When I am come face-to-face with injustice and falsehood, my blood rises. It just happened with a post I found on Facebook (referring to yesterday’s shooting attack in the ball park):
“Unfortunately the right is already generalizing the blame to left-wing hate and pattern of hostility. Given the level of hatred and hostility the right has routinely expressed toward the left (or anyone who disagrees with them), this is outrageous.”
This is what psychologists call a projection, defined as the unconscious transfer of one’s own desires or emotions to another person. The writer is projecting irrational leftist hostility onto conservatives. Reality is full of examples that prove the above statement is a flagrant lie. In my new book, Tyranny of the Minority, I indict the “vicious intolerance by the Left of any and all conservative opinions.” The evidence bears me out.
Consider these recent expressions of hatred and hostility by the Left against the Right: The depiction of Trump’s murder at the “Shakespeare in the Park” version of Julius Caesar; Kathy Griffin’s display of Trump’s bloody head; any utterances about Trump on any given day by Rep. Maxine Waters; Stephen Colbert’s disgusting comment about Trump and Putin engaging in a sex act; Robert DeNiro’s claim that Trump is a “racist, dog, mutt, bozo, and pig”; Madonna’s statement that she wants to blow up the White House; and don’t let me forget Sean Hannity’s reminder that there have been 12,000 recent tweets calling for the assassination of Trump. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Can you remember anything remotely resembling this tirade of filth during the eight years of Obama? Of course you can’t, because it didn’t happen. In fact, anyone caught criticizing Obama was immediately labeled as a racist.Clearly the writer of the Facebook post was wearing blinders. The policy of the Left is to vilify anyone who disagrees with its ideology.
In 1996, Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole with 49 percent of the popular vote and 379 electoral votes. If you supported Dole, Clinton backers would still talk to you. Not anymore. The simple fact that you are conservative is enough to turn your liberal friends and family against you. It all began with Obama. In 2007, when many acquaintances learned that I was not voting for their hero, they called me a racist. They didn’t care about my reasons. To them, no reason was good enough to justify my decision. One of my closest friends told me that I was stupid and has never talked to me again. For the past several months, my Facebook feed has been crawling with nasty, abusive statements charging that all Trump supporters are racists.
What accounts for this intolerant behavior by liberals? Throughout history, some human beings have used their religious beliefs to brutalize non-believers. This approach has wormed its way into the liberal playbook. Progressive liberals behave as though their ideology has been handed down from the mountaintop. Progressivism has morphed into our newest religion. With frightening similarities to Islam, the religion of the Left “is an authoritarian movement that wants total compliance with its dictates,” says Daniel Greenfield, Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, “with severe punishments for those who disobey.”
No longer regarded as merely political contests, elections represent to the Left a duel between good and evil. “Conservatives think liberals are stupid,” said author Charles Krauthammer. “Liberals think conservatives are evil.” You can tolerate stupidity but you can’t countenance evil. “You have to understand progressivism as a kind of religion—specifically a fundamentalist religion,” argues The Federalist. “In this view of the world, evil takes the form of any barrier to your self-expression.” Liberals believe that free speech should not apply to anything they disagree with. “People who violate the progressive code,” writes Mark Levin in Liberty and Tyranny, “are socially ostracized, sued for discrimination, forced to resign, and driven out of business.”
The typical liberal doesn’t give a damn about your individual rights or opinions. He only cares about his own point-of-view, which he, uncritically, deems to be superior. Today’s liberal will go on at length about “social justice” and the “common good,” but his bottom line is a society that conforms to his ideological aims and his alone. When a belief system is enshrined in a religion, it cannot tolerate criticism. In conformity with this new religion, a Hillary Clinton victory might have placed us closer to a political inquisition in which conservatives would be given the chance to confess and recant. In that scenario, unrepentant conservatives would be deported and replaced by Middle Eastern radicals. Is that so far-fetched? I don’t think so. Not when millions of our liberal friends are adopting a holier-than-thou attitude about how to run the country.
Ed Brodow is a political commentator, negotiation expert, and author of Tyranny of the Minority: How the Left is Destroying America.
