2018: The Year in Hate

Now that 2018 has mercifully passed into history, we can look with a less jaundiced eye at the amount of hate that the year generated. As you know, the radical left has declared war on free expression. It has deployed its favorite cudgel: the charge that any speech that contradicts its propaganda line is “hate speech.” Forgetting that the First Amendment to the Constitution was designed to protect disagreeable, unpopular and even hateful speech, these avatars of failed totalitarian states will harass and demean anyone whose words are hateful.

Fair enough, the civil code does allow us to sue for damages when someone unjustly impugns our good character or defames our good name. And yet, the label of hate speech is mostly trotted out to beat down anyone whose words cast aspersions on any group. And what counts as aspersion changes from day to day; sometimes, from hour to hour.

That is, if you dare to remark that biology determines gender, the trans lobby will rise up and denounce you for practicing hate speech. And it will do everything in its power to destroy your life.

If you think that we still live in a free country, you haven’t been paying attention. If you believe that Antifa radicals are defending the Constitution, you are beyond all hope.

So, leftist radicals have made it their mission to hate the haters. You see, hate is alright when it is directed toward someone you can label as a fascistic Hitlerian Darth Vader. And yet, it is ironic, to say the least, to see the opponents of hate become consumed by hate. To the point that they are willing to destroy anything and anyone who stands in their way… or who does not think as they think.

So, Roger Simon has suggested that we just finished a year of living hatefully. By hatefully I assume he means, a year filled with hate. And where your ability to spew hatred was a sign of transcendent moral goodness.

Simon explains:

… in 2018 (or earlier), we did have a year in which people despised each other seemingly as never before in our country -- sometimes with reason but quite often not.

Our psycho overlords have been selling the gospel of happiness, but no one was very happy. How can you be happy living in a world filled with hate:

Practically no one was happy. Or if they were, they didn't show it. All they wanted to do was vilify the opposition or even their neighbors.

Democrats hating Republicans (see the new movie "Vice") and vice versa were just the tip of a rancid iceberg. Never Trumpers hate Trumpers and the reverse, Sanders supporters hate Beto supporters, Antifa hate the bourgeoisie, the Proud Boys hate Antifa, FOX hates CNN and MSNBC hates FOX...It goes on and on. Families and friends split from each other. People shut up at work for fear they'll be fired. Thanksgiving is a festival of hostility, Christmas (when we're allowed to speak its name) is only slightly better.

What’s wrong with America? Simon offers a radical analysis. He suggests that America is filled with hate because it has descended into terminal godlessness. Without God, without the binding force of religion, America has disintegrated into a nation at war with itself. Didn’t the Bible teach us that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

There is and has been an emptiness in American society and I am going to suggest a cause I never thought I would, not because it is unique to me -- it hardly is -- but because I have, until relatively recently, been a rather typical agnostic of my generation.

It is the absence of God, augmented by the ongoing secularization of our culture largely perpetrated by that same generation (mine). We now almost have in America what the French call laïcité. It doesn't work there (they hate each other more than we do) and it won't here.

Call it a thought for today.

Victor Davis Hanson offers the same theme in his New Year’s column. He argues cogently that Trump’s repudiation of America’s governing elites was not really a rejection of meritocracy… because America’s ruling class lacks merit. Many of its members were chosen for reason other than merit. In truth, they are all self-important mediocrities, the kind that a self-esteemist culture, one that puffs people up with unearned praise, produces.

Our ruling elites are imposters, nearly all of them, and Trump has called them out on it. To their addled brains, Trump threatens everything they hold sacred, especially their sense of their own achievement. And like the boy who in the Hans Christian Andersen tale, he is saying that they are like the emperor who is not wearing any clothes. In the story everyone recognizes that the boy has spoken the truth. In our new reality, everyone decides that they must destroy the messenger who has shattered their self-illusion.

The one acceptable hatred is hatred of Trump. It is not just acceptable. It is required if you are to be invited to any more New York or Los Angeles cocktail parties. Hanson lays it out:

It is easy to suggest that much of the unprecedented hatred shown Trump is the poisoned fruit of his alleged toxic persona. And yet it is hard to calibrate whether any president has faced, from the moment of his election, the level of venom shown Trump by both political parties, and by the elite media, and the centers of progressivism on Wall Street, in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington, and New York.

A country that once banned for life a clown from a state fair for wearing in puerile fashion a Barack Obama mask now ritually talks of impeaching, committing to an institution, overthrowing, or beating, burning, decapitating, blowing up, and shooting the elected president.

Certainly, we have never seen anything like the constant anti-Trump media hatred, the efforts since the election to remove Trump, in slow-motion coup style, by seeking to warp the Electoral College, to invoke the 25th Amendment and the Emoluments Clause, to unleash special counsel Robert Mueller with an unlimited budget, a toadyish media, a team of partisan lawyers and investigators, and prior help from the top echelons at the Obama Department of Justice, the FBI, the National Security Council, and the CIA.

The argument of these elites and their institutions has been not just that Trump is incompetent or inexperienced, but that he is corrupt, perverse, treasonous, criminally minded, and to such a degree that the results of the 2016 should be overturned before the 2020 election. And such an end to Trump’s elected governance is justified not merely by his toxic person, but also by the racist, sexist, nativist, xenophobic Americans—the counterfeit half of the country—who elected him.

At the top of the list of those who Hanson calls out for being frauds are the Clintons:

Both Hillary and Bill Clinton, by education, careers, and service, are advertisements of the ruling class. Yet, she was the godmother of the disastrous Libyan incursion, knee-deep in scandal from cattlegate to Benghazi to Uranium One, and hired a foreign national during the 2016 election to find dirt on her political opponent through the paid services of foreign sources. Bill was impeached and somehow ended up worth well over $100 million largely by selling influence on the premise he and his spouse would one day be back in the White House. The Clinton Foundation is synonymous with corruption.

Take it a step further. The Clintons actively fostered a cultural climate that was rife with sexual harassment. When feminists womanned the barricades to defend serial sexual harasser and accused rapist Bill Clinton they were elevating him as a role model for all American men. Do you think it’s surprising that so many of the men who have been called out as sexual harassers are in the media and entertainment industries, are staunch Clinton supporters? Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Charley Rose and co. were emulating the splendid example of Bill Clinton. You might not have understood. They did.

And they knew that Hillary would have their back. She had had Bill’s back. She had defended him against rape charges. She had trashed the reputation of any woman who dared expose her husband’s predatory behavior. In fact, Hillary Clinton’s claim to fame, her only real claim to fame, was her ability to throw morality to the winds in order to stand by her man.

Today, as we see feminists launching vitriolic salvos at men who have harassed women would it not be better for them to admit that they and their heroes, the Clintons, encouraged and countenanced the behavior. Perhaps if they saw where the moral responsibility lay, and how much they had contributed to the hostile environment, they would be less consumed by hatred.

And, while we are at it, we should note that Hillary Clinton was an incompetent fraud. She had any number of sinecures, given her because of the man she married and because of her ability to turn a blind eye to his treatment of women, but not based on anything resembling a career success.

When it comes to imposture, Hillary Clinton rises to the top of the dung heap.