You follow the antics of AOC and the so-called "Squad" of hers and you wonder if the left has lost its mind. Your instincts are correct. And if it's any comfort to the left, it is not alone. In fact, there are even loonier elements loose among the elites.
On the East Coast, the Manhattan-based leftist Jesuit magazine America regularly produces copy that assaults the teachings of the Catholic Church. (Some Jesuits are born with that DNA.) But the magazine has outdone itself now, even by its standards. It has published an article titled "The Catholic Case for Communism" by its Toronto-based correspondent Dean Dettloff, who just happens to be a member of the Communist Party of Canada.
Dettloff concedes, "Christianity and communism have obviously had a complicated relationship. That adjective 'complicated' will surely cause some readers to roll their eyes." Well, he's right. It did. Communists have murdered millions of Catholics all over the world. Millions more in China, Cuba and elsewhere continue to be persecuted. "Complicated"? Programming a remote control can be complicated. There's a better word for this communist-Catholic dynamic. It's called "genocide."
This communist argued, "though some communists would undoubtedly prefer a world without Christianity, communism is not simply a program for destroying the church." Except that is precisely what communism has tried to do all over the world since its founding, and for good reason. Catholicism is its mortal enemy.
Rod Dreher wrote a devastating piece for The American Conservative titled "Jesuits Rehabilitate Communism." He wrote how in Warsaw recently, he knelt at the grave of the Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko, the chaplain of the Solidarity labor union movement, who the communist security forces beat to a lifeless pulp in 1984. In communist countries, faithful priests and believers weren't just killed; they were tortured and forced to watch their beloved Christ and his cross be mocked in lurid and disgusting ways.
It wasn't "complicated." It was obscene.
So, do you think it can get any more intellectually incoherent than that? Let's just mosey over to the West Coast now and see what we find there. Hollywood is about as left-wing as you can get, but you can never be left-wing enough if you're on the left, and here Hollywood goes again.
Hollywood is facing intense pressure from the left to be more "progressive." Now the left is targeting movies for children. What's the problem there, you ask? Just read Esquire magazine and you'll learn that Disney movies like "The Lion King" are unacceptably uber-capitalist.
Gabrielle Bruney acknowledges in her piece that this is a movie about animals, not humans. But that doesn't matter. "The politics of a cartoon savannah shouldn't be taken too seriously, of course," she writes. And then she becomes instantly serious: "but regressive class messaging abounds in children's films. A 2016 study of G-rated blockbusters found that nearly a third of all the main characters in the films were upper class, while another quarter were upper middle class. Just 20 percent of leads were working class or poor."
You see, the lions are the rich, and this means their prey is somehow the poor. Bruney complains that the hyenas in the film are the villains, even though the lions also prey on animals. She writes: "The problem with the hyenas, then, appears not to be that they eat meat, but that they're trying to eat above their station. In the class structure of Pride Rock, Disney pretty much made villains of the hungry poor, outcast animals who just wanted to literally eat the rich."
Similarly, the Washington Post published a column by Dutch professor Dan Hassler-Forrest in which he denounced "The Lion King" as a "fascistic" film that portrays "a society where the weak have learned to worship at the feet of the strong." He adds, "The hyenas transparently represent the black, brown and disabled bodies that are forcefully excluded from this hierarchical society."
Holy smokes. Can you follow this nonsense? Then again, did we just say "holy" (slyly inserting religion) and "smokes" (we must support the tobacco lobby)?
Maybe, just maybe, there's some hope here. Maybe the intolerant left will find fault with everything and one day, like a black hole, implode upon itself.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.