Matt Walsh:
I’m not often “shocked” by the deaths of famous people, particularly if they’re 79-years-old, but when I read that Justice Antonin Scalia died, I actually let out an audible gasp. He was one of our nation’s last true constitutionalists, a just man, a godly man, a great man, and his passing will leave a great hole in the conservative movement, the nation itself and especially the Supreme Court court. And that hole will be made even bigger if Obama is allowed to appoint the person who fills it.
Some notes on the jumbled mess left in the wake of this national tragedy:
Dark Explosions of Satanic Joy
Aside from being a good title for a death metal album, that about summarizes the way many liberals reacted to Scalia’s passing. Yes, yes, it’s the Internet and these are leftists, what else would you expect? Not much else, to be sure, but we shouldn’t reach a point where the predictability of deplorable behavior suddenly becomes its own excuse.
Within minutes of the man’s death — and this, by the way, is a man with a wife, nine kids and dozens of grandkids — progressives erupted with applause and jubilation all over social media. Plenty of outlets have compiled some of the celebratory remarks, but that probably isn’t necessary. If you didn’t see it, you can imagine. And keep in mind, these weren’t just a few scattered bad apples, but thousands and thousands of human beings gloating over the still warm corpse of a man so decent and admirable that some of his closest friends belonged to the ideological group now exalting in his demise. And these weren’t merely anonymous trolls on Twitter, but famous folks and folks in media and seemingly regular folks who used their real names and real pictures to post triumphant and sarcastic obituaries. Then, not satisfied with ghoulishly dancing on a freshly dug grave, thousands more began offering their fervent prayers that Clarence Thomas die next.
t was an insane, subhuman display. Evil, and proudly so. Another moment — one of many, often provided by leftists — that made me utterly ashamed of what this country has become.
I took about 50 screenshots of Tweets and messages sent directly to me and thought about posting them, but I’ve decided against it. Many of the comments cannot be published — like the fantasies about defecating on Scalia’s grave and defiling his corpse in various explicit ways — and the rest are from other callous hobgoblins too consumed by their own hatred and idiocy to feel shame anyway. Suffice it to say, American liberalism defied all odds Saturday night and somehow managed to reach an even lower low than the last low it reached. Liberalism is a religion of contempt and envy; each day it sinks deeper into moral oblivion, and upon Scalia’s death it plunged to new and terrifying depths.
What made the elation of liberals so sickening and grotesque wasn’t just the fact that they were delighting over a man’s death, but why. This a crucial detail. Those looking to mitigate the guilt of liberals by drawing irrelevant comparisons have pointed out that conservatives have themselves allegedly reacted inappropriately in similar situations; many argued that, for instance, right-wingers celebrated Ted Kennedy’s passing. But these two scenarios are quite distinct when you consider the motivations behind them.
Ted Kennedy — if this is the equivalence we’re settling on — was a drunken bully. He was deeply corrupt, scandal-plagued, and so lacking in courage and character that he left a woman to drown to death after driving her over a bridge. He was also a staunch opponent of the Constitution, the rule of law, and anything resembling the principles that lay at the foundation of this country. He was so cowardly that, for political reasons, he became a radical advocate of abortion despite knowing it to be a terrible evil. He left death, corruption and deceit in his wake, and his legacy will be forever marked by crime, exploitation and his active endorsement of child murder and other atrocities.
Though these sad truths obviously do not mean we should take pleasure in his death, they do lend a certain context to any conservatives who let their anger get the better of them when he departed a few years ago. For Scalia, the context is very different. Scalia was, objectively speaking, an honorable, honest, courageous man. Moreover, he was right. I’m not going to say he was right about everything he ever said — nobody is, although Scalia likely came closer than most — but he took truthful, important, noble stands on a whole host of decisive issues. He stood for the rule of law, for the Constitution, for human life and for the family.
He was right. These were the right positions. Not right in my opinion or in his opinion, just right. Correct. True. So when liberals hate Scalia, their hatred is made all the more reprehensible and absurd because they hate him for being right and for being courageous and for being decent. It’s like the difference between hating Osama bin Laden and hating Mother Teresa (many liberals do in fact have more hatred for Mother Teresa). We shouldn’t hate anyone, but if you lapse into hating a man like bin Laden, it just shows you are a human being who struggles to mentally separate his numerous wretched deeds from his humanity. I think, in context, it’s understandable if one were to lose that internal battle on occasion.
But if you hate Mother Teresa, it means, rather than hating evil and failing to properly distinguish the evil act from the evildoer, you actually hate goodness. And you hate goodness so much that you hate anyone who does what is good. In other words, the man who hates bin Laden at least hates him because he hates evil, but the man who hates Mother Teresa hates her because he loves evil. There is no moral equivalence here.
Liberals celebrating Scalia’s death aren’t just celebrating death, but evil. They aren’t just wrong in what they do and say, but in the reason why they do and say it. They hate a man because he protected the law, justice, human life, marriage and truth. They hate him for his rightness, and they’re happy he’s dead so that wrongness may win. That’s what makes this all so demented.
If Republicans Lose This Fight, They Lose Me
There are 11 months until we have a new president, praise the good Lord. That means Senate Republicans must spend 11 months rejecting Obama’s Supreme Court nominations. They’re saying now they’ll hold the line, but forgive me if I feel some skepticism. I’d love to believe they’ll hold the line, but I can’t quite get past the unfortunate detail that they’ve never held the line on anything.
If that’s going to suddenly change — and it must — they have to be prepared for a bloody, dangerous battle. Obama will likely put their heads in a vice, politically speaking, by picking a nominee who’s “mainstream” and “moderate” and has some tenuous connection to the Republican Party. It will all be a ruse, of course. There is no possible way — literally zero chance — that Obama nominates a constitutionalist judge with a record of defending life and liberty. Whoever Obama picks will be pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, pro-big government, anti-gun and pro-judicial activism. That means whoever he picks will be unacceptable. There is no point in saying, “Yes, but what if he makes a good pick?” He won’t. Certainly we’ll be told it’s a good pick; we’ll be told the pick is “appealing to both sides,” “non-partisan,” so on and so on, but that will be a lie. The only thing that should be appealing to our side is another Scalia, and he’s not going to put another Scalia on the bench. It won’t happen.
Yet we need another Scalia. Not want. Not hope for. Not in a perfect world. Need. If the Democrats succeed in establishing a full blown liberal court — leaving only Alito and Thomas as the reliable conservatives, with Roberts playing the part when he feels like it — the consequences will be unspeakable. Overturning Roe v. Wade will be out of the question for another generation, signing the death warrant of millions of yet-to-be-conceived children. States that have succeeded in passing laws and regulations curtailing the procedure will eventually be overruled by judicial fiat. Meanwhile, of course, states will never be freed from the requirement that they recognize the court’s perverse and unconstitutional redefinition of marriage. Worse, when the government moves to coerce churches into performing gay “marriages,” the Supreme Court will be there to officially codify the oppression into law, finally eradicating religious liberty in America once and for all.