By Ben Domenech
Monday, February 13, 2017
Over the weekend, Saturday Night Live aired a Kellyanne
Conway sketch that turned out to be very controversial, even for journalists
who are generally very anti-Trump in their signaling. The depiction of Conway
as a Fatal Attraction sex fiend obsessed with the limelight and furious at
being closed off from CNN isn’t funny, it’s just disturbing – even if you don’t
know her or her family. But the real indication here is in how quickly SNL moved
from a depiction of Conway that was considered empathetic and showed a harried
family woman who couldn’t escape the crazy demands of working for Donald Trump
to a crazed lunatic obsessed with getting in front of a camera. It’s a total
inversion of their earlier sketches, and it shows what happens when
partisanship totally skews the perspective comedians have on the characters
they’re mocking.
The saddest part about this moment is how revealing it is
of the illiberalism of some pockets of American society. There was no mass
breakdown in feelings of neighborhood in the past several elections.
Republicans did not like losing in 2012 or 2008, Democrats did not like losing
in 2004 or 2000, but it would be hard to find reports of the losing side being
so petty and vindictive toward supporters of the victor. See instead the scene
today, where Washington, D.C. leftists are screening out Trump supporters in
ads for roommates, housing laws be damned.
In one recent ad, a couple in the
area who identified themselves as “open-minded” and liberal advertised a 500
dollar room in their home: ‘If you’re racist, sexist, homophobic or a Trump
supporter please don’t respond. We won’t get along.’
In another, two women in their 20s
were searching for a roommate to take over a lavender-colored room in their
Columbia Heights apartment for 550. The women detailed their love of happy
hours, a ‘good Netflix sesh,’ pho and tacos. ‘We’re open to any age/gender
identity/non-identity,’ they added, ‘so long as you didn’t vote for Trump.’
Stella Morabito explains that what this is really about
is years of historical revisionism in our education system.
We need to ask ourselves: What
brought us to this place where the losing side has so utterly and violently
rejected the peaceful transfer of power from one president to another, and
previously agreed-upon electoral process and rules? It’s past time to ponder
the quote from Thomas Jefferson: ‘If a nation expects to be ignorant and free
in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.’
Let’s face it. Today’s street
theater is the culmination of decades of radical education revision. The
radical Left’s systematic attack on the study of Western Civilization has
essentially been an attack against the study of any and all civil societies. It
is an attack on the features that make a society civil and free. Those features
include freedom of expression, civil discourse, the Socratic method of figuring
out truth, value of the individual, and a common knowledge of the classics of
history and literature that help us understand what’s universal in the human
experience. All of that had to go.
Now, as we see students marching to
demonize as ‘fascists’ proponents of free speech, their ignorance is in full
view. This is really a full frontal attack on the rule of law, the
Constitution, and a system of checks and balances that guards against the
consolidation of centralized power.
The irony of a situation where the left has no empathy
for those who disagree with them is that this act of #resistance against
Republicans and conservatives will only turn off those people who might
otherwise be won over by a competing message. If your only political message is
grievance, it does little to move others who do not share your grievance. If
the only message is be like us or you’re a racist homophobe, then the
conversation stops early. It’s only by being more open that you have the
capacity to win others to your side. Leftists should be doing the opposite –
they should be inviting Trump supporters as roommates and endeavoring to
convince them of the rightness of progressive views. Instead, by slamming the
door in their face, it just convinces Trump supporters that the modern left is
illiberal, intolerant, and only interested in associating with their own kind.
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