By Ben Domenech
Thursday, June 16, 2016
One of the consequences of the success the American left
has found in the culture wars is that they have become more illiberal in
tendencies and views toward the toleration of opposing ideas within the public
square. It is not enough to achieve within the country the kind of cultural
reforms and shifting of norms thought impossible a decade ago – there can be no
space allowed for those who disagree with these cultural pushes to continue to
have a presence in polite society. Anderson Cooper’s questions to Florida
Attorney General Pam Bondi are a perfect example of this. Cooper’s worst
comment is that he has gone through Bondi’s prior year on Twitter and found
insufficient dedication to the cause of gay rights – as if Bondi tweeting
something about gay pride month would in any way have prevented a terrorist
massacre, any more than a law for more robust background checks would’ve
prevented a man with no criminal history of buying a gun, or a ban on the AR-15
would’ve prevented the man buying a Sig Sauer MCX.
The implication advanced by many on the left today,
particularly in the media, is that somehow, everyone they disagree with
culturally is to blame for an act of Islamist terror. Thus, people who are
members of the NRA, people who disagree with the Trans bathroom agenda, people
who held the same opinion as Hillary Clinton four years ago on gay marriage,
people who pray for victims of massacres, and people who don’t tweet about gay
pride month all contributed to this awful attack. The New York Times editorial couldn’t be clearer in depicting this act,
undertaken by an attacker who literally declared his allegiance and
justification, as driven by Republican exploitation of prejudice. This is who
does not want to wear the ribbonism taken to the level of utter absurdity.
Heather Wilhelm responds to the NYT:
This is strange, given that Omar
Mateen, the now-infamous shooter at the Pulse nightclub, did not mention
Republicans when called 911 to pledge allegiance to ISIS and its leader, Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi. According to the latest reports, he did not mention Paul Ryan
or Mitch McConnell when he called a local television station and declared the
following: ‘I did it for ISIS. I did it for the Islamic State.’ He did not rain
down curses upon America’s roiling bathroom wars or even the scourge of supply-side
economics when, terrified eyewitnesses reported, he said ‘he wanted America to
stop bombing his country.’
The implication that your fellow Americans have blood on
their hands is a serious one. What makes this implication more damaging in the
current context is that the American left has also come to hold the view,
despite every fact to the contrary, that the rights protected by the First,
Second, Fifth, Sixth, and Tenth Amendments are only in place because the
politicians have been bought. The facts are that Americans are buying more guns
than ever, and yet the nation has seen a dramatic
decrease in gun violence. The NRA is an expression of popular will working
on behalf of millions of dues paying gun owners. If wealthy and powerful
interests were successful at manipulating the political process in spite of
public opinion, we would have a nation that looked like what Michael Bloomberg
and Tom Steyer wanted it to be. We don’t.
Last night The Daily Show’s Hasan Minhaj, speaking to a
gathering of radio and TV journalists, went on an extended rant about Orlando
which included the statement that Congress is bought by the NRA to the tune of
3.7 million dollars over the past decade, suggesting that if the journalists in
the room could use Kickstarter to raise 4 million dollars that it would alter
our national gun policy. Even given the normal assumptions regarding the
inaccuracies of a fake journalist, this is a ludicrously inaccurate statistic,
but in an amusing way: he has apparently conflated the dollars given with the
fact that the NRA has 3.7 million members.
(They actually have far more now, since the Obama presidency has led to a boom,
but a search of 3.7 million turns that up frequently and is an awfully specific
thing to get totally wrong). The NRA gives far more than 3.7 million dollars
because they represent far more Americans than Minhaj recognizes.
The danger of illiberalism on the part of the American
left increases when they believe, falsely in this case, that the will of the
people is emphatically in one direction, and that it is only via the mechanism
of big money pouring into our politics that prevents this will from being
honored. Taken as a whole, this view delegitimizes not just the working out of
complex issues via our political system, not just the decisions of the Supreme
Court in cases like Heller and Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, but the basic
value of self-government.
In keeping with the appropriate tenor of toleration and
respect, Minhaj closed his rant with an expression of solidarity with the “F
your thoughts and prayers” movement on social media. This is where an illiberal
movement ends up – literally saying to people “F U for your prayers” – when it
believes the only solution to every problem is more government, more rules, more
ribbon-wearing… conveniently ignoring the hard truth that none of it, had it
happened a week or a month ago, would have prevented this terrible attack.
Seeing the world as it is is too hard. It is comforting to instead hold to the
simplicity that if a roomful of media can raise 4 million dollars, all the bad
things will go away.
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