Alex Marlow made a great point on Breitbart News this morning. He said that leftist violence (e.g., Antifa) is considered “resistance” and protest; while conservative speech is considered “violence”. Think about that. The WORDS of conservatives like Donald Trump or Rush Limbaugh are considered ACTS of violence and assault. The actions — the actual, violent actions — of leftists, so long as they’re leftists, is peaceful protest.
If this isn’t Orwellian, then what is?
Here’s the explanation. For leftists, emotions are king. Ayn Rand, one of my favorite thinkers of all time, had a great phrase: “Emotions are not tools of cognition”, she said. Emotions are powerful, important and part of what make us human. But they don’t tell us what’s true. We need thought, reason, facts, and logic for knowing truth.
Leftists have this totally inverted. That’s why they’re impervious to self-evident arguments against socialism, climate change policies and all the other insane things they support. If they FEEL something is true, and if they WANT to believe something is true — then it’s true.
Not all leftists or Democrats are violent, of course. But this emotionalist mentality dominates their views, at least on subjects like politics and ethics. That’s why they will end debates either through name-calling and other personal attacks, or saying things like, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. This frightens and saddens me.” Or, another favorite: “You disappoint me”. To leftists, whether they’re mean or “nice”, emotions are always THE tool of persuasion.
To an angry leftist, when you speak logically or with sanity, it rains on their emotional parade. This makes them wild with insecurity and fear. Psychologically, the insecurity and fear have to go somewhere. Instead of going somewhere productive, it goes to rage. The Antifa and other leftists — like Maxine Waters, who tells people to assault Trump supporters in restaurants and gas stations, and journalists, who openly lie to spread their false narratives — express their rage because it justifies the emotions they feel. No other reason is required.
It’s how we got to the double standard we see today. It’s how we got to the point where taxpayers, including conservative/nonleftist taxpayers, are forced to subsidize government-funded universities, one-sided institutions where speakers representing their views cannot speak without mob violence.
Double standards of this kind are dangerous. The greatest danger? The false and vicious idea that certain types of speech constitute violence. The initiation of violence must, of course, be against the law. But the moment our government and elected officials start to argue that certain speech — always conservative speech, never leftist speech — constitutes “violence” is the moment the First Amendment is over. That’s why the idea of “hate speech” — subjectively defined only by emotionalist leftists, of course — is the single worst idea to come out of academia and government in the last generation. And that’s saying something, because there are a lot of stupid and dangerous ideas out there.
We’re only a single election away from implementation of that idea. All you need are the combined forces of the “deep state”, a Democratic President and even a partially Democratic Congress to ensure that just as violence will be against the law, so too will the equivalent of “verbal violence”. When conservatives or other nonleftists speak — whether on social media, college campuses, or anywhere else — you will be considered a criminal for inciting “hate speech” against the authorities. THAT will be the beginning of dictatorship. And it will all have started with the double standards we see right now.
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