Saturday, October 13, 2018

Liberals and Leftists Supporting Trump

Fortunately for him, President Donald Trump has attracted the support of many liberals, progressives and radical leftists. No, they are not out marching for Trump. They are displaying a level of unadulterated madness that has caused many Americans to decide that perhaps it’s not such a good idea to give them political power. Consumed by a rage to destroy, America’s increasingly radicalized left  has shown itself to be inept, incompetent and completely out of its mind.

Deranged is not strong enough to describe what is happening. Gerard Baker opens his Times of London column with a famous adage: whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. No one seems to agree about who said it first, but clearly our purveyors of multicultural pagan idolatry are reaping what they sowed. They have allowed Donald Trump to make them into raving maniacs.

Where are Enlightenment cults to Reason when we need them?

Republican poll numbers are rising and Democratic wrath has seemingly served precisely the purpose it was not intended to serve. It’s what happens when you take leave of even the pretense of being rational and allow your emotions to take over. For your edification, I would note that it’s what the therapy culture prescribes.

Baker lists some of the more egregious public statements made by non-politicians.

First we have a Google executive, a man who seems to be as articulate and well-informed as the average high school dropout, that is... Hollywood celebrity:

A very senior but hitherto invisible executive at Google, Dave Hogue, tweeted: “You are finished, @GOP. You polished the final nail for your own coffins. F***. YOU. ALL. TO. HELL.” He followed that with: “I hope the last images burned into your slimy, evil, treasonous retinas are millions of women laughing and clapping and celebrating as your souls descend into the flames.” I should remind you that Google’s founding motto, the leitmotif of the internet giant’s very existence, is: “Don’t be evil.”

We are happy to point out that Google executives are now living in the world of Biblical prophecy. So much for facts and reality.

What does it tell us about Google? Baker continues:

Some sceptics have sneered at what they see as the hypocritical moralising of a company that, among other things, avoids paying taxes in jurisdictions where it makes profits, imposes illegal restrictions on mobile phone makers to cement the dominance of its own operating software and connived with the authorities in China to produce a censored search engine that would block phrases like “human rights”. But I think that’s unfair. Thanks to Mr Hogue’s animadversions on an entire political party, we now have a much more clearly defined sense of what passes for evil in Google’s moral universe. Don’t be evil = don’t be a Republican.

I trust you also noted the profound remarks offered by one Christine Fair, a professor of diplomacy. She must have read some Shakespeare because, upon reading her remarks one is reminded of the bard, who has the witches in Macbeth intone: Fair is foul and foul is fair.

Not to be unfair, Baker quotes Fair’s barely articulate expression of full-throated outrage:

Then there was Christine Fair, an associate professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, widely considered the nation’s top institution for the study of diplomacy — yes diplomacy — who delivered her own verdict on the Kavanaugh decision: “All of them (white, male Republicans) deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and donate them to swine? Yes.”

When called out for her madness, Fair responded that she was just repeating what others have been writing on her blog. Huh. Were they really writing that they wanted to castrate her corpse? Huh. You see what happens when a noted empathy monger believes that you will not be healed until you feel her pain... or until you get a full measure of her stupidity.

And then there is the highly moral and sensitive Ariel Dumas, who writes for Stephen Colbert. One hopes that she is not a descendant of noted French author, Alexandre Dumas. What did Dumas say?

And here comes Ariel Dumas, a “writer” on the Stephen Colbert comedy show on CBS. “Whatever happens, I’m just glad we ruined Brett Kavanaugh’s life”, she tweeted. Mr Colbert has neither pledged to avoid evil, nor does he rank in anyone’s lists of institutions of learning. But he has often claimed a strong moral purpose to his work so we must assume it’s this that is animating his staff.

Baker explains the significance of his selection:

But what’s significant about these deranged howls is where they come from: influential voices from the tech sector that controls so much of our online activity; from an educational establishment that decides so much of what our children learn; and from the media sector that determines the bulk of the entertainment and information we consume. A kind of Devil’s triangle, if you will, that encloses the tight hold that the left has over so much of cultural and commercial lives.

They do not come from internet trolls. They come from America’s leading high tech firm, from one of its greatest educational establishments and from the world of CBS entertainment… formerly headed by the saintly Les Moonves.

With enemies like these, Donald Trump must be saying, you don’t need friends.

For the first time since he swaggered onto the political stage and crashed the Republican Party, he has succeeded in uniting it behind him. The lingering doubts among Republicans about his probity, competence, conservative credentials and the risks he poses to the norms of liberal democracy and public discourse have been eclipsed by what they see as the exigencies of the fight against an opponent whose anger and loathing rises by the day.

Happily enough, Bret Stephens presents the same argument in his New York Times column today. He hones in on the outrageous ,ignorant and divisive statements made by politicians, of all people. Many are familiar, but...

His theme is tongue-piercing, by which he means making oneself marginal and unattractive. Stephens says that liberals have pierced their tongues, but, again, I do not think that they are really liberals. They have gone over to the dark side and have become radicalized. We will not opine further on the matter of tongue piercing.

Speaking of “liberals” Stephens writes:

It pierced its tongue on CNN this week, when Hillary Clinton told Christiane Amanpour that “you cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.” And when former Attorney General Eric Holder said Sunday, “When they go low, we kick ’em.”

It pierced its tongue last week when New York’s Representative Jerrold Nadler pledged to use a Democratic House majority to open an investigation into Kavanaugh’s alleged perjury and the “whitewash” investigation by the F.B.I. A party that can’t change its mind and won’t change the subject meets the classic definition of a fanatic.

A political party become home for fanatics. Sounds about right to me. Stephens continues:

It pierced its tongue last month when Cory Booker and Kamala Harris turned Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing into audition tapes for their presidential bids, complete with “I am Spartacus” histrionics and bald misrepresentations about Kavanaugh’s views on racial profiling and contraception.

It pierced its tongue when Minority Leader Chuck Schumer chose to make Kavanaugh’s confirmation the year’s decisive political test, rather than run a broad referendum on Trump’s inglorious tenure.

You know it well, but when politicians tell their supporters to harass their political opponents, something has clearly gone off the rails.

Maxine Waters urging protesters to hound Republicans out of restaurants and pursue them at department stores and gas stations. A #MeToo movement that moved all-too swiftly from righteous indignation against undoubted predators like Harvey Weinstein to a vendetta culture based on rumors and whisper networks based on self-censorship. Twitter mobs getting people fired and speakers canceled.

And then there is the media, having long since abandoned its charge to maintain a strict division between news and commentary. Today’s American media has become propaganda wing of the Resistance:

It pierced its tongue when The New Yorker violated normal journalistic standards by reporting Deborah Ramirez’s uncorroborated allegation against Kavanaugh, and much of the rest of the media gave credence Julie Swetnick’s lurid one. The pile-on wound up doing more to stiffen Republican spines against an apparent witch hunt than it did to weaken their resolve in the face of Blasey’s powerful accusation.

Naturally, the radical left keeps claiming that Trump brought incivility to American politics. After all, Barack Obama told his followers to get in the face of Republicans. And he told them to punish their Republican enemies. And he told them to bring a gun to a knife fight. Put it all together, and Trump becomes the problem. Right?

Stephens concludes:

Much of this also merely echoes the uncivil politics that have been practiced by Trump and his followers from the moment he started campaigning for the presidency. But if the most liberals can say for their political tactics is that they aren’t as bad as Trump’s, they are indicting themselves twice — for imitating the wrong model, and for doing it worse.

7 comments:

Dr. Irredeemable Dreg said...

"[D]eranged howls."

I like it. Evocative, reminiscent of Picasso's "Screaming Horse" sketch.

David Foster said...

"Much of this also merely echoes the uncivil politics that have been practiced by Trump and his followers from the moment he started campaigning for the presidency."

Bull. The Left has been pursuing increasingly uncivil politics for the past two decades, starting mostly on college campuses--where shouting down of opposition speakers and similar tactics has become quite common--and spreading out into the larger society from there.

Stuart Schneiderman said...

not bull... a rhetorical ploy, by both authors.

Rick O'Shea said...

Wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire.

Sam L. said...

Let's think now... Which side has been physically attacking the other side?

Anonymous said...

I’ve been wondering if people who are invested in being Liberal are going over the edge because they are being challenged to look at some kind of mental blind spot, which is painful and is challenging their idea of reality.

/Esther

whitney said...

To be fair, Christine Fair has been cuckoo crazy for years. Probably decades. She pops up occasionally saying something nutty but of course the scourge of social media has made it so much easier