In the old days, “liberals” and Democrats used to stand against “religious bigotry” and “religious zealotry.”
What they meant was the judgmental, arbitrary and hostile treatment of people with differing views.
We knew that had all changed when they began to excuse and even embrace militant Islam. Militant Islam stands for all the things that they used to claim conservatives, including conservative Christians, always stood for: bigotry, judgmentalism and even the use of coercion against people who disagreed (e.g. gays, people who wished to use birth control, women who don’t cover their faces and who want lives, etc.)
Back in the Obama years, when Obama excused and even seemed to actively encourage Muslim terrorist attacks against “infidels” in the United States, many of us recognized something was amiss. How could the previously “liberal” advocates of peace, love, brotherhood, tolerance and “live and let live” from the 60s and 70s have morphed into people who ally with the polar opposite, now in the twenty-first century?
Today, we know the answer. Leftism — what used to be labeled “liberalism” — is now a religion. It’s not merely a belief system. It’s way more than a political viewpoint. It’s a totalitarian religious ideology. Their “God” isn’t merely government. It’s their own emotions. “If I feel it, it’s true; if I feel it, you WILL think it, and act on it … or else!!”
You see it with “cancel culture”. Some unseen, unknown power decides what IS and IS NOT acceptable. Gone With the Wind? It’s out. Live PD and Cops? Gone. Aunt Jemima? Condemn it or face the consequences. Oddly, other things — such as the blackface wearing past of Virginia’s far left Governor, or Joe Biden’s not-so-innocent anti-black remarks, even in the present day — are excused. Excused — by whom? By that unseen, unnamed Force who decides these things for the media, and for the rest of us. That’s a RELIGION. It’s a totally irrational, fundamentalist kind of one.
Reason, logic and persuasion — utilized, in fairness, by many religious people over the ages — play absolutely NO role in today’s leftist cancel culture that now controls the entire Democratic Party and the vast majority of our media, cultural, corporate, educational, sports and entertainment institutions. No dissension. No debate. No challenge or questioning, not even within the leftist ranks, as dissenters soon find out. THAT’S what you call living under a religious dictatorship.
You see it in the treatment of pressure/victim groups of their own people who dissent. If you’re black or Hispanic and support President Donald Trump on any issue — you’re toast. If you’re gay and have questions about the policy of forcing parents to assign “transgender” status to five-year-olds in the public school system — you’re bigoted and hateful. According to whom? The unseen gods who decide these things.
Do reason, facts, logic and reality have anything to do with it? No way. The attitude underlying today’s vitriolic condemnation and censorship by leftist cultural commandos could not hope to compete with the most conservative, supposedly bigoted Christian or conservative viewpoint today. I don’t know of any conservatives treating gays, lesbians, blacks or Hispanics with anything like the savage treatment leftists impose on their own, such as blacks or gays who support President Trump on any issue at all.
Today’s leftism is a virulent form of intolerant dogmatism; it’s the worst we have seen since the Middle Ages. I read that in the Middle Ages, waves of insanity took over entire towns for no clear reason. In that era, there wasn’t a lot of freedom and rationality. You didn’t have capitalism, self-responsibility, or a Bill of Rights in the Middle Ages. I can’t help but think of that era today as we see our media and tyrannical government officials treat an increase in the positive test results for COVID among healthy people as the equivalent of the Bubonic Plague. In the Middle Ages, at least they claimed it was all mysticism. Today they call the irrationality “science”. It’s madness almost nobody could ever have predicted. And try not wearing a mask in a society where probably 80 percent know it’s stupid and pointless to wear a mask to keep out germs smaller than the tiny holes in the mask — and yet they will keep doing it anyway, perhaps for years and years to come. Less because of government fines or imprisonment (at this point) than because of social shame. That’s the work of ruthless, nasty dogmatists who have done their job well on the more reasonable and fair-minded among us.
You Catholic school children from the 1950s and early 60s: You had those stern, uncompromising and socially shaming nuns. Well, in 2020 we’re all stuck with Sister Rachel Maddow, Sister AOC, Sister Ilhan Omar and Mother Superior Pelosi.
You probably didn’t know it. But we’re living in the middle of a religious dictatorship. The religion is leftism. The dictatorship, like all tyrannies, is controlled and run by a minority. But up through the present moment — they’ve got most of us.
Anyone up for a rebellion? Bullies are afraid of reason. It’s their kryptonite. Mass numbers of people asserting what’s true? That would enrage and frighten them to the core. If we don’t fight back against the bullies, we’ll have to learn the hard way: They’re just getting started.
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