At age 69, going on 70, I sometimes feel like I fell asleep for 20 years and woke up realizing I missed the part when the American left went from stupid to bat-guano crazy.
Coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s, I was used to the Berkley kind of stupid where the radical left wanted to turn the U.S. into a gigantic Woodstock festival. Where the food would come from, or the energy or anything else was a mystery. I mean, not everyone could become a pot farmer — once the drug and every other drug was legalized.
Somewhere along the way, the left went from being adorably stupid to dangerously insane, and I missed it all. Must’ve been the years I spent in that Minnesota commune.
Actually, we can trace the evolution of leftist idiocy to the left’s use — and misuse — of language. Redefining words and concepts to shoehorn entirely different definitions into a constantly changing political agenda can be amusing at times. That is until you realize the deadly earnestness of the left’s intentions to radically alter the way we think to achieve a political end.
Case in point: There was a recent statement issued by an NYU law student supporting Hamas and blaming Israel for the massacre of its own people. The student, Ryna Workman, wrote that “Israel bears full responsibility” for the terrorist attacks.
This didn’t sit well with the prominent law firm of Winston & Strawn, which had already offered to employ Workman at its headquarters in Chicago. The firm withdrew the offer, setting off a series of hysterical handwringing statements from Workman and other NYU students.
“The firm’s decision is just one instance of ‘systemic, concentrated violence’ Workman has experienced since issuing her anti-Israel pronouncement, according to a letter of support from other NYU students obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.”
Huh?
I don’t think the non-binary student understands the meaning of “violence.” Or the non-binary student understands the meaning too well and deliberately mis-defined the word to enable its use in a politically charged context, trying to elicit an emotional response to being “unfairly” excluded from the opportunity to work for six figures for a prestigious law firm.
Workman’s problem is that the only people who agree with and understand the use of the word “violence” in this context already agree that Hamas is not to blame. Everyone else is either laughing or shaking their heads in awe-struck wonder at the stupidity of it all.
This sort of wordplay is the essence of critical theory BS, where the Marxists invert the meaning of words in order to justify their insane pronouncements. “Silence is violence” is an absurdity, but the hope is that normal people can be swayed by rhetoric. It often works with liberals, apparently.
You can’t take anything a critical theory advocate says seriously, because words are simply rhetorical tools, not descriptions of real things.
Professor David Bernstein, a law professor at the George Mason University School of Law, had the perfect riposte to this nonsense. “Brutally murdering 1400 Israelis is ‘anti-colonial resistance.’ Rescinding a job offer, however, is ‘violence.'”
“Speaking to The Intercept Monday, Workman dismissed the blowback to her statement as a “dangerous distraction,” writes Joseph Simonson in the Free Beacon. There’s that specter of violence again. “Distractions” are only dangerous when there’s a physical threat attached to them.
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