The Logic Behind the Left’s Demonization of Conservatives

By Ben Shapiro

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

In the immediate aftermath of the murder of 49 Americans at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., CNN’s Anderson Cooper descended on the scene of the crime. There, he confronted Florida state attorney general Pam Bondi, who was attempting to organize support for the victims and their families. She agreed to speak with Cooper, presumably to talk about those efforts.

Cooper, however, had a different agenda.

Bondi had defended Florida’s statute in favor of traditional marriage in court. This, according to Cooper, put her in league with the ISIS-inspired jihadi. “Do you really think you’re a champion of the gay community?” Cooper sneered. “Do you worry about using language accusing gay people of trying to do harm to the people of Florida when doesn’t that send a message to some people who might have bad ideas in mind?”

Cooper’s not alone. The New York Times lamented that the Orlando massacre did not drive sudden, wholesale acceptance of the LGBT agenda, from same-sex marriage to transgender bathrooms. Writing in the Times, Jeremy Peters and Lizette Alvarez mourned that the terrorist attack “only exacerbated the anger from Democrats and supporters of gay causes, who are insisting that no amount of warm words or reassuring Twitter posts change the fact that Republicans continue to pursue policies that would limit legal protections for gays and lesbians.”

And when Evangelical leaders traveled to New York to meet with presumptive 2016 Republican nominee Donald Trump, they were met with protest by LGBT activists who screamed, “Your hate is killing us! Your lies are killing us!”

Meanwhile, Democrats played the same routine with gun-rights advocates. After proposing, in fully unconstitutional fashion, that Americans placed on a terror watch list be stripped of their Second Amendment rights — without a showing of evidence, without an opportunity for defense — the Left suggested that anyone opposing this measure was in league with ISIS. Senators Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) and the execrable Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) stated outright that Republicans wanted ISIS to have weapons. “Republicans,” spouted Murphy, “have decided to sell weapons to ISIS.” Warren then repeated the line. So did the White House.

Why the demonization?

The mainstream Right has never claimed that the murder of military members at Fort Hood by a jihadist required Democrats to support more military spending. We never claimed that the jihadist had been motivated by an anti-military culture generated by the Left. When Donald Trump idiotically suggested that Barack Obama might be a secret Muslim in league with ISIS, Republicans nearly universally condemned him.

The same isn’t true of the Left.

To the Left, failure to support their agenda is tantamount to support for murder. There are no conservative Americans who oppose same-sex marriage yet believe that gays and lesbians should not be murdered at nightclubs; there are no Christian Americans who don’t think men should enter women’s bathrooms, but also think that people who suffer from gender-identity disorder ought not be shot to death by a rampaging Muslim terrorist. There are no shades of gray in the Left’s view of the Right — we disagree, and thus we are evil.

That’s because the Left doesn’t believe in the basic concept of rights. The Left believes that you have a right to behave as they say you should behave — no more, no less. This is why the Left supports regulations on hate speech; they don’t agree that you have a right to say things that make people feel bad. That’s being a bad person, and the government shouldn’t let you be a bad person. This is why the Left thinks that private businesses have no right to discriminate in choosing their clientele — unless, of course, the Left is choosing which states to boycott for political purposes. The shibboleth so often parroted by the Left — “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” — no longer applies.

The Left projects its own view of rights onto the Right, imagining that if the Right disagrees with any particular views or behavior, it must want to stamp out the people who propagate them.

And this funhouse mirror-image rightly scares them. It scares them so much that they have to routinely demand government coercion.

Ironically, however, it’s precisely because the Left is what they claim to despise that conservatives insist on holding onto their guns. Not one conservative in America has called for Pulse nightclub to be closed. But leftist allies of Pulse patrons want conservatives to hand over their weapons in the mistaken belief that conservatives side with ISIS.

Obviously, the Left is wrong. Pam Bondi can oppose same-sex marriage and still stand with the LGBT community in their right not to be slain at gay clubs. Republicans can stand for gun rights and oppose jihadism. But so long as the Left insists that its cartoonish vision of conservatism represents reality, there will be no room for negotiation. You can’t negotiate with a monster, even a monster of your own creation.