Not long ago I wrote that the Democratic Party was driven by the twin-engines of hatred and utopianism.
The reaction to Queen Elizabeth’s death suggests, however, that at least one loud chunk of the Democratic base is a single-engine affair, and it’s not utopianism that’s driving them.
When I say the activist American left, I mean in particular the racialists.
Senior Democratic Party officials, including the American president, have treated the queen’s death with appropriate solemnity, but the racialists have been bouncing off the walls.
The Daily Mail has a round-up of some of the most appalling examples:
“For 96 years, that colonizer has been sucking up the Earth’s resources. You can’t be a literal oppressor and not expect the people you’ve oppressed not to rejoice on news of your death.”
“The queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged. We may never learn what the queen did or didn’t know about the crimes committed in her name”
“Journalists are tasked with putting legacies into full context, so it is entirely appropriate to examine the queen and her role in the devastating impact of continued colonialism.”
“Real question for the ‘now is not the appropriate time to talk about the negative impact of colonialism’ crowd: When is the appropriate time to talk about the negative impact of colonialism?”
“Telling the colonized how they should feel about their colonizer’s health and wellness is like telling my people that we ought to worship the Confederacy. ‘Respect the dead’ when we’re all writing these Tweets *in English.* How’d that happen, hm? We just chose this language?”
“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”
That’s all from Twitter, obviously. The most egregious comments got a lot of pushback, and Twitter itself censored at least one of them.
But according to a writer at Slate, they shouldn’t have.
“Let the Descendants of Britain’s Empire Have Their Glee,” is the headline of an article by one Nitish Pahwa.
Their glee at the death of a 96-year-old woman, she means.
Here’s her closing argument:
At any rate, the memes, jokes, and gleeful tweets are not just a manifestation of the very contemporary desire to dunk on one’s online enemies as viciously and virally as possible. That is part of what’s fueling this response, sure; it’s a pillar of modern social media culture. But these reactions are also coming from a place of real, often deeply felt pain. If the queen, for many, was a symbol of grace, for many other people she was a symbol of something deeply ugly.
The queen is dead; long live her former subjects. Let them have this one.
Let’s not.
Let’s aim upward instead of downward for a change.
This whole mindset—the idea that vicious “dunking” on one’s “enemies” is just a part of modern social media culture—doesn’t excuse the bad behavior so much as indict the culture that foments it.
We’re very badly mannered online. Why excuse it?
Because of all the “real, often deeply felt pain?”
The pain of one’s ancestors having been badly treated?
Real, deeply felt pain like that felt by my leftist American friend of 30 years who couldn’t bear the sight of a cozy Skt. Hans Aften bonfire in Denmark because her husband’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great aunt had been burned as a witch in Salem? (True story.)
My various great-grandparents were badly treated by Kaiser Wilhelm I. By the Russian Tsars. By the pogroms of central Europe. And a damned good thing, or the survivors required to produce me never would have fled to America and started the process of producing the people who would ultimately produce me.
Now, my feelings may not count for much since I don’t know the oppressive pain of being a salaried writer at New York magazine or a tenured professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, like two of the most obnoxious complainants above, and I’ve never suffered the indignity of being published in Slate, like Nitish Pahwa.
But who among us can go more than a few generations back before finding members of our family that were mistreated, abused, enslaved, or killed?
What’s especially stupid about this kind of performative anguish is that it’s a virtual certainty these people are leftists—which is to say, Democrats. Where’s the real and deeply felt pain they feel as “people of color” for the horrors inflicted upon their ancestors as recently as the 1960s? If after everything the Democrats have done to black Americans you can still vote for Democratic candidates and policies, why on earth should anyone take your gripes about Queen Elizabeth seriously?
But here’s the thing about activist leftists of color:
Let me tell you one thing. You ought to know who you’re dealing with. You gotta treat them like shit. I mean, that’s the only way they’ll respect you. I keep them right here, like under my thumbs. Like, you have to. Otherwise they get out of control. Like kids.
Whoops! Sorry, the citation wasn’t me talking about activist leftists of color (or anyone else): it was South Carolina’s Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate Krystle Matthews, caught on tape saying those exact words about white voters by Project Veritas.
She’s taking appropriate heat for the remarks, and that’s a good thing.
The charming Ms. Matthews previously wowed South Carolinians when a Project Veritas sting released earlier this year caught her soliciting donations from drug dealers: “I don’t care about no dope money, give me that dope boy money. Where the duffel bag boys?”
According to the Newsweek article linked above:
Matthews publicly apologized before calling on Democrats to unify around her, saying that Democrats are too often “distracted or redirected” in pursuit of a common goal.
Indeed: one mustn’t let the voters be distracted by one’s need for dope boy money. I think Aristotle said that (or was it Montesquieu)?
This is the leftist dynamic right now: activists screaming bloody murder about present pains over historic injustices on the one hand, while pushing racial hatred right now on the other. And voting in lock step for the party that fought a war to preserve the slavery that they claim is wounding them to this very day.
It’s essentially the Democratic platform: no one in human history, they insist, has suffered as have the various minorities of America (who nevertheless continue to risk their lives to sneak into the country, which is weird), and we must all fight the racism that defines America—but we also have to keep those white devils down lest they get out of control. Like kids.
Meanwhile the American president is meandering around the country ginning up hatred for “MAGA Republicans.” That’s the Democrats’ mid-term election strategy: raw hatred. Dehumanization. Biden’s contempt is palpable: he sneers, he snarls, he barks, he raises clenched fists. No one alive today has ever heard an American president talk like that about supporters of the opposition party. It isn’t done. But the Democrat Party and the establishment media offer only encouragement.
The Marxist moron Bill Press, for example, concludes an article in The Hill by observing: “Biden shouldn’t have called MAGA Republicans semi-fascists. He should have called them outright fascists, period.”
Ooh, that’s a bingo!
But look at his argument:
How dare Biden engage in such name-calling, they (Republicans) thundered. This, mind you, from MAGA Republicans who, following the example of their “dear leader,” excel in name-calling. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) compared the Biden administration to “Marxist dictatorships.” On Fox News, right-wing commentator Mollie Hemingway called Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine plan a “fascist move.” And at an August 2020 campaign rally, Donald Trump warned that Joe Biden would “replace American freedom with left-wing fascism. Left-wing. We’re going left-wing all the way. Fascists! They are fascists!”
In other words, it’s OK for Republicans to call Democrats “fascists,” but President Biden must apologize to the nation — Or resign? Be impeached? — for suggesting that MAGA Republicanism is semi-fascist?
LOL.
Read carefully: Rubio was talking about the Biden administration. Hemingway was talking about a policy. Trump was talking about candidate Joe Biden’s platform. Not a single one of them was talking about Democratic voters.
And that’s the best Bill Press could do. He wants to defend Joe Biden with some good old down-home whatabout-ism, but he can’t find a single Republican politician or commentator demonizing Democratic voters the way Joe Biden is demonizing Republicans.
He can’t find it because it’s not there.
But, you know… LOL.
MAGA Republicans are such fascists.
It’s what all the cool kids on all the cool media are saying. They support this idiotic premise not with facts or evidence, just recitations of the same old tired partisan talking points.
And then they have the chutzpah to accuse Republicans of being divisive and full of hatred?
There hasn’t been a nastier, dirtier, more cynical or more dangerous political strategy from a major American political party in my lifetime.
I know the left is convinced Donald Trump was preaching a gospel of hate: that’s the conventional wisdom, the thing we’re all supposed to believe. But where was that hatred expressed? How? In what words, what deeds? Almost everything the establishment media have been saying about Trump is a lie: he never bragged about grabbing women by the crotch, he never called the white supremacists in Charlottesville “fine people,” he never called all Mexicans rapists, he never paid Russian prostitutes to urinate on a bed that Obama had slept on. (He never told people to inject themselves with bleach.) All of that “hatred” came from the fertile, hateful imagination of the leftist activists controlling the media narrative, and for just one reason: Trump had beat them and that could not be tolerated.
Anyone who reads this blog knows I’m hardly an unconditional Trump supporter. Only a week or two ago I was wondering aloud how we could get the guy to step down and let Ron DeSantis step up as the heir apparent to the 2024 nomination. There’s plenty to dislike about Trump, even if you like his policies and his fighting spirit, as I do. He’s a blowhard, a narcissist, an egomaniac. He can be a bully. He’s got onion-paper skin.
But there is infinitely more, at this point, to dislike about Joe Biden and the direction in which he’s taking his party and the nation. He’s whipping up a storm of hatred, anger, and division—by insisting that the 70+ million Trump supporters of America are themselves a force of hatred, anger, division, and fascism.
Someone needs to get that old man to change his messaging fast.
Fair enough he wants to slime Republicans: American politics ain’t beanbag. But every other president and presidential candidate in American history managed to find a way to slime their opponents and their policies without whipping up hatred for opposition voters in the process.
Joe Biden’s either too dumb to figure that out or too cynical to care.
Fortunately, I don’t think the American electorate is as dumb or as cynical as Joe Biden.
But if I’m wrong, we’re in for a bumpy ride.