More and more, the left is spouting a rhetoric of high, moral-sounding fantasies to distract from the ruinous havoc their policies wreak on the real world.
You could hear the cognitive dissonance this week in the small kerfuffle between London’s utterly incompetent and self-righteous Mayor Sadiq Khan and America’s unruly but generally effectual president.
Khan, a virtue-signaling jackass, spent much of Trump’s UK visit excoriating the president for such crimes as pulling out of the useless Paris Climate Accord and failing to kowtow to the left’s inchoate ideas about “diversity.”
Trump responded trumpianly by calling Khan a “stone cold loser,” and pointing out that “he’s done a poor job, crime is up, a lot of problems.”
And, well, yes. Khan’s a mayor, after all. His job is running a city not forging the conscience of a nation. And his city — once the greatest on Earth — has become a cesspool of record homelessness, impossible traffic and a murder rate spiraling higher than it has for over a decade. Unwise immigration policies fashioned on misguided diversity theory are a huge contributor to the problems. So in a reasonable world, Khan would be prevented from making high moral declarations by the sock he’d stuck in his own mouth.
Which brings us home to America. Here, Trump’s deregulation and tax cut policies have helped ignite an economy that has brought unemployment among blacks to record lows.
And sure, that’s great in real life, but how is it playing in the left’s moralistic fantasies? When confronted with the triumphant results of Trump’s actions, Harvard Professor Cornel West complained about the way the president talks, “When you create an atmosphere, an ambience of xenophobia, it reinforces the polarization and therefore many black folk wouldn’t even be able to connect the statistics that look good with the language.”
For one thing, so much of the president’s admittedly rough-hewn language has been purposely distorted and taken out of context by a news media desperate to prove every Republican racist. It’s an open question, therefore, whether it’s Trump or CNN who is at fault for the bad ambience around here. But laying that aside, West is essentially saying that Trump’s indifference to left-wing academic standards of racial sensitivity is more important than what he has actually accomplished for actual human beings.
Congressman Al Green of Texas says the same: “The president can be impeached for his racism and his bigotry. Unfortunately, however, he is a beneficial bigot. Meaning he benefits a good many people and I, unfortunately, have to tell you I’m so saddened when I see people who have built their reputations fighting bigotry allowing this to persist to the extent that it has.”
Run that around in your aching head a moment. The president is a “beneficial bigot” because his policies help “a good many people.” Is that the same as his being a not-bigot who simply doesn’t kowtow to the politically correct speech codes the left has imposed on us to keep us from criticizing their awful policies?
Because if you want to get a load of some non-beneficial non-bigotry all you have to do is visit one of America’s left-wing cities. “Rats at the police station, filth on L.A. streets — scenes from the collapse of a city that’s lost control,” reads a headline in the Los Angeles Times. The filth has gotten so bad in my town, officials are worried about the spread of flea-borne typhus and rodent-carried bubonic plague — that’s the Black Death that once wiped out a third of Europe, just so you know.
The local news station in Seattle — where left-wing governance has brought about the same sorry Angelino state of affairs — is running an hour-long documentary called “Is Seattle Dying?” and yes, it is. Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco likewise. And in Chicago, after a single weekend in which over 50 people were shot, Jussie Smollett is now the only person in the city who hasn’t been attacked.
Meanwhile, the crisis at our border has become an emergency — a catastrophe for all concerned that could be ended with a few tweaks to our absurd asylum laws. But the “resistance” resists doing anything meaningful to stop it because they’re too busy displaying their compassion for illegals in front of any TV camera they can find.
The left spends an awful lot of energy trying to get conservatives to shut up. Political correctness, deplatforming, demonetizing, blacklisting, outrage mobs, boycotts — all dedicated to making sure that they alone get to do the talking.
But you know what? The right doesn’t even need words to make the point anymore. Just go to the Democrat-governed cities. Look out the window. Walk the streets.
Everything the left talks about is meaningless. Everything they touch turns to crap.