Whether it is murderers slaughtering police officers after listening to instigating rhetoric from Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter… or college students assaulting conservative speakers after years of listening to leftist professors define conservative language as violence… whether it’s a Democratic congressman throttling a student journalist while the media pretty much lets it slide… or a dressed-up-as-mommy loon laying hands on Ben Shapiro while lefty commentators cheer… or whether it’s a Republican congressional candidate body-slamming a reporter from a socialist newspaper who had himself expressed a desire to punch a conservative reporter… I tend to come down pretty solidly against people physically attacking one another. Maybe this makes me a contributor to what Kurt Schlichter calls “the boring moralizing and sanctimonious whimpering of the femmy, bow-tied, submissive branch of conservatism.” Which is troubling because it’s probably going to make it even harder to get Schlichter to pick up the drink tab, already one of the most intractable problems facing the conservative movement today.
Okay, I’m joking: Kurt will actually sport a round plus he turns a great vitriolic phrase. But really, grown-ups shouldn’t hit each other. And they shouldn’t hit reporters either. It tends to cause the death of civilization and, believe me, you’ll miss it when it’s gone.
And yes, virtually every member of the mainstream media deserves to be tarred, feathered, tossed into the nearest river and pelted with rotten fruits and vegetables as he is carried out to sea. You know how, when an institution becomes so corrupt that it feels untouchable, its leaders begin to make a show of their dishonesty to prove just how untouchable they are? Tammany Hall sachems wryly testifying about the “little tin boxes” where they keep their graft. Vladimir Putin placing his puppet Dmitry Medvedev in the presidency to circumvent term limit laws. Loretta Lynch meeting Bill Clinton on the tarmac to “discuss their grandchildren.” And so on. Well, that’s what I see when I look at “news” organizations that hire and elevate guys like George “I-love-you-Hillary” Stephanopoulos or Ted Baxter clone and open anti-Trumper Scott Pelley. These are institutions that are so corrupt and feel so immune in their corruption that they want to show their corruption off by way of spitting in the eyes of anyone naive enough to oppose corruption.
Of course they deserve a kick in the pants, every damn one of them.
Still, we don’t refrain from violence on the basis of just deserts. “Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?” as Hamlet said. We refrain from violence as long as we possibly can because it ends debate, the meat on which democratic freedom feeds.
Defense Secretary James Mattis — a man who seems to know when violence should and shouldn’t be used — was recently asked what worries him most in his new position. He said:
The lack of political unity in America. The lack of a fundamental friendliness. It seems like an awful lot of people in America and around the world feel spiritually and personally alienated, whether it be from organized religion or from local community school districts or from their governments.
There’s no doubt in my mind that this divisiveness was caused, at least to some degree, by leftists who, seeking to disguise the utter failure of their philosophy, have sought to transfer the blame onto every standard of decency and normalcy. If only we can get rid of moral truth… sexual norms… reason… God… then — oh, then! — our leftist systems that have failed everywhere will at last succeed! It’s a tactic that can only tear our society apart.
These people should be expelled from our universities, boycotted in our media and ridiculed in the public square. But slugging them? As satisfying as it might be, and as well-earned, I fear it’s a Samson move that will ultimately bring the roof down on our own heads.
I’m agin’ it.
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