in their own interest. Disposable pregnancies allow men to fornicate without fear of becoming husbands and fathers — a fate they’d regard as worse than military service.

Some of the most outspoken celebrity male “feminists” were Hugh Hefner and his fellow pornographers, who made fortunes by exploiting women’s bodies. Hefner even boasted of helping to fund the legal team behind the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion in all 50 states in 1973. It’s the legal equivalent of Bill Clinton getting up and telling his alleged rape victim Juanita Broadrrick, “you’d better put some ice on that” cut lip. Hey, whatever makes the little ladies happy, or at least less unhappy.

Hefner also supported the nascent LGBTQ activist movement, which has mushroomed into the predominant threat to religious liberty and freedom of conscience in the United States, Canada and Western Europe. Once you throw off the gold standard of faithful sex within marriage, or even natural, complementary differences between male and female, anything goes, as the Cole Porter song says.

In recent days, Virginia’s three-man Democratic leadership team has imploded on racism and sexual assault allegations.

Gov. Ralph Northam, who first owned up to being in a medical school yearbook photo in either blackface or a KKK outfit, backed away from his admission and is ignoring pleas to step down. The kindly Dr. Northam also endorsed infanticide — after birth — in a radio interview.

Ironically, Dr. Northam’s campaign gave money to the group that in 2017 produced one of the dirtiest, race-based political ads of all time, “American Nightmare.” The TV spot was aimed at his gubernatorial opponent, Republican Ed Gillespie. It shows a pickup truck with a Confederate flag and a Gillespie sticker driven by a white man intent on killing several minority children, one of them in Muslim garb. The ad finishes with an admonition to end “hatred.” It was removed after an Islamic terrorist in a pickup killed eight people on a bike path in New York City.

As for Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who is facing an allegation that he sexually assaulted a woman at the Democrat National Convention in 2004, I don’t know if he publicly commented when Democrats confronted Supreme Court nominee and now Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh with Christine Blasey Ford’s and other women’s uncorroborated sex assault claims. But his fellow Democrats, who convicted Brett Kavanaugh in the court of public opinion, suddenly have a newfound respect for due process.

Finally, there’s Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, who admitted wearing blackface in 1980 when impersonating a black rapper at a party. Mr. Herring, the prime force behind a new “hate crimes” bill in Virginia, and who violated his oath of office by refusing to defend the state’s marriage law, apologized but did not offer to step down.

Miraculously, the nation’s left-wing media have not been able to contain all these scandals. Ed Gillespie, among others, must be thinking about David’s report on his enemies in Psalm 57:6: “They have dug a pit before me; Into the midst of it they themselves have fallen.”

But conservatives had better not indulge in too much schadenfreude. Proverbs 24: 17-20 warns:

“Do not rejoice when your enemy falls,

“And do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles;

“Lest the Lord see it and it displease Him,

“And He turn away His wrath from him.”

Still, you can observe a lot by watching.

• Robert Knight is a contributor to The Washington Times.