The Most Memorable Leftist Hypocrisies of 2017-8
The
left is composed of horrible people. Most sane people realize this,
even if they have friends on the dark side. I have friends on the left,
so I can say, "Some of my best friends are horrible people." The right
wing has its own problems, but for now, let's talk about the first two
years of Trump's presidency. It should stun even the most cynical among
us.
From the "99%" to "Crush the Little Guy"
Jason Wilson published a column at the reliably left-wing Guardian called "How the world has fought back against the far-right and started winning."
It celebrates Gestapo tactics against inconsequential bad guys the left labels as racists, Nazis, or whatever. Wilson glorifies "doxing," "counter-surveillance," and "no-platforming." He likes pressuring governments to classify internet commenters as terrorists and deny them visas. It exhilarates him to foment betrayals within conservative camps and devastate people like Milo Yiannopoulos.
You get the feeling that Jason Wilson hates people.
Atop Wilson's hit list sits Gavin McInnes, a guy who made YouTube videos and denounced the Charlottesville protests. Wilson also reminisces gleefully about getting Alex Jones blacked out from social media and demonizing Lauren Southern.
Wilson uses the "Nazi" label. Maybe he shouldn't unless he speaks of himself.
The trials and police investigations following the Reichstag Fire of February 27, 1933 sound eerily like everything Jason Wilson trumpets. The fire caused expensive damage to Germany's parliamentary building. It became the pretext for sundry measures that the National Socialists and Hitler used to eradicate dissent from one-party rule: massive propaganda, "doxing" the supposed bad guys (in this case, communists), banning other parties from meeting, censoring publication of ideas contrary to the state, fishy balloting, abrogating due process, rounding up enemies of order, and seizure of arms and resources.
This sounds like a left-winger's dream come true, if you replace communists with white supremacists or homophobes.
Maybe the left thinks it can carry on this way and won't go to the excesses of the Nazis because American leftists are more civilized. Or something. I doubt that the left even understands the Nazis enough to avoid becoming them.
It took five years to go from the Reichstag Fire to Kristallnacht and the Anschluss. I don't doubt we could go from Charlottesville to a massive raid on transphobic churches and emergency annexation of Guatemala by 2022.
Fighting white supremacy by giving rich white women unchecked power
If you know the story of Emmet Till, you know that in 1955, whites killed a black boy for allegedly flirtatiously addressing a white woman. Why? Because there exists in the American psyche a powerful urge to protect the honor of women, and especially white women.
The white knight returns!
In 2017, Time named Taylor Swift Person of the Year because she dodged a lawsuit by a man far poorer than she was. The man sued her because she called his bosses and told them he had groped her; the radio station fired him. He disputed her claims and sued her for defamation. She showed up to the trial and made a splashy speech that won the jury over, so he ended up with no job, and she came out with even greater fame, notoriety, and fortune. With her millions upon millions of dollars, she could hardly class herself with a honkytonk waitress fighting off a sleazy shift supervisor.
Time found Swift's heroism so dazzling that it overshadowed soldiers killed in war, volunteers running orphanages, leaders of foreign countries, first responders braving death to medevac disaster-survivors, and people who did more than get someone fired for groping them at a photo shoot.
If he did grab her rear end, he should not have. He deserved a slap, a suspension, or even a firing. But did he? Let's try to stay objective.
We can all join hands and condemn rape or a man who beats a woman up. When it gets to whistling, groping, and acting fresh, our consensus buckles. The problem with these lower-level harassment cases becomes their lack of tangible evidence, their room for wildly unreliable memory, the dearth of traceable harm to the victim, and the impossibility of knowing who tells the truth. Everybody, male and female, has motives to lie. Generally, the more serious the crime, the more traces it leaves.
In Swift's interview, she says this:
(If they do destroy people's lives over a whistle or a pinch, might they show a tad bit of grace or at least mercy – dare I say, forgiveness?)
As it turns out, no. In fact, the Chicago Tribune just reported that the tsunami of police reports after 2017's MeToo has caused...a precipitous drop in the percentage of resolvable rape claims.
So should we be surprised that your average poor white or black woman who files a report about a contractor getting fresh 15 years ago will likely add her case to the 68% of such complaints that go absolutely nowhere?
And another thing: If the left is so worried about white supremacy, why do they disregard time limits, proportionality, or evidentiary standards only when it comes to sexual misconduct? Religion is a protected class, but they don't care if a Christian gets thrown into a dumpster this afternoon by gay Satanists and reports it. People deface military decals on veterans' cars and humiliate them on Twitter with barely a peep of concern.
It dawned on me as I read these stories – I experienced constant racial harassment from liberals when I worked at California State Northridge. Three weeks into the job, a boorish white hack who headed the creative writing program told me to hold a cigar, fake a Spanish accent, and pretend to be a Cuban gardener in front of twenty graduate students I didn't know. When I conveyed that this did not fit my doctoral training and I didn't find it (or him) amusing, he spread a rumor that I was a CIA agent. Whenever I complained, the feminists who ran the Equity and Diversity Department told me I did not have enough evidence or that I had missed the deadline. When I reported the knife marks on my office door to the police, they did not even interview the witnesses who alerted me to them. (I was on military leave in Georgia at the time.)
In sum, the Taylorizing of the left gives rich white women total unchecked power. They can accuse underlings, helpless scapegoats, and human obstacles of anything from whenever and bring hellfire and destruction without having to apologize or compensate for it. In fact, they become heroes lionized by Time.
To get Trump, the left abandons its integrity on the Middle East, Central America, and Eastern Europe
Ah, the memories of my liberal youth. I remember sharing my left-wing mother's horror at whatever the United States did abroad. Recall names from the heyday of anti-imperialist moralizing: Somoza, Sandinistas, Contras, Noriega. To this day, the famous "Boland Amendment" and Oliver North have emblazoned Central America into Reagan history.
I remember the party line: we should stay out of Central America's affairs. We should not take sides or make judgments about things down there! When I went to a model U.N. at Georgetown in 1987, the liberal consensus back then was: "asylum-seekers" are bad! The U.S. government used refugees from communist countries like Cuba, Vietnam, and Nicaragua to make those countries look bad and justify more U.S. "imperialist" intervention. Why, what did it matter to us what Noriega did to his people? Why should we tell El Salvador how to run itself?
Remember when people hated asylum-seekers so much that they almost blacklisted Reinaldo Arenas, a gay Cuban? The images of Elián González in the late 1990s must remind us of the left's long-lost rectitude. The little boy should not be allowed to stay in the U.S. because that would make Cuba look bad, so we would be racist. Why trust Cubans? People who come to the U.S. eager to badmouth their Latin American homelands to make Americans feel morally superior? And we all know that eventually leads to us sending in the Marines.
Now I have no idea where things stand. The left wants us to believe that massive caravans coming from Central America are claiming to seek "asylum" in good faith, not as some zany Three's Company-style scheme to cheat the immigration system.
The sudden fascination with "asylum" also amounts to playing with fire. When you apply for asylum, you are making a serious claim against the government of another state. A country that grants an asylum request is stating that it believes that the petitioner's home country violates human rights. And yes – this can result, down the road, in calls for the United States to intervene in the other country, as America did in Latin America for decades.
Once upon a time, in the 1990s, I translated asylum cases for lawyers who did them pro bono. We dealt with genocides and dictatorships far beyond what happens today in Guatemala. Translating pained me back then. One woman described lying in her own urine under a blazing sun in a prison courtyard, wondering if she would live another day. Those cases took months or years to process and often did not end favorably.
Maybe things have changed drastically, and now Hondurans can get into the U.S. without any fuss by saying that they're victims of domestic violence, scared of homophobes not letting them marry their gay neighbors, or worried about gangsters. It looks strained to me.
Lefties forgot their antiwar and anti-xenophobia views on the Middle East and Russia, too. I nearly fainted when I saw so many lefty writers slamming Trump for withdrawing troops from Syria and Afghanistan, plus lathering Mattis in praise post-resignation. And I never thought I'd see leftists say any Russian who talks to political people in the U.S. or stirs up debate on social media is colluding with treasonous Americans to interfere with our elections.
Such inconsistency. Yet no matter how much they contradict themselves, they are always horrible.
From the "99%" to "Crush the Little Guy"
Jason Wilson published a column at the reliably left-wing Guardian called "How the world has fought back against the far-right and started winning."
It celebrates Gestapo tactics against inconsequential bad guys the left labels as racists, Nazis, or whatever. Wilson glorifies "doxing," "counter-surveillance," and "no-platforming." He likes pressuring governments to classify internet commenters as terrorists and deny them visas. It exhilarates him to foment betrayals within conservative camps and devastate people like Milo Yiannopoulos.
You get the feeling that Jason Wilson hates people.
Atop Wilson's hit list sits Gavin McInnes, a guy who made YouTube videos and denounced the Charlottesville protests. Wilson also reminisces gleefully about getting Alex Jones blacked out from social media and demonizing Lauren Southern.
Wilson uses the "Nazi" label. Maybe he shouldn't unless he speaks of himself.
The trials and police investigations following the Reichstag Fire of February 27, 1933 sound eerily like everything Jason Wilson trumpets. The fire caused expensive damage to Germany's parliamentary building. It became the pretext for sundry measures that the National Socialists and Hitler used to eradicate dissent from one-party rule: massive propaganda, "doxing" the supposed bad guys (in this case, communists), banning other parties from meeting, censoring publication of ideas contrary to the state, fishy balloting, abrogating due process, rounding up enemies of order, and seizure of arms and resources.
This sounds like a left-winger's dream come true, if you replace communists with white supremacists or homophobes.
Maybe the left thinks it can carry on this way and won't go to the excesses of the Nazis because American leftists are more civilized. Or something. I doubt that the left even understands the Nazis enough to avoid becoming them.
It took five years to go from the Reichstag Fire to Kristallnacht and the Anschluss. I don't doubt we could go from Charlottesville to a massive raid on transphobic churches and emergency annexation of Guatemala by 2022.
Fighting white supremacy by giving rich white women unchecked power
If you know the story of Emmet Till, you know that in 1955, whites killed a black boy for allegedly flirtatiously addressing a white woman. Why? Because there exists in the American psyche a powerful urge to protect the honor of women, and especially white women.
The white knight returns!
In 2017, Time named Taylor Swift Person of the Year because she dodged a lawsuit by a man far poorer than she was. The man sued her because she called his bosses and told them he had groped her; the radio station fired him. He disputed her claims and sued her for defamation. She showed up to the trial and made a splashy speech that won the jury over, so he ended up with no job, and she came out with even greater fame, notoriety, and fortune. With her millions upon millions of dollars, she could hardly class herself with a honkytonk waitress fighting off a sleazy shift supervisor.
Time found Swift's heroism so dazzling that it overshadowed soldiers killed in war, volunteers running orphanages, leaders of foreign countries, first responders braving death to medevac disaster-survivors, and people who did more than get someone fired for groping them at a photo shoot.
If he did grab her rear end, he should not have. He deserved a slap, a suspension, or even a firing. But did he? Let's try to stay objective.
We can all join hands and condemn rape or a man who beats a woman up. When it gets to whistling, groping, and acting fresh, our consensus buckles. The problem with these lower-level harassment cases becomes their lack of tangible evidence, their room for wildly unreliable memory, the dearth of traceable harm to the victim, and the impossibility of knowing who tells the truth. Everybody, male and female, has motives to lie. Generally, the more serious the crime, the more traces it leaves.
In Swift's interview, she says this:
You might be made to feel like you're overreacting, because society has made this stuff seem so casual[.] ... You should not be blamed for waiting 15 minutes or 15 days or 15 years to report sexual assault or harassment, or for the outcome of what happens to a person after he or she makes the choice to sexually harass or assault you.You go, girl! But wait. She became Person of the Year because she's famous, rich, blonde, gorgeous, and the singer of hits like "Look What You Made Me Do," in which she reprises celebrity feuds by taking a bath in a tub full of diamonds. Do poor women get such first-class treatment if they rush to report a disrespectful pinch fifteen years after it happens? Can they get people fired?
(If they do destroy people's lives over a whistle or a pinch, might they show a tad bit of grace or at least mercy – dare I say, forgiveness?)
As it turns out, no. In fact, the Chicago Tribune just reported that the tsunami of police reports after 2017's MeToo has caused...a precipitous drop in the percentage of resolvable rape claims.
Police successfully closed just 32 percent of rape investigations nationwide in 2017, according to the data, ranking it second only to robbery as the least-solved violent crime. That statistic is down from about 62 percent in 1964, despite advances such as DNA testing.Wait. Did I read that correctly? The number of rape investigations that ended in a closed investigation went from two thirds in the Mad Men 1960s to one third in the enlightened age of the Women's Marches. Talk about unintended consequences. Of course, the left will attribute this to not enough police resources, but police resources have enough work to address the huge number of men murdered or killed by overdoses of illegal drugs. In fact, in 2017, the police had to address 15,129 cases of one serious crime – murder – of which 11,862 were males and 6,789 were black males.
So should we be surprised that your average poor white or black woman who files a report about a contractor getting fresh 15 years ago will likely add her case to the 68% of such complaints that go absolutely nowhere?
And another thing: If the left is so worried about white supremacy, why do they disregard time limits, proportionality, or evidentiary standards only when it comes to sexual misconduct? Religion is a protected class, but they don't care if a Christian gets thrown into a dumpster this afternoon by gay Satanists and reports it. People deface military decals on veterans' cars and humiliate them on Twitter with barely a peep of concern.
It dawned on me as I read these stories – I experienced constant racial harassment from liberals when I worked at California State Northridge. Three weeks into the job, a boorish white hack who headed the creative writing program told me to hold a cigar, fake a Spanish accent, and pretend to be a Cuban gardener in front of twenty graduate students I didn't know. When I conveyed that this did not fit my doctoral training and I didn't find it (or him) amusing, he spread a rumor that I was a CIA agent. Whenever I complained, the feminists who ran the Equity and Diversity Department told me I did not have enough evidence or that I had missed the deadline. When I reported the knife marks on my office door to the police, they did not even interview the witnesses who alerted me to them. (I was on military leave in Georgia at the time.)
In sum, the Taylorizing of the left gives rich white women total unchecked power. They can accuse underlings, helpless scapegoats, and human obstacles of anything from whenever and bring hellfire and destruction without having to apologize or compensate for it. In fact, they become heroes lionized by Time.
To get Trump, the left abandons its integrity on the Middle East, Central America, and Eastern Europe
Ah, the memories of my liberal youth. I remember sharing my left-wing mother's horror at whatever the United States did abroad. Recall names from the heyday of anti-imperialist moralizing: Somoza, Sandinistas, Contras, Noriega. To this day, the famous "Boland Amendment" and Oliver North have emblazoned Central America into Reagan history.
I remember the party line: we should stay out of Central America's affairs. We should not take sides or make judgments about things down there! When I went to a model U.N. at Georgetown in 1987, the liberal consensus back then was: "asylum-seekers" are bad! The U.S. government used refugees from communist countries like Cuba, Vietnam, and Nicaragua to make those countries look bad and justify more U.S. "imperialist" intervention. Why, what did it matter to us what Noriega did to his people? Why should we tell El Salvador how to run itself?
Remember when people hated asylum-seekers so much that they almost blacklisted Reinaldo Arenas, a gay Cuban? The images of Elián González in the late 1990s must remind us of the left's long-lost rectitude. The little boy should not be allowed to stay in the U.S. because that would make Cuba look bad, so we would be racist. Why trust Cubans? People who come to the U.S. eager to badmouth their Latin American homelands to make Americans feel morally superior? And we all know that eventually leads to us sending in the Marines.
Now I have no idea where things stand. The left wants us to believe that massive caravans coming from Central America are claiming to seek "asylum" in good faith, not as some zany Three's Company-style scheme to cheat the immigration system.
The sudden fascination with "asylum" also amounts to playing with fire. When you apply for asylum, you are making a serious claim against the government of another state. A country that grants an asylum request is stating that it believes that the petitioner's home country violates human rights. And yes – this can result, down the road, in calls for the United States to intervene in the other country, as America did in Latin America for decades.
Once upon a time, in the 1990s, I translated asylum cases for lawyers who did them pro bono. We dealt with genocides and dictatorships far beyond what happens today in Guatemala. Translating pained me back then. One woman described lying in her own urine under a blazing sun in a prison courtyard, wondering if she would live another day. Those cases took months or years to process and often did not end favorably.
Maybe things have changed drastically, and now Hondurans can get into the U.S. without any fuss by saying that they're victims of domestic violence, scared of homophobes not letting them marry their gay neighbors, or worried about gangsters. It looks strained to me.
Lefties forgot their antiwar and anti-xenophobia views on the Middle East and Russia, too. I nearly fainted when I saw so many lefty writers slamming Trump for withdrawing troops from Syria and Afghanistan, plus lathering Mattis in praise post-resignation. And I never thought I'd see leftists say any Russian who talks to political people in the U.S. or stirs up debate on social media is colluding with treasonous Americans to interfere with our elections.
Such inconsistency. Yet no matter how much they contradict themselves, they are always horrible.
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