The New American Viciousness

Remember when Rep. Maxine Waters egged on a crowd, telling them to harass members of the Trump administration in public. She did not know it, because she does not know much of anything, but Waters was encouraging her supporters to become like Storm Troopers. 

The same disgraceful behavior was on display last summer when Antifa radicals and the BLM protesters were rioting across blue America. Of course, they kept shrieking about how they were fighting Hitler while they were acting like Storm Troopers-- hating a man that we and several others have called America’s first Jewish president, a man whose administration was markedly pro-Israeli.

Of course, local authorities have been largely tolerant of the BLM rioting. Precious few if any of the rioters, looters and murders were arrested or prosecuted. Thus does deviant behavior become normalized. And thus do the bonds of civility break down.

A couple of weeks ago a man in Montana-- not exactly a deep blue precinct-- interpellated Tucker Carlson in a fishing shop. Said man wanted to tell Tucker to his face that he was the worst human being on the planet. Did you notice how profoundly stupid the statement was.

As for the man who launched this mindless tirade, few people were really concerned about the fact that he was monumentally rude. Fewer still were concerned about the fact that someone who thinks that Carlson is the worst of the worst must himself be in possession of an IQ in the low double digits.

It was pathetic. It was an assault. It was disgraceful. It was the kind of behavior that would cause the man to be shunned by his neighbors-- unless they want to be tarred with the same brush, that is, unless they want their own reputations to suffer by association with a foul-mouthed lout.

But now, such behavior has become normalized. It’s acceptable to express hatred for Republicans. After all, therapy culture has taught us that it's all about feelings, and that if you feel strongly about something, you must express yourself, lest your bottled up feelings turn into cancer.

It’s acceptable in polite society to declare that Republicans deserve a beating. As noted here above and before, Republicans are the new Jews. Led by the Squad, and the Biden administration’s pro-Hamas wing, Democrats are now giving you permission to harass and beat up people on the streets, like Ernst Rohm’s Brown Shirts.

So, Lance Morrow recounts a recent event at an exercise class in a Wall Street Journal op ed. What could be more proper than an exercise class? What could be more civil, more orderly than an exercise class. Apparently, in blue America such is no longer the case:

A friend in upstate New York took a fancy exercise class the other day. The instructor wanted everyone to do vigorous leg work. She said brightly: “Just imagine you are kicking Jim Jordan. That’s it! Imagine you’re kicking Jim Jordan! Good!” Mr. Jordan, a Republican, represents Ohio’s Fourth Congressional District.

So, Jim Jordan, not exactly a household name, is now the left’s favorite pinata. Kick him; hit him; hit him while he's down; do not let him get up.

One feels obliged to note that the person uttering these threats is a female. What if some deranged male somewhere reads about this and concludes that kicking people is now the lingua franca of political debate. What if someone gives to her what she is so blithely proposing that we give to Jim Jordan?

Morrow shared the episode on Facebook. Here is what happened:

I posted the anecdote on Facebook, starting with the words: “The way we live now.” I thought it might make an interesting Rorschach test. It did.

Almost immediately, someone commented, “He deserved it.” Other comments followed, along the same line. I thought the image of a group of Americans physically attacking a fellow citizen because they disagreed with his politics—acting out the assault in an exercise class for very nice people, who think of themselves as kind and good—might give friends on Facebook pause. I thought it might make for a moment of self-awareness. It was a little prissy of me to think so.

But, who was the man who commented that Jordan deserved it:

The man who wrote that Mr. Jordan deserved his symbolic stomping happens to be a distinguished Jewish American in his 80s, born a year before Hitler and Chamberlain met in Munich. In a further comment, my distinguished friend called Jim Jordan a “monster.”

Donald Trump is, for my friend, the real American monster, hatching his comeback down in Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Jordan is only one of Mr. Trump’s henchmen, a monster-by-association, but nonetheless good for stomping.

The man’s brain has been so completely addled by leftist politics that he has become convinced of the basis of Palestinian terrorist propaganda-- that Jews are Nazis. So he thinks that he is fighting against Nazis while he is acting like one. Pathetic.

You  would think that he attended the church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, where they used to distribute Hamas propaganda at Sunday services.

So, it’s yet another sign that civility is dead in today’s America.

Civilization is a thin veneer, as people used to say when men wore neckties and held the chair for ladies as they sat down to “dine.” Manners tend to be an item of nostalgia now, and whatever veneer may have been there once has long since disappeared.

So, violence is now acceptable in America. Harassment and assault are perfectly acceptable if the target is a Republican. As Morrow explains the culture has become vicious. Naturally, the good burghers of the American left blame it on Trump-- because they blame everything on Trump-- but the people who are committing the great majority of America’s violence, to say nothing of its crime, were not Trump supporters. They certainly did not spend twenty years in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s church.

I worry when this business of acting out violence manifests itself in something as innocent as an exercise class—there’s an implication of flippant acquiescence in a deed from which a decent person should recoil. 

A dimension of oblivious, semiconscious viciousness infects the culture. I don’t like the thought of Americans—in this case, rather privileged citizens, with the leisure to spend half of a workday morning toning their bodies at a gym—miming an act of mob violence and thinking it's cute.

The incident suggests an internalization, a normalization of such attacks as, say, the one on Sen. Rand Paul near the White House after the Republican National Convention last year, or the mobbing of people sitting at restaurants, or the acting-out of crowds screaming at public figures outside their homes in the middle of the night.

As we have been wont to notice, America is broken.