by TOM KNIGHTON
Some days, stories just fall out of the sky for me. Other days, I have to hunt for a topic.
Today was one of those latter days, which is fine. I’ve found some of my best stories looking over the news of the day, hoping to find something to react to if nothing else.
Normally, though, I wouldn’t really talk much about someone criticizing a book, especially when I mostly agree with the criticism, but a piece at the Washington Examiner is missing something that I think we need to remember.
The most hostile administration to the press in American history was former President Barack Obama’s administration.
Obama also tried to force nuns to provide contraception and decreed that “transgender” students should be able to use the bathroom “that corresponds with their identity.”
These are things that are missing from Zack Beauchamp’s new book, The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World.
Beauchamp is a writer for the leftist website Vox. In The Reactionary Spirit, he spends a lot of time arguing that former President Donald Trump and the new political populism represent authoritarianism — despite the fact that most political and cultural repression today is coming from the Left. Leftists such as Beauchamp keep preaching that Republicans are authoritarians, then in the next breath demand that you submit to the Left’s policies, no matter how irrational, immoral, unconstitutional, or bizarre.
Here is the sleight of hand that Beauchamp uses. He takes old cases of people resisting moral and necessary social change and declares that such attitudes are still a driving force on the Right. Are you against a boy claiming to be transgender sharing a locker with your daughter? You’re no different from the goons who beat up civil rights marchers. You’re an authoritarian.
Someone once observed that “for liberals, it will forever be Selma, Alabama, in 1965.” This is where Beauchamp lives. He never considers that in the last 50 years, liberalism itself has changed, going from being focused on equality, common sense, and due process to becoming hysterical, punitive, and irrational — not to mention authoritarian.
The reason—which author Mark Judge seemingly misses—is that it’s not authoritarianism when the left does it.
See, what you have to remember about your garden-variety leftist is that they don’t have a problem with the government dictating what you can and can’t do. It’s only bad when someone other than them can do so.
As Judge notes, they find these tenuous links between situations, such as opposing something the left wanted that was good in the past and something the left wants now that is objectively terrible, and equate the people opposing them as identical. That’s while they ignore how they intentionally hound people who disagree with them and seek to push them out of the public entirely.
Showing up at someone’s home and trying to kick the door in because you don’t like what they say isn’t authoritarianism, you see, nor were the riots that gripped the nation in 2020 because of what happened with police in a given city. Violence from the left is never a step toward fascism because their causes are good.
Nor is their attempt to stifle free speech through restricting gun-related advertising and thus gun-related publications. Nor is their desire for hate speech restrictions that would inevitably morph into restrictions that go beyond mean words and racial slurs.
The right is so authoritarian, oddly enough, that they want all law-abiding citizens to have the means to resist a tyrannical government, but the left seeks to disarm the populace and their defense is that you can’t beat the US military in the first place, so why bother?
And they don’t think that sounds the least bit authoritarian.
Because, in their mind, it’s not.
See, to the leftists, what they want is nothing but good and noble while anyone who opposes it is a tyrant.
It’s not about what is actual tyranny or fascism or anything else. It’s about believing that everything you want is good and pure and therefore only the truly evil could possibly oppose it.
While some leftists know exactly what they are doing and saying (lying), I know that this goes right over the heads of many of them. For instance, I’ve pointed out before that everything the left likes to refer to as examples of terrible behavior they compare conservatives to… slavery, civil war, institutionalized racism, the KKK, Jim Crow… are all Democrat institutions. What is the stain on the Republicans? Joe McCarthy? While he was heavy handed, history has shown he was dead-on correct. What else?
So basically, when they Democrats want to declare the Republicans are terrible, they say they are just like them.
06/28/24 – North Korea publicly executed 22-year-old man for watching K-pop
Putin’s ally and weapons supplier.
Iran publicly executes suspected homosexuals by slow strangulation as nooses are raised by construction cranes set to rise as slowly as possible.
Death takes about 30 minutes after the feet of the accused leave the ground.
joe and obama treat Iran like a buddy.
Not a thing from the so call UN Human Rights Phonies