Get in their face and punch back twice as hard, a legendary community organizer demanded of his constituents, before becoming America’s most passive chief effective, feigning discovery of scandal after scandal only after being informed by the media.
Back in April, Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang punched back twice as hard at one of the latest cliches the left uses to avoid having argument — “Check your privilege,” a disguised form of racism, as the privilege implied is based on skin color. As Kurt Schlichter wrote a couple of weeks ago in his epic deconstruction of the phrase at Townhall.com:
Their poisonous notion of privilege is really just another way for liberals to pick winners and losers based not upon who has won or lost in the real world, but upon who is useful and not useful to the progressive project at any given moment.
This is why you see young people descended from Holocaust survivors tagged as bearers of “privilege” when their tattooed, emaciated grand-parents landed here with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Others who grew up in luxury get to bear the label of “unprivileged” because ten generations ago some relative came from a particular continent.
It’s idiocy. It’s immoral. We need to say so. For too long we’ve put up with this silliness.
This past week at National Review Online, James Lileks deconstructed another recent tyrannical cliche from the left, “Not All Men”:
What’s so bad about it? the author asks, and explains:
When a man (though, of course, not all men) butts into a conversation about a feminist issue to remind the speaker that “not all men” do something, they derail what could be a productive conversation. Instead of contributing to the dialogue, they become the center of it, excluding themselves from any responsibility or blame.
Who says he’s “butting in”? Couldn’t this be a response offered calmly after a broad mischaracterization? If someone says “all blacks are” or “all Asians are” and the person who demurs happens to be black or Asian, have they derailed a conversation, or offered a counterpoint? Since when does disagreement mean you aren’t contributing to the conversation? Are only positive reinforcements contributions? If speaking up to correct what one perceives to be an erroneous statement makes one the center of the dialogue, then pointing out that the sun does not revolve around Saturn makes one the center of the solar system.
Read the whole thing. Of course, this is the same left who, in-between listening to “gangsta (sp) rap” and watching a Quentin Tarantino film festival and thus being exposed to repeated casual usage of the N-word (and numerous other words that until the rise of the new left couldn’t be said on TV), want trigger warnings on their academic literature, as Jonah Goldberg, the author of The Tyranny of Cliches, recently noted:
The New York Times reports that activists want many classics to have trigger warnings in effect printed on them like health advisories on cigarette packages. The Merchant of Venice, for instance, would need the label “contains anti-Semitism.” Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway would need a warning that it discusses suicide. Oberlin’s memo advised faculty that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart may “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more.”
As a victim of “and more,” I can sympathize. But this way leads to madness.
And what a strange madness it is. We live in a culture in which it is considered bigotry to question whether women should join combat units — but it is also apparently outrageous to subject women of the same age to realistic books and films about war without a warning? Even questioning the ubiquity of degrading porn, never mind labeling music or video games, is denounced as Comstockery, but labeling The Iliad makes sense?
I do wish these people would make up their mind. Alas, that’s hard to do when you’ve lost it.
A pair of recent Afterburner videos by PJM’s own Bill Whittle also explores the strange schizophrenia of today’s leftists. Last fall, Bill made a spot-on comparison of Miley Cyrus’s MTV Awards sex-obsessed freakout with the depraved culture of the Weimar Republic, and what happens next. In his latest Afterburner, Bill compares today’s college students and their “Trigger Warning” obsessions with the passive, and doomed, Eloi from H.G. Wells’ The Time Traveler.
Rarely do I disagree with the conclusions Bill reaches in his Afterburner videos, but I think he may be slightly off regarding today’s left. As people as divergent as Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty, hapless Twitter user Justine Sacco, and Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Firefox, can attest, the modern left appear to be soft, sensitive Eloi, but underneath their freshly powdered skin and ubiquitous tortoiseshell Smart Glasses, they’re pure Morlock, ready to devour anyone who deviates even slightly from the day-to-day definition of political correctness.
Take the racially-obsessed on-air talent at MSNBC, or Ethan Krupp, who posed for photos late last year as the Obamacare Footie Pajamas Boy. The jammies were intended to appear cute and non-threatening, making Krupp look like he just parachuted in from the set of the Big Bang Theory, but he was quoted by the Daily Caller as saying, “We have no morals, and we will attack you:”
“I am a Liberal Fuck,” Krupp wrote in one post. “A Liberal Fuck is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views and sarcasm to win any argument while make the opponents feel terrible about themselves. I won every argument but one.”
Krupp then detailed the only political argument he claimed her ever lost, a drunken encounter he had with a “conservative gay prick.”
Of course, Krupp is simply a creature of his environment — his worldview was cultivated by his college professors, reinforced by both the media he consumes, and his colleagues. It’s certainly commonplace at Organizing for Action, the Obama special interest group where Krupp works, when not starring in their in Tweets and videos to shill for socialized medicine.
As they say at David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine, ”Inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” What happens to a society led by those who have similar or worse worldviews than those at OFA? The transformation of the Weimar Republic into something far darker and destructive is one extreme direction. The societal collapse of socialist postwar England is another.
In the meantime, the mob must be sated, if only to keep distracting attention from its leader’s dreadful performance in the White House.
Just ask Obama supporter Mark Cuban.
Obligatory Allahpundit-style exit quote: “This is what Tim Russert’s network has become.” Definitely follow the link, which brings it all home.
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