by Scott McKay
I was on a media panel talking about what the Left has done to the Fourth Estate in America and how that damage might ultimately be repaired. And afterward, I spent a lot of time interacting with sponsors and attendees, and a common thread seemed to run through those conversations.
Namely, the multiplicity of utterly indefensible, absurd propositions that make up the narratives and constructs by which our left-wing current ruling class seeks to base its power over us.
It’s an inexhaustible list, and as a few of the folks with whom I conversed kept offering up examples of the various idiocies and non-starters imposed on them — these folks, Chicago conservatives, are as oppressed a minority as there is in America — it dawned on me that this discussion belongs in these pages.
One must name a thing in order to defeat it. So this week’s three columns will do just that. Therefore, we’ll start with five examples of moronic things to which you are demanded to subscribe.
1. “Our Violence Is Speech. Your Speech Is Violence.”
This one had been rolling around the decks and crashing into the rails long before 2020, but when George Floyd died from a fentanyl overdose while a Minneapolis police officer attempted to restrain him in the process of an arrest for Floyd’s having passed bad paper in a convenience store, it achieved Stupid Lie Nirvana on the American Left.
The George Floyd protests were the most violent in America since the Left’s carnage of 1968. Dozens of cities burned, several people perished, an untold number were injured, and countless neighborhoods were reduced to zombie status. Half a century from now, we might well look upon the “mostly peaceful” riots of Antifa and Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020 as the turning point in the deurbanization of American cultural and commercial life, and it’s entirely possible that those big blue cities will never recover from the mayhem the Left’s cultural revolutionaries inflicted.
It’s very obvious that urban retail will never recover from the smash-and-grab epidemic of looting for which the BLM mob is directly responsible.
And yet there are still, nearly three years later, hundreds of Americans who have been turned into political prisoners for simply setting foot in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Just last week, there was a televised manhunt for one who decided to turn fugitive rather than endure the Château d’If conditions in the federal gulag to which the Jan. 6 prisoners have been subjected.
Instead of allowing that demonstration to wash over the Capitol and generate the earned media for which it was designed, it was treated as an “insurrection,” and agents provocateur were unleashed on it who might very well have turned parts of it more confrontational than it otherwise would have been. And the same people who were egging on the George Floyd riots responded to Jan. 6 by engaging in utter authoritarianism, including ringing the People’s House with razor wire and National Guardsmen for months while government agents were unleashed upon political dissidents of every unfashionable stripe.
This absurdity has taken on Kafkaesque proportions since, so much so that the FBI is now putting Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass under its microscope while pro-Hamas demonstrators led by members of Congress shut down the proceedings of our government without consequence.
2. Gender Is Not Sex, You Bigot
I’ll hold off on a full exposition of this one, because to anyone but a hard-core leftist it’s patently, painfully obvious that everything about transgender theory is propaganda intended to demoralize normal people rather than expand the concept of civil rights.
Instead, I’ll just offer this: The reason why we’ve had to suffer through the insanity of the transgender movement is that conservatives, or, more generally, people on the right, have been too squeamish when talking about sex.
And when I say sex, I mean the word “sex,” literally. Because we used to refer to what we currently call “gender” as “sex,” and everyone understood that there were two sexes, male and female. But conservatives, and people on the right side of center, didn’t want to use that word, and so the use of “gender” began.
But “gender,” at least in English-language use, is a much more amorphous term, and it opened the door for lots of perverse sexual identities to claim seats at its table.
And, naturally, the Left, which is about bending reality to suit its infantile and often satanic desires, took this and ran with it to the far frontiers of absurdity.
I was at a coffee place on Monday and found myself waited on by a very deep-voiced, obviously male barista calling himself “Athena.” I detected no irony present in his intentions or presentation. And perhaps I’m part of the problem, because I said nothing — though my disdain came through, nonetheless.
Whatever, dude.
3. When We Stop Inflating the Currency, Our Inflation Isn’t a Problem Anymore
This one was a fairly prevalent item for discussion among the attendees at the Freedom Summit in Chicago, as there were lots of regular middle-class folks on hand who actually feel the pinch from Bidenomics and were not sparing in their reactions to it.
Because the current narrative — and I honestly don’t know who they expect to fool with this one — is that, since they’ve managed to strangle inflation to the point where it’s more like 3 percent (it’s actually more than that) as opposed to 9 percent (it was actually more than that) a year or two ago, it’s a win.
John Kennedy brilliantly put paid to that idiocy in a speech last week that I pass along because his efforts deserve recognition:
It goes like this: When your insane federal spending and your moronic government actions both debase the currency and hamstring the ability of the productive class to create goods and services for the marketplace, you end up with too much money chasing too few goods and prices rise.
When that process grinds down demand and people stop trying to buy the too-expensive things that they at one point wanted, and when, as a result, the prices begin to stabilize, you have not then solved the problem. Instead, what you have done is to create a new normal that is worse than what previously existed.
The problem is no longer Biden’s inflation. It’s Biden’s prices. People understand that at a gut level, especially when they’re running up balances on credit cards at usurious interest rates in a failed attempt to make ends meet.
I’m not going to say this is a lie they’ll stop telling. I will predict they’re going to regret telling it at some point.
4. “Queers for Palestine”
I’m using this one as a placeholder for something we see again and again on the Left: the nurturing of completely inconsistent ideological and philosophical factions side by side as part of its coalition.
This used to be more tenable when the Left saw itself as a coalition of the Little Guys. It stopped being that right around the time Barack Obama came on the scene, which was the culmination of a long process by which the Left’s thinking became hopelessly muddled.
And, of course, it’s untenable. We’re seeing that in surveys and anecdotal evidence that Muslims are turning away from the Democrat Party in droves, outwardly because of Joe Biden’s halting lurch in Israel’s favor, but inwardly for a far more basic reason.
Namely, that they’re being asked to support sexual identitarianism of a flavor that Islam very specifically declares an abomination, and they can’t stand it.
There are lots of “Queers for Palestine” mismatches in Democrat ideology today. One of the most fun is the new claim that the pro-life movement is shot through with racist white men who are attempting to deny the reproductive freedom of black women … while the pro-abortion movement sets up abortuaries in black neighborhoods to effect the wholesale slaughter of black babies, which isn’t racist at all. There are many more.
What those inconsistencies all have in common is something they don’t want to admit — namely, that these disparate and unreconcilable groups all hate Western civilization and America as its active ingredient. We on the right should be far more vocal in calling that out.
5. No Guns for You, But Our People Go Around Strapped to the Gills
You’ve probably heard about the Naomi Biden/Secret Service incident over the weekend, when three thugs in the swanky Georgetown neighborhood in D.C. made the mistake of attempting to steal an SUV belonging to the Secret Service detail of the granddaughter of the president. The Secret Service detail fired on the thugs, who then fled and got away.
Try being someone without Secret Service protection in Washington, D.C., and use a gun to drive away would-be car thieves, who are rampaging not just in the nation’s capital but in every major city in America, and see what happens. They’ll come at you like a pack of wolverines, and you’ll be lucky if you’re not lynched, literally or judicially.
We’ve yet to see the gun-grabbing ruling-class prattler who’s willing to forego armed protection while calling for the disarming of the American people. We’d love to see just one of these babbling mountebanks put that money where his mouth is.
“Oh, but I can’t. I get death threats from white supremacists.”
When 10 times a day ordinary people are carjacked in his city. A carjacking isn’t a death threat at all, though.
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
Photo “Queers for Palestine” by Australian Jewish Association – AJA.
