It’s time to push Leftist ideas and antics back to the fringes of American political life. These ideas, preached and practiced with righteous tyranny, have not only bullied their way into the public discourse but into our churches, our government, our businesses, our schools, and our lives.
Like a toxic gas, the lethal effects of the Left’s “revolutionary” ideology have slowly seeped into the culture, making it hard to breathe for all those who beg to differ. And it’s becoming harder to see how their corrosive curiosities will ever be stuffed back into Pandora’s Box.
You know the ones I’m talking about: Sanctuary cities openly defying explicit federal law to protect illegal aliens. “Nasty” women – marching with children – who scream 50-year-old protest slogans laced with the filthiest vulgarities of 21st century feminism. Mobs whose convoluted “protests” incite, then excuse blind vandalism against horrified business owners. “Heretical” counter-protesters who are beaten for daring to whisper their honest views. Dysfunctional citizens who choose not to comply with police but are celebrated the way terrorists’ families celebrate their evil kinfolk. Crazed protesters with noisy placards at town halls who drench elected officials with rehearsed verbal vomit. And terrified college guest speakers who are shouted into silence.
Guest speakers like conservative author Dr. Charles Murray who was recently invited by the AEI Club at Vermont’s Middlebury College to speak. To challenge Murray, the club also invited Allison Stanger, a liberal professor at Middlebury. Enraged students shouted the speaker down for 20 minutes, forcing the event to an undisclosed location. After Murray and Stanger emerged, the half-brained mob attacked.
“Someone pulled my hair, while others were shoving me,” recounted Stanger. “I feared for my life. Once we got into the car, protesters climbed on it, hitting the windows and rocking the vehicle whenever we stopped to avoid harming them. I am still wearing a neck brace, and spent a week in a dark room to recover from a concussion caused by the whiplash.”
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Where were the authorities? This is not free speech! This is not democracy! This is pure force, and force – not speech – was protected here.
“Speech for me, but not for thee,” is not free speech. The Founders never created the First Amendment to protect intimidation and violence. The nanosecond one side intimidates or punches the other, protections end. It is no longer a free flow of ideas, but force and tyranny.
Protecting violence over free speech is like starving wheat to nourish the weeds. Although weeds are choking the life from the wheat, the Left keeps feeding them because, after all, “They’re plants, too.” But, in nature, wheat and weeds can’t co-exist. Neither can political wheat and weeds; they are two irreconcilable approaches to social order.
Yet, there seems to be no end to the battalions of bookish political worms who squirm to microphones to rationalize all sorts of mayhem. “That’s free speech,” they mutter, with eyes peeking above theatric bifocals sitting on their noses. Butchering the hallowed vernacular of the Civil Rights era, their hollow screeds elbow themselves above the voices of sensible dissenters, denigrating them as racists, homophobes, xenophobes, Islamophobes, Uncle Toms, and women-haters.
To his credit, ultra-liberal Peter Beinart wrote a column in The Atlantic condemning Middlebury’s violence. But to his great discredit, he watered down his outrage to show solidarity for the core issues fueling his out-of-control brethren. He wrote: Conservative views on gay marriage, “trans” students, illegal immigrants and climate change are “bigoted”, “reprehensible” and “unconscionable.”
We say stuff like that about evil, not honest disagreements.
An endless crop of political mushrooms like Beinart are quick to load weaponized language with degrading labels targeted to assassinate the characters of their ideological enemies. Low-class political bullying isn’t violent but, like violence, it clogs the flow of speech. Pummeled by an artillery of “-ism” and “-phobic” labels, dissenters just shut up and pay the cheaper cost of silence to salvage what’s left of their hard-earned reputations.
When truth and facts don’t matter, debating Leftists and puritanical liberals is futile. Their pious theologies are iron-clad virtues in their minds – a pure religion never to be questioned. The kind of cold, calculated, unimpassioned reason that Lincoln advised as a defense against this sort of stuff, is gone. To Leftists and to the liberal Pharisee, you’re either a “believer,” or you’re evil … period.
It’s time that the centers of American influence stop spotlighting the endless causes of these opportunistic mobs. Why? Because time has proven that Leftist remedies don’t work. Forget the politics. These ideas do little, if anything, to punish or reward the primal inclinations of raw human nature.
But a new tide is turning. It’s in the air. Lawless acts, with no enforcement, is making an organic, grassroots response inevitable. If authorities won’t act, the good men and women they represent must. We can no longer sit and allow tyrannical forces, and the do-nothings we hired to protect us, to bludgeon and pilfer the blood-soaked ideals that keep our civil society from degenerating into barbarous incivility. Our greatness is in our goodness, but being “too good” crosses over into cowardice when the good sit by, as evil prevails.
Will Rogers once said, “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”
We’ve gotten run over. Words are exhausted. Healthy discourse, for now, is a colossal waste of energy at a time when we so desperately need that energy to solve some very real, nation-rotting problems.
Leftist influence has left America with a lot of work to do. But with a determined will, imagination and victorious effort, good men and women at the grassroots level can take the needed actions to turn things around.
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