I am a strong advocate for holding liberals to the same rules they hold everyone else to. Far too often we see conservatives hammered for something they did or said, even if it’s taken out of context, and hounded from the public stage because an angry liberal mob was pointed in their direction for no other reason than the left’s desire for a scalp. While it is satisfying to claim one of theirs after they claim, or try to claim, one of ours, it’s a sad game that ends with everyone losing.
This game is nothing new, but it has gotten significantly worse in recent years, especially after the election of Donald Trump. Before the election liberals hated non-liberals (independents are not immune either, anyone deemed not sufficiently liberal is fair game), but after November 8th, 2016, particularly around 9:00 pm when it became clear that Hillary was not going to win in a walk, their blood began to boil and scalps became the order the day.
This week saw the left eat one of their own, as was bound to happen – Frankenstein’s monster always returns to destroy the castle eventually.
An actor named Mark Duplass (don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of him, most people haven’t) tweeted something fairly innocuous. “Fellow liberals,” he wrote, “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.”
Like I said, a harmless tweet expressing a sentiment from an earlier time, a simpler time. But that time is dead. The aisle is a chasm, and progressives have built a wall around their side, a la Berlin 1961, to keep people in. Suggesting it be breached is heresy.
Duplass quickly came under fire from people in his own trench; from inside the wall. A day later he issued a retraction.
Why issue a retraction (an apology) for simply telling liberals they might want to sample the air outside their bubble every once in a while? Because that’s not allowed. A hive mind is not built to accept or even handle dissent.
I feel sorry for Duplass, all he tried to do was to be human. He tried to expand other people’s minds, or at least their understanding of what they view as their enemy. That is not allowed.
Time will tell if his career is impacted by this, but it’s a sad commentary on where we are as a society that that’s even a possibility, and likely a probably. Such is the state of Hollywood, and the state of the left.
Fueled, in part, by the outrage of the left, some on the right decided to go scalp-hunting and landed a much bigger fish – the director of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, James Gunn.
Ten-year-old tweets from Gunn were very politically incorrect at the time and are considered a hate-crime by today’s standards. Gunn was quickly fired by Disney from writing and directing the next installment of the billion-dollar franchise.
Quickly, the very mob that had run Duplass into his panic room to tweet an apology was angry over Gunn’s dismissal. Liberal “journalists” and activists (like there’s a difference) who’d just called for the firing of Scarlett Johansson a week ago for the crime of being a woman who was going to play a transsexual and championed every boycott call of Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Rush Limbaugh over harmless comments, condemned the firing of a director who made rape and pedophile jokes. The hypocrisy is obvious.
Both sides had a “victory” of sorts – one got an apology that served as a warning shot to anyone else in their tribe who might consider not hating conservatives, and conservatives claimed a famous scalp by applying the very rules we’ve been bludgeoned with by liberals for years.
This tit-for-tat is something I’ve subscribed to for years – liberals should be held to the same rules they impose on others. Liberals should be forced to take their own medicine, it’s not our fault that it sometimes turns out to be a suppository. But these ridiculous events exposed just how insane the whole exercise has become. Lives were damaged, maybe even careers ruined, over a tweet suggesting we might be able to tolerate each other, at least in 240 character increments on social media.
Apparently, we can’t. Or, more accurately, we won’t.
I’m just as guilty as anyone. Though I didn’t have anything to do with these events, having spent large chunks of the last few days off social media (something I highly recommend), I likely would have jumped in had I seen it. And I’m not suggesting conservatives change – unilateral disarmament is insane. I just can’t help but feel a little nostalgic for the past, when we could disagree and still get along. The days before the liberal mob made every little thing political and ruined it all for the rest of us.
Post Script:Yes, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again (at least a few more times, then I’ll give it a rest), but I’ve written a damn good book that talks about this issue called “Outrage, INC: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood.” Don’t take my word for it, take the words ofMark Levin,Ann Coulter,David Limbaugh,Dana Loesch,Dan Bongino,Michelle Malkin,Ben Shapiro,Kurt Schlichter, and countless others. Obviously, I have an interest in selling you the book, but they don’t. Yet they did. You’ll love it, trust me. Thanks.
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