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Samizdata quote of the day Hatred is a transformative power. It can make the innocuous into the menacing. So it has become a weapon of choice. The left has used hate to transform President Trump into a symbol of the new racism, not a flawed president but a systemic evil. And he must be opposed as one opposes racism, with a scorched-earth absolutism.
– Shelby Steele, writing ‘Why the Left is consumed with hate’.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate
This is nothing new. Conservatives think liberals are dumb and misled, liberals think conservatives are evil. We try to educate them, they try to pound stakes through our hearts. Every Republican president forever has been “evil” to them.
What has changed is that many of us no longer give them the traditional pass that they are simply wrong, but instead consider them to be evil themselves for remaining happily wrong and causing humanity so much misery.
I was literally sickened by the incivility and downright indecency of the DamDem senators in the first two days of the so-called “hearings” — all we got to hear was their browbeating of Judge Kavanaugh. Whatever he managed to say, they sneered at and twisted.
(I have to say that later last night I watched Justice Clarence Thomas’s forthright and indignant response to some of the questioning at his own hearing. Don’t have the link, but it’s on UT. Magnificent.)
This cannot be allowed to go on without direct, very public rebuke of every one of them.
So: Excerpted, lightly edited, from a comment that Yrs Trly just left at https://www.thenewneo.com/2018/09/23/the-anti-kavanaugh-plan-of-attack/#comment-2400771 :
I plan to call the office of every Pub on the Judiciary Committee tomorrow, to tell each of them just exactly that.
If any other Stateside Americans here agree, I would request that you do the same.
Cheers. 😡
The attitudes described in Shelby’s article are much older than he seems to think. Thomas Sowell’s ‘A Conflict of Visions’ is one of many sources tracing them from the 18th century at least. Shelby wrongly imagines them as formed in the 1950s and 1960s in the movement against southern anti-black racism.
It would be far more accurate to note that a stopped clock is right twice a day, and the left will from time to time stumble across an issue where their enemies are actually the baddies and so their love of hating their enemies is not an actual perversion.
It is not at all likely that a group so infatuated with symbols as the PC would so eagerly use the very party name (Democrats) under which all this was done from the 1860s through the 1960s if that had truly been their formative experience.
Cart before the horse. U.S…..
Why do folks so consumed by raging hate ultimately seek refuge under the tent of the Democrat party?
“Gosh Mr. Sutton, why do you rob banks?”
Meanwhile, back at the 2018 Tony Awards:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvGmOZ5T6_Y&t=1s
By all objective factors the Republican Party should be doing well in the polls for the midterm elections in November – the economy is doing well, taxation has been reduced (especially reduced for the ordinary people – as they no longer have to pay the Obamacare “penalty”, i.e. the Obamacare tax) and the Democrats are committed to utterly insane policies – the policies that the Democrats are committed to are demented. However, the Republicans are actually doing very BADLY in the polls and may well loose the Senate and the House.
The Democrats (the media, the education system – the rest of the totalitarian “Progressive” establishment elite) have followed “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky – they have personalised politics around a “hate figure” Donald Trump. Donald Trump now serves the function of “Goldstein” in George Orwell’s “1984” – a figure for the general population (especially the young) to be consumed with HATE for, “four minute hate sessions” every day, and-so-on.
The Republicans are connected to “Goldstein” (Donald Trump) and are thus part of the “four minute hate” secessions and so on – and, I repeat, look set to the loose the Senate and the House to a tide of savage and unreasoning HATE, which the totalitarians (the education system, the “mainstream media” and so on on) hope to use to turn the United States of America into a totalitarian collectivist society.
Barack Obama hoped to “fundamentally transform” America into a totalitarian collectivist society, but he FAILED – and he failed because he did not harness the power of HATE. He was a trained “Community Organiser” (i.e. socialist operative), but he failed to use that part of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” (the main text for “Community Organisers” and other such). The left (the education system, the media and so on) have understood this mistake and have corrected it – they have identified a “hate figure”, Donald Trump, to “personalise” politics around, and have all the various cultural institutions the left control (the schools, the universities, most of the television stations, the entertainment industry, the internet companies….) hard at work creating and sustaining a TIDAL WAVE OF HATE, in order to destroy the United States of American and replace it with totalitarian collectivist society.
If people are consumed with hatred (with rage) then one can not reason with them – no good economic news or careful argument showing the utter absurdity of the policies the Democrats are advocating will have any effect. The “Progressive” plan is to transform the population (or at least 51% of voters) into RABID DOGS without reason and consumed by savage hate – and if the Progressives succeed (and it seems they are succeeding) then the election campaign, and the future of the United States of America and the rest of the Western world, will be without hope for non leftists.
Make no mistake – the Progressives intend to utterly destroy the “capitalist” United States and replace it with a totalitarian collectivist society, and without the United States of America the rest of the West can-not-stand.
Of course Saul Alinsky, of “Rules for Radicals”, also advocated using “humour” against the Hate Figure – ridicule and mockery (in this he followed the “Bloomsbury set” in Britain many years before). Far from being good natured this “comedy” is also all about HATE – generating HATED and CONTEMPT for the targeted “Hate Figure” the left have identified to “personalise politics” around HATRED of.
For example, the agitprop (agitation propaganda) cartoon series “Our Cartoon President” does not “just” target Donald Trump (and it ways that have never-been-done-before to any other President – targeting his children and so on), it also targets Ted Cruz. Senator Cruz, a serious constitutional scholar and policy analyst, is depicted in “Our Cartoon President” as a subhuman creature, fit only to be exterminated (physically exterminated). The depiction of Ted Cruz in “Our Cartoon President” is on-all-fours with the depiction of the Jews in Nazi propaganda, or the depiction of “Kulaks” in Soviet propaganda. The intention is obvious – to generate hatred of and contempt for Ted Cruz – someone who was an OPPONENT of Donald Trump in the 2016 Primaries, and who has never done any of the things the left claim that Donald Trump has done.
The treatment of Ted Cruz should give pause to those of us who sometimes think “if only Ted not Donald had been nominated in 2016” – look how the left are treating Ted Cruz, how they are turning him into a figure of hatred and contempt. And the left (the “mainstream media” and so on) are doing this to a man who has done nothing wrong, and is a serious and profound thinker about both the Constitution and policy. The power of HATRED (so often presented as “humour”) can really do this – it can turn vast numbers of people (the majority of voters?) into rabid dogs, immune to evidence and rational argument. People totally and absolutely consumed by HATE.
The left (which controls much of the education system, and most of the media, and-so-on) is totally committed to the destruction of Western Civilisation (which they refer to by the word “Capitalism” and other “boo words”) and they will do anything, anything at all, to achieve this task.
Paul Marks (September 25, 2018 at 8:58 am), the latest Gallup poll reported by instapundit may cheer you up a bit:
(As instapundit is also wont to say, “Don’t get cocky, kid”, but I think a modest hopefulness is defensible.)
More generally, remember the warning incident of Nigel Farage who, on Brexit night after the (actual) polls closed, read the (opinion) polls and said “It looks like Remain have just edged it.”
Even when the polls move against us, there is often a silver lining. The opinion polls fooled Theresa May into calling an election (after saying she wouldn’t) and then moved steadily against her until the actual polls closed. The big win May expected would have securely ensconced her at the head of the Tories. Meanwhile, Labour is stuck with Corbyn till the next election, when at least no-one will vote for him because they think it’s safe to protest vote as he cannot possibly win.
You are of course right that, for a long time now, the new world has been important to the survival of the best of the old.