The Left claims to be about inclusiveness, freedom and open-mindedness. Those are actually very liberal values. The Right supposedly is dogmatic, and is all about status quo and perpetuating the system. Think about that because this last election turned those suppositions on their collective heads. The Left became dogmatic and wanted to perpetuate the status quo, and people voting for the Right wanted to do something to challenge the system. The Left has been mindlessly attacking, inciting violence and actually committing it, while the Right has had some people talking.
Now I have to wonder what has happened to so many of my Jewish friends. When did they stop being the people who named their nation after “wrestles with God” and started being these unquestioning robots? When did the people who literally invented debate and discourse as an ideology start becoming dogmatic?
I had a good friend whom I respect, post a meme of screenshots from Twitter supposedly by pro Trump people saying “Well, if my president can, I’m gonna start grabbing hoes by the p*ssy,” referring to something Trump said several years ago. Horrible right? My friend even wrote that this was why she was so scared about Trump being elected. Because now people are using it an excuse to do what Trump talked about…… only I did a quick search on the 6 Twitter accounts and guess what? Not a single one was an actual Trump supporter. But here’s where it goes sideways, – I posted screenshots and my friend deleted them, writing she had researched it and that they were all Trump supporters. I spoke to her in private and she claimed she never said that, but then oddly enough she posted again that they were Trump supporters. I lost a ton of respect for her after that.
Look, I 100% understand if you don’t like Trump, I am not gonna call you out for saying “Hillary is better than Trump” – even though I disagree, because really this is a choice between which STD you would rather have, Syphilis or the Clap. Neither one is really a great choice, but one might be easier to treat, I will leave you to decide which is which. The truth is neither of these candidates should have been in the running. This is why I don’t understand this vitriolic feeling to defend one candidate or the other. It’s not like either one of them is a great candidate.
What I will say though is watching world events suggest something that is rather obvious. Hillary supporters claim Trump is the cause of the recent upsurge in racism and bigotry, that the morons who espouse Trump “values” are typical of the people who voted for Trump. They ignore the most important lesson in all of this. The violence is coming because violence is being incited, and frankly I’m seeing it far more from the Left right now. The crybully Left who whine and cry about feelings and safe places and yet have no problem shouting down anyone with a dissenting opinion. And this is why Trump got elected.
I have written about pendulum theory before, that often what happens is that life much like a pendulum will swing as hard the opposite way as it did in the first way, and this election is proof of this.
We saw the past few years the identity politics and the idiocy in the academic world creating conditions that were ripe for this swing. Safe places? Trigger warnings? Not bad things when NOT TAKEN TO AN EXCESS. But when teachers cannot assign certain readings because it might trigger feelings, you have a problem. I am not talking about actual hate speech -that should always be fought and it’s rather easy to determine: 3 D’s demonization delegitimization and double standards equal hate speech, period. Talking about history and using academic, peer-reviewed cited sources is not hate speech.
I get banned from Facebook for responding to someone calling someone else a liar by saying “No you are the liar” and receive a 30-day ban. I challenge someone to post a source for something and get told I’m “gas-lighting.” I say that someone who is advocating Holocaust denial and lying about Israeli involvement in 9-11 is spreading hate speech and I am called “Thought police.” And you wonder why people like me are done with pretending to be nice?
But I will say that there is a real concern here: simply put, when you silence someone for a long time, when they finally do re-find their voice, they often are not able to use their inside voice, they forget that there is a time to yell and a time to whisper and everything in between. If you deny someone the ability to express themselves and you shut them down whenever they speak, you cannot be shocked when they cannot use their inside voice.
The people rebelling against PC culture are often not the spokespeople for the rest of us, not any more than the lefty SJW asshats were. In fact, I am pretty certain that while I often use strong colorful language, I very rarely use offensive statements that personally attack anyone – when I am mean or harsh, it’s in general. People need to understand the difference.
The reason Trump won was simple — he tapped into the frustration against the system. The frustration against the language police, the anger at the whiny crybullies who try to shut down any opinion that they don’t share. And I truly hope the pendulum doesn’t swing too far because there is value in some of PC culture, there is value in creating places where people feel safe and included. But frankly it went too far with everyone and their dog demanding safe spaces from everything and trigger warnings, but then acting like fascists when they don’t get their own way.
The simple fact is that the Left only believes in a democracy that does what IT wants, and it only believes in freedom of speech when that speech agrees with it. I never thought I would see the day when the Right became the defenders of freedom and the Left became the deniers of it.
