By “everything” I mean everything, as when students at the University of California, Davis, protested a photo of a heroic slain female police officer holding a Thin Blue Line flag because they regarded it as “anti-black” and “disrespectful.”9 This was an apolitical tribute to an officer killed in the line of duty. But for many leftists, supporting police officers is, by definition, racist.
While no slander of conservatives or Republicans is beyond the pale for the left and the media, they cannot abide even the most innocuous show of support for President Trump. CNN was outraged when American soldiers stationed in Iraq asked the president to sign their MAGA caps and their embroidered patches reading “Trump 2020.” In denouncing these troops, CNN cherry-picked Department of Defense guidelines to suggest they had violated prohibitions against partisan political activities, omitting the express provision: “Active duty members may, however, express their personal opinions on political candidates and issues, make monetary contributions to a political campaign or organization, and attend political events as a spectator when not in uniform.” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders observed, “CNN will attack anyone who supports President Trump, including the brave men and women of our military who fight every day to protect our freedom.”10
“A WANNABE DICTATOR’S BUTTBOY”
It is rich that the left and the media blame President Trump for the destruction of public discourse when they have pummeled him with a daily barrage of obscene lies and vulgar hate since he first launched his primary campaign. They wring their hands over Trump’s supposed lack of decorum, his bad manners, and his offensive tweets but exempt themselves for worse behavior and don’t report that Trump is often responding to Democratic and leftist provocations.
The Washington Post helped drive the left into a frenzy when one of the paper’s contributors, Saudi citizen Jamal Khashoggi, was murdered by Saudi agents in Turkey. Upon his death, Khashoggi was widely hailed as an honest, independent, crusading journalist—until the Post itself revealed he was essentially an agent of the Qatari government who cooperated with Qatari representatives to devise his Post contributions so they would achieve maximum propaganda value.11 Willfully ignoring that inconvenience, the media uniformly tried to exploit Khashoggi’s death to bash Trump for not reacting strongly enough to the incident. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough asserted, despicably, that President Trump didn’t care about the murder because of his financial interests. He didn’t offer this as an opinion but as a naked statement of fact. Co-host Mika Brzezinski venomously lashed out at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as a “wannabe dictator’s buttboy” for his apparently inadequate response to Khashoggi’s death. Brzezinski later apologized—not to Pompeo but for her choice of words—and said she should have said “water boy.”12 Needless to say, had a right-wing commentator uttered that gay slur there would have been hell to pay.
This double standard is not lost on columnist Michelangelo Signorile, a gay man who asks why liberal comics keep using “homophobia” in their routines if they are defenders of gay rights. He cites a comedian who portrayed Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff Joe Arpaio saying he’d accept an “amazing bl** job” from President Trump. “The absurdity of it draws a laugh, even from many of us who are queer,” writes Signorile. “But the joke nonetheless rests on the tired premise that gay sex is one of the most grotesque things anyone could possibly do.” Among other examples, Signorile hits Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and the New York Times editorial page for implying that Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin are sex partners.13 One might fairly ask why the left was outraged at Kevin Hart, a black man, for decade-old jokes about gays while Brzezinski, Scarborough, Kimmel, Colbert, and the Times were given a pass. Thus, we see that leftists excoriate homophobia and other outrages only when politically convenient, not because they are actually crusaders against these outrages. It’s about power, not principle.
Bill Moyers is a perfect example of an intolerant, rage-filled liberal who projects his own attitudes onto conservatives. Several years ago he argued that conservative talk radio incites domestic terrorism and hate. Now consider whether that could describe his own comments during the 2016 presidential campaign: “Trump and his ilk would sweep the promise of America into the dustbin of history unless they are exposed now to the disinfectant of sunlight, the cleansing torch of truth. Nothing else can save us from the dark age of unreason that would arrive with the triumph of Donald Trump.”14
In a dramatic reversal of the sixties free-speech movement, leftists openly proclaim that their political opponents have no right to participate in politics or even walk the streets. At a rally in Los Angeles, Congresswoman Maxine Waters declared, “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” This was no misstatement, as Waters reiterated her sentiments in a television interview.15 Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Waters’s remarks unacceptable but immediately blamed them on President Trump’s “daily lack of civility.”16
Leftist bullies drove White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders out of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, and it was easier to find liberals applauding the incident than condemning it.17 Similarly, a restaurant owner in California tweeted that he would refuse service to MAGA hat–wearing customers. “It hasn’t happened yet, but if you come to my restaurant wearing a MAGA cap, you aren’t getting served, same as if you come in wearing a swastika, white hood, or any other symbol of intolerance and hate,” tweeted J. Kenji López-Alt, a chef-partner of the restaurant Wursthall in San Mateo. The tweet received 2,100 likes and 200 retweets. In other tweets he again compared Trump supporters to KKK members: “MAGA hats are like white hoods except stupider because you can see exactly who is wearing them.”18
CNN host Chris Cuomo unsurprisingly sympathized with López-Alt, claiming that MAGA hats “triggered” people and wearing them is equivalent to wearing a shirt that says, “I hate black people.” Cuomo’s CNN colleague Don Lemon agreed, saying, “If you’re going to wear that hat… maybe that hat means the Central Park five to people. Maybe it means birtherism to people. Maybe it means Mexicans are rapists to people. And so you cannot erase those things from the story of that hat.…”19 So, in Lemon’s view, Trump supporters shouldn’t wear the hats because they know Trump haters will assume they’re racist. It’s not the fault of Trump haters, you see, but those who dare to publicly show support for Trump—a president supported by half the American people.
Lemon knows his fellow leftists. A forty-one-year old woman attacked twenty-three-year-old Bryton Turner in a Mexican restaurant in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and knocked his MAGA hat off. Like a good progressive, the attacker said she was the victim because Turner’s hat upset her. “He’s not a victim. I am the victim,” she claimed, though witnesses said Turner was minding his own business when she assaulted him without provocation.20
Similar examples of leftist intolerance abound:
After Senator Susan Collins supported Judge Brett Kavanaugh at his Supreme Court nomination hearing, she received a slew of belligerent voice messages and a threatening letter that the writer falsely claimed contained ricin.21
Sam Lavigne, a New York University professor, created a database of 1,595 Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees from LinkedIn, including their full names, locations, and their roles at ICE. Leftist group Antifa spread the database to their Twitter followers, and the list circulated to one of its subgroups on Reddit, which encourages spreading personal information about people they consider “Nazis” or “alt-right,” including ICE and NSA employees. “Doxing ICE agents is good and moral,” said one Reddit user.22 Unsurprisingly, New York University representatives were silent about its professor’s outrageous action.23 The Daily Caller reported that Twitter had not suspended Professor Lavigne.24
Antifa has become an extremely violent terror group. Its membe
rs move in large packs and attack their outnumbered targets with clubs, steel pipes, and bear spray. They’ve repeatedly terrorized entire sections of Portland, Oregon, harassing and chasing utterly innocent motorists, not even sparing the elderly or the handicapped.25 In Philadelphia, an Antifa gang attacked U.S. Marine Corps reservists Alejandro Godinez and Luis Torres, mistakenly believing they had attended a nearby right-wing rally. The Marines were touring city landmarks when about ten Antifa members swarmed them, punched and kicked them, and sprayed them with mace, calling them “white supremacists” and “Nazis.” One of the Marines testified later that the attack was so brutal they could have died.26
In response to reports of the separation of families at the border, the late actor Peter Fonda tweeted that President Trump’s son Barron should be taken from his mother and caged. Fonda had previously tweeted about White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, “Maybe we should take her children away and deport her to Arkansas, and give her children to Stephen Goebbels Miller for safe keeping.” The Secret Service investigated the matter, as it had when comedian Kathy Griffin posed for a photo while holding a mock decapitated head of President Trump.27
A half century ago, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, the radical left unleashed its rage on the Democratic Party. Today, the radicals control the party, with leftist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dominating the headlines, socialist Bernie Sanders achieving enormous popularity among the party’s base, and the Democratic National Committee being chaired by radical leftist Tom Perez, who previously had his fellow radical Keith Ellison working as his deputy.28 At best, these agitators offer sympathetic silence as their acolytes harass, intimidate, and attack conservatives in every conceivable public venue.
“SOME WHITE PEOPLE MAY HAVE TO DIE”
Iram Osei-Frimpong, a leftist teaching assistant at the University of Georgia, posted on the university’s Facebook page, “Some white people may have to die for Black communities to be made whole in this struggle to advance to freedom. To pretend that’s not the case is ahistorical and dangerously naïve.” So he advocates murder while accusing others of being “dangerous”? In a later-deleted post on Medium he allegedly said, “Killing some white people isn’t genocide; it’s killing some white people.… We had to kill some white people to get out of slavery. Maybe if we’d killed more during the twentieth century we still wouldn’t talk about racialized voter disenfranchisement and housing, education, and employment discrimination. This should not be controversial.”29
While not all leftists are violent, it’s hard to deny that compared to conservatives, leftists are not a happy lot, which is ironic since they’re the ones with utopian dreams. Too many leftists are consumed with rage, believe most of their own countrymen are inveterate racists, and await some kind of environmental cataclysm. Instead of investing confidence in Americans’ ability to succeed through their ingenuity and work ethic, they burden people with victimhood in the name of protecting them. AOC is billed as the party’s fresh new face of optimism, but in reality she has an extremely low opinion of America today. Here’s how she describes her policy proposals: “I think all of these things sound radical compared to where we are, but where we are is not a good thing. And this idea of like, ten percent better than garbage, it shouldn’t be what we settle for.”30 So there you have it. America is just a smidgeon better than garbage—a fitting Democratic Party slogan.
Unfortunately, it’s virtually impossible now for Republicans to reach across the aisle and work with Democrats. First, Democrats have no interest in compromising with Republicans, and anyone who did would be attacked by other leftists. And second, it’s hard to compromise with people who slander you daily as a bigot. You can’t compromise with people who claim you’re the root of all evil and will condemn any of their own who even reach out to you in friendship, let alone compromise.
Filmmaker and actor Mark Duplass, as part of a challenge to “do a good deed every day,” tweeted, “Fellow Liberals: If you are interested at all in ‘crossing the aisle’ you should consider following @benshapiro. I don’t agree with him on much but he’s a genuine person who once helped me for no other reason than to be nice. He doesn’t bend the truth. His intentions are good.”
From the progressives’ reaction, you’d think Duplass had cursed their families. Swarming on him as an irredeemable traitor, one exclaimed, “F*** Mark Duplass. Why do liberals always have to cede EVERYTHING for the sake of bipartisanship?” Another declared, “I will bet money mark duplass either has sexual assault in his past or bodies in his basement.” And another: “The privilege of being able to look past someone’s sh*tty opinions because they were nice to you once is staggering, as staggeringly dull and overrated [as] mark duplass’ films are I’d wager.” Finally, “For Posterity, @MarkDuplass is a racist monster.” Duly chastened, Duplass deleted the tweet and stated, “Genuinely appreciate all of your comments. My goal is to create further understanding of each other’s positions. If we ‘vote them out’ without any attempt to understand, they’ll likely just vote us out next time the same way. That said, I hear your points. Best to all of you.”31
Sorry, I’m not buying this. Are we to believe Duplass genuinely appreciated being denounced for encouraging people to follow a single conservative on Twitter? If so, it doesn’t speak well of him. Out of decency alone, he should instinctively reject such bile. At any rate, his apology didn’t work. It just triggered more vitriol from “tolerant” leftists who revile conservatives for their alleged intolerance. One lovely leftist writer commented, “In addition, letting ‘good’ white guys slide on bullsh*t like this where they make an uneducated statement and aren’t held accountable for it are part of why we are where we are today in lots of different parts of Hell.”32 One wonders how many Hollywood denizens actually buy into liberalism of their free will as opposed to oppressive peer pressure—clearly, people are not free to dissent from the liberal line. Indeed, the left has cultivated a mania for blacklisting that you simply don’t find among conservatives.
Former vice president Joe Biden is another liberal who has been forced to apologize for saying something nice about a conservative. During a speech in Omaha, Biden casually alluded to Vice President Mike Pence’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2019. “The fact of the matter is it was followed on by a guy who’s a decent guy, our vice president, who stood before this group of allies and leaders and said, ‘I’m here on behalf of President Trump,’ and there was dead silence.” Calling Pence “a decent guy” was more than leftists could stomach. Liberal activist and actress Cynthia Nixon delivered the obligatory smackdown. “You’ve just called America’s most anti-LGBT elected leader ‘a decent guy,’ ” she tweeted. “Please consider how this falls on the ears of our community.”
Realizing he’d committed an unpardonable sin, especially for a Democratic presidential aspirant, Biden immediately genuflected to the gender gods. “You’re right, Cynthia,” Biden tweeted. “I was making a point in a foreign policy context, that under normal circumstances a Vice President wouldn’t be given a silent reaction on the world stage. But there is nothing decent about being anti-LGBTQ rights, and that includes the Vice President.”33
Even a Democratic luminary like Biden is not allowed to be gracious toward the left’s political foes, and this goes double for social conservatives and triple for unapologetic Christian conservatives. Mike Pence is one of those guys whose decency is undeniable, yet he is vilified by the McCarthyite left. Pence is among that special breed of individuals who walk the Christian walk and remain true to their principles even under the most intense pressure to disown politically incorrect convictions. Though many Americans probably still believe in the biblical principle that marriage is between one man and one woman, few have the courage to admit that in public for fear of scorn from the secular left. Pence’s innate decency is particularly galling to the left because it exposes their contrasting gracelessness, intolerance, and mean-spiritedness.
The left has become a closed-minded mega-cult that arbitrarily declares issues beyond debate and opponents unworthy of respect or civil treatment. Those who don’t agree are not just wrong but evil, and openly embracing this noxious idea is now part of the rite of passage among leftists’ ranks.
“THEIR CONCERNS ARE IRRELEVANT”
When people criticized Jimmy Kimmel for implying that surgeries for newborn infants weren’t covered by insurance before Obamacare, he sarcastically commented, “I would like to apologize for saying that children in America should have health care. It was insensitive, it was offensive, and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”34 In typical leftist fashion, Kimmel wasn’t merely expressing disagreement with conservatives on healthcare policy but suggesting that anyone who disagrees with him is immoral and indifferent to children’s health.
It’s commonplace for leftists to argue that people who oppose same-sex marriage hate gays, those who support border enforcement are racist xenophobes, those who support welfare reform despise the poor, those who favor entitlement reform are indifferent to the elderly, and those who oppose abortion want to rob women of their autonomy. And with greater frequency, leftists violently protest and block conservatives from speaking on university campuses or in the streets of liberal cities. “Liberals are creating an America, where it’s natural to hate people of differing political views,” writes columnist John Hawkins. “Not disagree with, hate.… It’s the liberal mentality that says, ‘People who disagree with us on anything are racist, sexist, homophobic and evil. Therefore, we don’t have to treat them fairly. Therefore, their concerns are irrelevant. Therefore, it’s acceptable to lie about them, take away their rights or even use the IRS or legal system to mistreat them.’ ”35
Guilty by Reason of Insanity Page 27
