One of the more maddening elements of our political debate is how both sides view the individual, and how they treat them. Conservative ideals are based on individual responsibility, and in turn the state showing respect for that individual. On the flip side, as we saw in our last chapter, the Radical Left despises the individual, and will always put the state ahead of individual rights1. What’s maddening is how despite their contempt for the individual, the Radical Left does an outstanding job of exploiting personal stories to push their agenda, while the side that puts respect for the individual first is incapable of using any of the great stories about how individuals have their lives destroyed by the policies of the Radical Left.
A great example that comes to mind is Cindy Sheehan – anybody remember her? She was dubbed “The Peace Mom” for acting as a figurehead for the anti-Bush anti-Iraq war movement. Her son was killed in the fighting in Iraq and, along with Code Pink, launched a number of protests against the Iraq war. Her hatred for George W. Bush made her a natural darling of the mainstream media, and she was everywhere. Never mind that a number of her family members supported the war; they weren’t newsworthy. She wound up divorced from her husband, and a number of her family members didn’t agree with her antics, either. Whatever your opinion of Sheehan, it’s hard to not feel some sympathy for a grieving mother who lost her son. I’m no fan of hers, but this woman needed therapy – and the Radical Left showed it’s compassion and gave her exploitation instead. And like all other elements of the anti-Bush anti-war movement, the media lost interest some time around January 2009. And now Sheehan is just a footnote who basically lost most of her family.
You know the names that the left brings out to frame their narratives, often sketchy at best and sometimes simply false – Trayvon Martin, Sandra Fluke, Michael Brown. However distasteful, one can not deny the success the Radical Left has enjoyed in exploiting personal narratives in pushing their agenda, while sadly conservatives can not. Granted, having the benefit of the national media behind whatever story they’re pushing is much easier – note how a name like Kate Steinle’s gets buried when every element of her death destroys Leftist narratives.
What is even more curious is for all that the Radical Left promotes individual stories how little they care about what happens to actual individuals as a result of their policies. For one prominent example in recent news, look no further than what’s happening in Europe. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that importing large numbers of young men who view women as property could lead to the rise in sexual assaults. Even worse is how in the name of political correctness the Radical Leftists in the media downplayed these horrible attacks:
Another is that the broadcasters downplay or conceal events that might rouse the public’s emotions. The alleged gang rape of two teenage girls in southwest Germany on New Year’s Eve by four Syrian refugees was not reported by any of the main news programs, for example, despite the parallels to the attacks in Cologne and other cities. And then there is the part where law enforcement has taken too light a hand in stopping these violent attacks on the citizens who they’ve sworn to protect:
Authorities in Sweden are investigating claims that police there covered up sexual assaults committed mostly by immigrant youths at a music festival in Stockholm — attacks apparently similar in style to those carried out on New Year’s Eve in the German city of Cologne.
Police documented 38 claims of sexual assault — including two alleged rapes — in connection with the “We Are Sthlm” festival in 2014 and 2015, according to Reuters. They believe the attacks were carried out by about 50 people, most of them young Afghans, Reuters reported, citing Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish paper that broke the news.
And when this mentality manifests over time you end up with years of rape and government cover up, as what happened in Rotherdam. Had this scandal involved Catholic priests or white fraternity brothers it would have been the story of the year. And here in the states we see the callousness of our ruling class when Democratic State Senator Evie Hudak basically told a rape victim that she’d probably have just hurt herself had she been armed. The silence from feminist groups over Sen. Hudak’s remarks was deafening.
Which leads to the sad conclusion: Sorry ladies, but for all that leftists say that they are pro-woman, they want you to get raped. Yes, you read that correctly. When bringing rapists into your neighborhood and having their crimes ignored by the media and the police is acceptable in the name of Leftists achieving multicultural holiness, your life doesn’t mean a damn to them. The radical left’s war on masculinity doesn’t make everybody good guys, it just makes mischief easier for predators. It’s gotten so bad that Russia has been the nation to assert itself as the adults in the room.
Image appears via The People’s CubeThe left cares about young people, and especially those who are minorities, because they tell us they do. Of course, the actions that they support tell another story. There was a recent uproar about Justice Scalia making remarks that placing minority students into a school based on their skin color where they may not be academically qualified might not be a good idea. One would think this should be a no-brainer – I’m not a dumb guy, but putting me into an advanced nuclear physics class where I’ll probably fail out won’t do anybody any favors. Thomas Sowell explains reality:
Much empirical research over the years has confirmed Justice Scalia’s concern that admitting black students to institutions for which their academic preparation is not sufficient may be making them worse off instead of better off.
I became painfully aware of this problem more than 40 years ago, when I was teaching at Cornell University, and discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation.
These students were not stupid or uneducable. On the contrary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests. Their academic qualifications were better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests.
Why were they in trouble at Cornell, then? Because the average Cornell student in the liberal arts college at that time scored at the 99th percentile. The classes taught there — including mine — moved at a speed geared to the verbal and mathematical level of the top one percent of American students.
Nearly one-fourth of these black students with stellar qualifications in math failed to graduate from M.I.T., and those who did graduate were concentrated in the bottom tenth of the class.
There were other fine engineering schools around the country where those same students could have learned more, when taught at a normal pace, rather than at a breakneck speed geared to students with extremely rare abilities in math.
Justice Scalia was not talking about sending black students to substandard colleges and universities to get an inferior education. You may in fact get a much better education at an institution that teaches at a pace that you can handle and master. In later life, no one is going to care how fast you learned something, so long as you know it.
And in his closing, Sowell asks a serious question:
Do the facts not matter to those who are denouncing Justice Scalia? Does the actual fate of minority students not matter to the Left, as much as their symbolic presence on a campus?
Short answer: No. In our last installment I also pointed out how “Black Lives Matter” is ending more of them, as opposed to those lives actually mattering. #BLM also brings us to the problems with gun violence in general. In my local newspaper, The Falls Church News Press, two separate editorials promoted the joys of victimhood. The first was from Radical Leftist bomb thrower Wayne Besen:
A day earlier, Trump said of the Paris attacks: “You can say what you want, but if they had guns, if our people had guns, if they were allowed to carry, it would have been a much, much different situation.”
Yes, but this could have made things much worse – with people shooting wildly around a loud, dark concert venue, inadvertently hitting innocent victims, while still having inferior weaponry to the actual terrorists.
And more recently, Sen. Dick Slaslaw’s Richmond Report:
Every time we have a firearm docket, I see members of the audience wearing “Guns Save Lives” stickers. Let me ask you something, in a mass shooting or other situation involving many people in harm’s way, would you trust a stranger to have a perfect shot?
Somehow the danger of getting hit by a stray bullet by someone challenging the shooter (who, as a bonus, is now prioritizing killing some right-wing gun nut instead of you), these guys would rather have the security of an unchallenged shooter able to fire at will and carefully select his targets. So yes, a leftist would rather see you gunned down rather than surrender the monopoly on violent force that only the state can responsibly handle.
For health care, lefties in the US see single payer as the Holy Grail. Never mind what actually happens, as “Phineas Farquar” reports on Britain’s vaunted National Health Service trying to capture a defector who they refused to treat:
“The parents of a child suffering from a severe brain tumor signaled Monday they would defy efforts to force them to return to Britain, days after their family fled.”
While we’re on the subject of compassion over in Great Britain, Colin Fernandez of the Daily Mail reports:
Within 15 years, British families may have to start phasing out gas cookers, fires and boilers if the UK is to meet new tougher targets aimed at halting rises in global temperature.
How can fighting Climate Change be anything but good? The Telegraph’s Victoria Ward fills in the blanks:
The cold weather death toll this winter is expected to top 40,000, the highest number for 15 years.
The figures were described as a “tragedy for the elderly” by campaigners who warned that not enough was being done to protect pensioners from unnecessary deaths in cold weather.
Malcolm Booth, chief executive of the National Federation of Occupational Pensioners, said: “Excess winter deaths look like rising above the exceptional 2008-09 total and potentially reaching above 40,000 – and that is a disaster for the elderly in Britain.
“Winter deaths are a tragedy for families of those affected but it appears the underlying causes of these deaths have still not been properly addressed.
To start to wrap up this chapter, we go back to the gun debate. As Glenn Reynolds writes (emphasis mine):
It’s gotten so bad that even the reliably liberal and pro-Obama Piers Morgan is writing that Donald Trump’s plan for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration is dumb, but Obama’s do-nothing approach is even dumber. Morgan writes: “The reason Trump’s new, stunningly divisive message is resonating with so many Americans is that none of his opponents seems to have a clue how better to deal with this deadly threat, especially President Obama. … As Obama is seen to be fiddling while Rome burns, Trump is seen, whether you agree with him or not, to at least have an understanding of the immediacy and scale of the threat and a clear determination to try and deal with it. … [Obama] sounded utterly devoid of any real new ideas on how to tackle ISIS, whose military and economic power strengthens every day. He spoke in weary tones of how we were going to beat them but nobody listening to him could have felt remotely convinced that he has a clue how this will actually happen. His current strategy clearly isn’t working, yet all he promises is more of the same. Obama’s whole attitude to ISIS has always been breathtakingly complacent, and now this casual approach has come back to haunt him.”
Yes. When we talk about “compassion” in American politics, it usually involves some sort of scheme to give poor people money. But compassion ultimately comes down to caring what happens to people, and when Obama acts as if he doesn’t take the threat of Islamic terrorism in America seriously, he’s sending a signal that he doesn’t care what happens to Americans who might be victims of terrorism or even about Americans who are worried about becoming victims.
Exactly – the president doesn’t care about the people he was elected to lead any more than the multitudes who voted for him. At the end of the day, unless you fit one of their convenient narratives, leftist compassion does not care if you are raped, shot, freeze to death, have your best opportunity to improve your life squandered, etc. Ignoring how your misfortune contradicts their beliefs is a small price to pay, and your sacrifice is for that greater good of the belief in the benevolent genius of statism.
I’ll leave with one last excerpt from Trib Live’s Salena Zito It might seem to be a bit of a tangent, but it’s a good set up for the final chapter in this series (emphasis mine):
For the briefest of moments, Sister John Bauer’s sparkling smile — framed by her nun’s habit, as she held the 10-point, 200-pound buck she bagged in Elk County, about 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh — went viral statewide.
Within hours, the photo of the Elk County Catholic High School teacher received more than a million views on the Erie County Roman Catholic Diocese’s Facebook page.
She told local reporters she didn’t understand all the fuss: “In St. Marys, this is what you do. You go hunting. And everybody goes hunting. The coach, myself. The students.”
She learned to hunt while serving in the Navy.
She bagged the buck on deer season’s opening day; after three hours alone in her tree stand, waiting for a target to pass by, she prayed the rosary
“After I realized I got the deer, I thanked God,” she said, explaining that she views hunting as a spiritual endeavor and a form of conservation, a way to help ensure the deer population can be sustained by the land.
She shared the butchered meat — sausage and steaks — with two families.
Within days, the nearby Erie Diocese removed the Facebook post because of nasty comments posted by activists who apparently were offended enough by guns, God and hunting to feel justified in reacting offensively and lewdly.
God, guns and prayer have been intertwined as enemies of the political left ever since Barack Obama described Pennsylvania voters as being “bitter” over job losses and surmised that “they cling to guns or religion.”
Despite handily winning this state twice, his and the left’s hatred for the very people who voted for him has never waned. As with everything else he dislikes about traditional American culture, he has sought to “correct” the behavior of those people.
And why the need to correct the behavior of the people? Any religion seeks to convert non-believers, some far more aggressively than others. Religion, you say? Three years ago Barbara Walters exhaled a breath of refreshing honesty:
He made so many promises. We thought that he was going to be – I shouldn’t say this at Christmastime, but – the next messiah.
The only part of that statement I would dispute is “was”? The Radical Left’s blind loyalty to Obama hasn’t waned a bit in the last seven years. And they are angrier than ever – not at the failed savior, but at the infidels who refuse conversion. And that will take us to the final chapter of this series:
Religious Extremists Are Our Biggest Threat, and Not Who You Probably Think (5 of 5)
https://twitter.com/voxday/status/686682063077027840
You've seen a harbinger in Cologne.
The liberal elite would rather you be raped than admit their own lies.
What gun will you buy today?— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) January 10, 2016
Cross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog
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1 The one exception where leftists value personal freedom more than conservatives is pretty much involving sex or drugs, but naturally that also includes not ever taking responsibility when overindulging in said activities.
