In the run-up to President Donald Trump's first formal address
to a
joint session of Congress - a State of the Union address in all but
name - always-more-inflammatory charges are flying fiercer than
ever before. In the mouths of the left and much of the media,
if President Trump isn't personally the reincarnation of Hitler, he's
at least a
Nazi, a KKK Grand Wizard, or possibly Genghis Khan with a telephone.
Yet what should be hair-raising accusations seem tired and
stale, and
for good reason: Every
Republican President or presidential candidate is Hitler, at least
until they're no longer near the Oval Office.
We all remember
the "Bushitler" meme. Sen. McCain was compared to Hitler.
The anodyne, inoffensive, and ultimately ineffective Mitt Romney was Hitler. Though
those newspaper articles have mostly been shoved down the
memory hole, even Ronald Reagan was regularly compared with Hitler,
in words as well as in editorial cartoons.
This was preposterous nonsense forty years ago and it's
preposterous
nonsense now. How many American citizens did President Reagan
order
murderered? How many has President Trump? How many
did George
W. Bush? Exactly none, so far as we know, and certainly no
more than a handful. Let's not forget that Barack Obama did, in fact, order the murder
of American citizens - admittedly active terrorists
who probably deserved it, but he had our military target them without
observing the Constitutional provisions for dealing with accused
traitors.
Yet for the past forty years, Republicans great and small have
been
compared to Hitler, even when pursuing the exact same policies
which had been promoted by Democrats with nary a peep from the
media. Mr. Trump tried to forbid
citizens of a handful of mostly-Muslim countries from coming
to America (while doing nothing against the dozens of other countries
where the vast majority of Muslims live) and the world nearly ended; both Mr. Obama and Jimmy Carter did likewise,
to Iraq and Iran respectively, and nobody cared.
Donald Trump is deporting illegal immigrants? Well,
he's only
been president a few weeks, but thus far he hasn't expelled any more invaders
than President Obama did over the same period of time.
None of these facts are new. None of these
strategies are
new; they same "Republicans are Nazis" meme has been around longer than
many current officeholders have been alive.
For
all that time, the Right has indignantly complained
and got absolutely nowhere with any defense, until Donald Trump hit
upon
the tactic of using bogus leftist lies as an attack on the bogus
leftist "fake news" media.
Yet still the dishonesty and fake news continues, even though
just
about every American now sees through the smokescreen if they only
squint a little, and fewer and fewer are having to even squint.
Why
do the media leftists keep lying?
The Religion of the Left
The Left has for so long claimed the mantle of
science and
rationality that it's all too easy to grant them that connection
without a second thought. As with most of their political
arguments, though, that too is a lie.
Sure, the Left honors scientists when they say things the Left
can use
to steal power, even when it's a proven fraud - like the global warming hockey-stick, the
dangers of secondhand
smoke, or the imaginary hazards of perfectly safe
pesticides.
They're not nearly as tolerant of equally well-qualified
scientists who
present actual evidence saying that promoting underage transsexualism is child
abuse, adult transsexualism is a mental disorder,
or pointing out the medical and public-health dangers of
homosexual practices.
In other words, like all politicians and most human beings,
leftists laud people who agree with them and pillory those who don't,
regardless of the truth.
Most of the time, though, reality has an influence over
time. No doubt there were a great many white Americans in, say,
1950 who truly believed that black people were inherently inferior and
deserved their lowly status. Over the next half-century of
black success in a wide array of pursuits, the number of individuals
who still can maintain that every black man is less than every white
man has shrunk markedly. The clear and obvious facts in front
of them have changed minds over time.
Yet the clear and obvious facts opposing the many dictats of
leftism - such as the devastating poverty and genocide that socialism
led
to in Communist
Russia, the explosive and murderous barbarites committed throughout
Europe by uncivilized Muslims, and so on down the line - seem to have
no effect on lefty opinion whatsoever.
We would expect honest
writers, particularly feminists, to say, "Gee, maybe
President Trump has a point about not letting any more Muslims into
America,
considering how Sweden's massively growing Muslim population has led to
such a spectacular increase in rape that there are documentaries being made about it."
But no. The left loves homosexuals, but a Muslim
jihadi
murdering dozens of homosexuals in a Florida nightclub triggers
absolutely no re-evaluation of pro-Muslim positions. Sexual
harassment of the slightest sort is a hanging offense on any American
university campus, except if the perpetrator is a Muslim mob in Europe,
then it's fine.
And on down the line. Which leads us to the
conclusion:
Leftism is not really a political philosophy, or a body of belief, or
an organized way of understanding the world based on a fundamentally
flawed premise - at least it's not just
those things.
Leftism is a religion - a religion that requires its adherents
to
believe without question in things contrary to observable fact, even at
the expense of their own lives or the lives of their friends.
This is hardly a new development in human affairs - religions
have
preached nutty stuff and demanded irrational actions from adherents for
all of history. What's a little unusual is how ferociously
the Religion of Leftism claims to hate the very idea of
religion despite being one.
The
concept, common to most religions, that there is an absolute truth of
Received Wisdom that is not
subject to question or inquiry has been declared by the Left not only
to be false,
but to be unworthy of discussion.
Yet that's precisely how the Left treats its beliefs of the
day - they
are not merely received truth, they may not be questioned in
the smallest degree under pain of being declared not only wrong but
evil. That's not liberty; it's not science;
it's not progressive; it's not even modern. It's a specter
from the barbaric and superstitious past we thought
the West had escaped
centuries ago.
A Religious War
In that light, though, the current leftist opposition to
President
Trump is even more frightening than it might otherwise be.
The whole point of America is that the people decide who
rules, and if
you don't like the guy in office, you suck it up and try harder to win
next time. All of America was hopeful that Barack Obama might
turn out to be a positive force, at least with our historically fraught
race relations if nothing else. When that turned out not to
be
the case, the Tea Party movement went about turning things around in
the best American fashion with truly peaceful marches and effective
political action, leading to today's Washington where the White House
and both houses of Congress have Republican majorities.
How many limousines were torched, Starbuckses destroyed,
opponents beaten, campuses vandalized, or shops looted by Tea Party
rioters? None.
It's
true that many Tea Party types fought vehemently against Mr. Obama's
dictats, most notoriously the requirements of Obamacare. These
battles, though, were mostly carried on through the courts and polling
places. Conservatives refused to be governed by Mr. Obama's
whims,
but they never made the country ungovernable.
Making American ungovernable -
that is, destroying public order through mass strikes, mass protests,
and general chaos - is, however, the explicit, vehemently-stated goal
of today's Left. By definition, this is "insurrection" which
traditionally has entitled the ruling government to use military force, not
just police, to restore order.
Now,
it's possible that today's looting leftists believe that conservatives
are too wimpy to meet force with force, and goodness knows we've given
them enough cause to think that. Mr. Trump may be a different
beast,
though, in which case we may very well have an expanding and nationwide
civil disorder and military response on our hands, at least in the
cities.
Why would
the Left be willing to bring this about? The last time we had a
civil war, it was because the North decided that their moral beliefs
could no longer tolerate being involved in the evils of Southern
slavery, and the South was not willing to sacrifice that "peculiar
institution" for the sake of national unity. At root, the
Civil War was a
religious war: the North saw
slavery as the sin it was, and the South
refused to bow to the Northern abolitionist religion.
We are in the same situation today, but it's worse, actually,
because both sides consider the other to be committing grave moral
evils.
In
the main, conservatives consider abortion to be murder, homosexuality
unions to be abominations, transsexualism to be a mental illness
fetish, and the welfare-induced destruction of families to be misguided at best and likely evil too. They
can
grudgingly tolerate the existence of these
practices in their country; they cannot abide being forced to pay more
and more for
them, and are apoplectic at the idea of these ideas being rammed in
their
children's faces at taxpayer-funded schools.
On the other side, the left considers
nationalism to be evil, open borders and free
healthcare to be human rights, and "Saving the
Planet" to be a cause that outranks
human rights of any kind. They are significantly less willing
to
compromise their views than conservatives; indeed, many of them don't
believe conservative views have a right to be spoken much less
heard.
The
most intractable sort of conflict is one based, not on
geopolitical reality, but on fundamental unshakable beliefs, and that's
exactly
what we are looking at here in America. If my morals are your
mortal sins and vice versa, there's no possible way we can coexist side
by side. The proof of this is playing out on the news every
night,
intensifying all the time.