The left has a fraught relationship with freedom, in that they are against it except when it comes to bizarre perversions and transgressive nonsense designed to blow your bourgeois mind. Free speech, a free press, the right to worship as you see fit – these are frustrating obstacles to their power. They insist on pretending they support these things, and they are willing to infringe upon any of your freedoms to do it.
I recently mocked them with a Schiff-disturbing Twitter thread demonstrating what it might look like if the right imposed a cracked mirror-image set of left’s dream policies upon them for a change, and boy, did the “fascist” and “Nazi” tweets fly from the 12-follower bots, the third-tier 1,200-follower blue checks, and the invertebrate sissies of Never Trump like Frank “Lumpy” Luntz. My favorite fulmination came from the Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes, who took a break from failing at marriage, radio, and publishing to demonstrate the kind of integrity for which he is renown among no one to cite only the provocative early tweets and not the one that essentially said, “See, you wouldn’t like this, so don’t do it,” thereby evading the point in service of his lame posturing for all his fans. Both of them.
But after his lib-curious cruise ship brochure’s utter humiliation by Mike Rowe last week, I guess he had to do something to distract, no matter how cheesy.
There’s an important lesson here for when the fake outrage weenies try to swarm you on social media. Never apologize, never explain, always mock. They suck, and they are nobodies. Why bother pointing out an obvious provocation when they already know what it is and are simply pretending not to, or when they are too dumb to understand it in the first place? Go back at them – they will inevitably prove your point when you are living in their pointed little heads.
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And here’s a pro tip for the fussy boys of Twitter: You already libel us as “Nazis” and “fascists” – which is weird because we aren’t socialists, national or otherwise – so it’s not like you doing it with even higher-pitched shrieks than usual is going to make it more compelling or get us to care. Nor is it a particularly persuasive flex to somehow assert that a bunch of proposals which a dozen years of my columns oppose are actually proposals that I really support, and that I could not possibly be mocking the pinkos, and that I somehow inadvertently let slip out some sort of inner Mussolini and only tacky blue checks are clever enough to detect the hidden truth. Again, we have the continuing liberal dilemma: Are they dumb, or do they merely think that the people listening to them are dumb?
But I did mix in some plausible initiatives among the outrageous ones. The lines about increasing our carbon footprint and deporting all illegal aliens – yeah, those are good ideas.
In the end, holding up the mirror to these saps had exactly the effect that I sought to achieve – these dorks are so easy to play. Utterly without even the self-awareness to hide their Stalinist aspirations, they demonstrated that they were fine with those authoritarian tactics, just not with those particular objectives. The thread’s modest proposals included banning Marxism, control of social media, and punishing dissenters. Their response was that I should be banned, that social media should toss me off, that I should lose my job, and that I should be reported to the cops. A bunch of freedom advocates reported me to Twitter, so I got a flurry of those “German law” notices. Basically, their view is that suppressing rights is not inherently bad. It’s only bad if done to them. When done to us, it’s a moral imperative.
And the amusing part of this is that they somehow think this kind of double standard is sustainable. The point of the thread was lost on them, of course, because – again – they either won’t see it or are too dumb to. You cannot launch a campaign to impose your wish list of societal pathologies on the other half of the population and think that if you lose, we all just revert back to the status quo without consequences. When you change the rules, you change the rules. There’s no, “Oh, never mind.” If you foolishly put authoritarianism on the table, you may find yourself on the menu.
The increasingly authoritarian left seeks to impose its cultural insanity upon us through soft power and by exploiting the tendency of people to go along for a while as if nothing has fundamentally changed. But that frog-boiling paradigm only lasts for a while – eventually a critical mass of patriots will get woke, and if you look at packed school board meetings around the country and the support for guys like Ron DeSantis, you see that the backlash has already started. It will grow. And the country will change, not necessarily for the better. Human nature is such that there’s no just reverting back to the former state of affairs after a full-frontal assault on the other half of the country. “Oh well, we tried. Back to normal until the next time we try to remake society into our manic pixie dream socialist utopia,” imagines the left.
No. That’s not how human nature – which, contrary to socialist fantasy, is a thing – works. When you open the door to tactics that our norms and customs once forbade – like silencing people’s ability to dissent – do you really think you’ll be able to slam it shut again when the New Rules become inconvenient?
That’s the true danger of the establishment’s urge to oppress – it will normalize their authoritarian tactics. I’m worried about leftist authoritarianism, but I am also concerned about the reaction to it getting carried away. Many times in this column, I’ve observed that Donald Trump was not our last chance; he was theirs, and they did not take it. They refused to see the right half of the country’s perspective, mostly because their neo-Marxian religion has condemned us as evil and unworthy of regard. Boy, that’s dumb, and dangerous.
Now, pistol to my head, I’d choose our authoritarianism over their authoritarianism, but I’d prefer no pistol to my head and no authoritarianism at all. I liked how things were before the New Rules. The problem, as my thread and the libs’ illuminating reaction to it demonstrated brilliantly, is that the other side is taking “No authoritarianism” off the table. And that’s quite a roll of the dice for the side without the guns.
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