Tag: liberals

The Increasing Aggressiveness Of Petty Tyrants

Somewhere along the way, we seem to have come to the point here in the United States where it’s all politics all of the time. That’s not literally true, of course, but it seems as if political tensions and conflicts obtrude on daily life with increasing frequency. It’s hard to get away from it.

Having written in the past about Americans’ traditional love for the simple joy of being left alone, today we’re overrun with zealots who aggressively push their agenda every chance they get. They relish getting into our faces and going out of their way to exceed the normal boundaries of the offices and positions they occupy.

Who’s to blame? That’s largely a matter of one’s political perspective.

Conservatives like myself see in progressives an overwhelming sense of self-righteousness that breeds a sense that they’re justified, even entitled, to try to compel the rest of us to think like they do and support the same policy objectives. From sweeping messianic goals like saving the world from an (imaginary) imminent climate catastrophe down through every lesser goal of progressive utopia and conformity, the left’s actions are nothing, if not heavy-handed.

Progressives, on the other hand, view Americans who don’t share their world view and aren’t on board with their agenda as some combination of ignorant, unenlightened, retrograde, immoral, selfish creeps who need to be bludgeoned into cooperation since they so pathetically lack the good sense to conform to progressive orthodoxy.

Following are some of the ways in which progressives are going overboard to steamroll their opponents. Let’s start with several cases in which progressive office-holders are so eager to assert their rightness and the other side’s wrongness that they egregiously exceed the proper limits of their official powers.

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Founder of liberal news site says right to own firearms is ‘made up’

Josh Marshall, founder of the liberal news site Talking Points Memo, claimed on Tuesday the right to own guns is “made up” by pro-Second Amendment activists.

“Just to remind everyone, the individual right to own and use firearms is completely made up and the product of NRA funded activism,” Marshall wrote.

Stephen Gutowski, founder of the firearms news site The Reload, wrote an extended Twitter thread on what he referred to as an “incredibly lazy” statement. 

“The text of the amendment is very plain. ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’ The amount of gaslighting people on the left use in regards to the Second Amendment is amazing,” Gutowski said. “Keep doesn’t mean own. The people means the states.”

“This all strikes me as incredibly lazy more than anything else. It’s intended to get claps from those who already uncritically agree with you. It’s certainly not going to persuade anyone else,” Gutowski continued. “As with the other plainly worded amendments in the Bill of Rights, determining how they apply in a myriad of different circumstances is necessary. But this shortcut of just saying the words don’t mean what they plainly mean and are really devoid of all value is dumb.”

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An Ugly War Among Leftist YouTubers Shows Two Common, Toxic Pathologies Plaguing U.S. Politics

An incredibly vicious and protracted war is being waged, seemingly with no end in sight, among numerous prominent liberal and left-wing commentators who work primarily on YouTube. The conflict erupted on May 26 when Cenk Uygur — the founder and long-time host of The Young Turks, the largest liberal-left YouTube platform — baselessly and falsely accused independent journalist Aaron Maté of being “paid by the Russians,” while his co-host, Ana Kasparian, spouted innuendo that Maté was “working for” unnamed dictators.

Maté is one of the very few left-wing journalists who reported skeptically on Russiagate and who questioned the U.S. Government’s narrative about the civil war in Syria, including by traveling to war-torn parts of that country to do so. He won the 2019 Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award for his work debunking Russiagate. Yet with a one-minute rant from their insulated studio, Uygur baselessly branded Maté as someone who is “paid by the Russians” while Kasparian asserted that he “seemed” to be working for Assad and other dictators — a potentially reputation-destroying smear for a journalist and one that can be quite dangerous for a reporter who, like Maté, works on the ground in war zones.

The conflict engendered by those grotesque fabrications escalated significantly when Kasparian sent a private Twitter message to one of Maté’s defenders, Jimmy Dore, in which she threatened to accuse Dore of #MeToo-type sexual harassment from when they worked together seven years earlier. Kasparian made clear that her intent to publicly vilify Dore as a sexual harasser would serve as punishment for his criticisms of The Young Turks. Dore then revealed Kasparian’s threat on his program, and days later, Kasparian made good on her threat by accusing Dore of sexual harassment back in 2014.

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