On Jan. 11 Barton Thorne, principal of a Memphis high school, posted a video in which he denounced the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol while nevertheless comparing the widespread High Tech assault on Free Speech to the hysteria of 50’s McCarthyism. He was, ironically, placed on forced leave after several of his own staff members, no doubt Democrats, no doubt impervious to the meaning of “irony,” objected to his statement.
Former N.Y.C. hair stylist Brandon Straka, a gay man who fled the political Left in 2018 when he realized it only valued him because of his orientation and was in no way interested in a free exchange of ideas, has been cancelled by Facebook in an exercise of the very sort of tyranny he had come to despise. The 500,000 members of his “Walk Away” movement whom he had enticed to move to the Right with him, were also cancelled. Bravo Facebook!
While I have repeatedly touched upon the hypothetical if not utterly specious nature of the Ideas informing the Left, Katie Couric, now a member in good standing of my Pantheon of Simpletons, referred to all those who supported Trump as a “cult” who need to be “deprogrammed,” this the latest term in the lexicon of “liberal” insults. Believing in the efficacy of Human Intelligence as more than just a Western bias, believing that life begins at Conception [which it does], believing that one has the right to defend one’s National Borders against illegal immigrants, believing that Heterosexuality is Nature’s Norm, believing that it is absurd to make one’s country increasingly energy-dependent on others which don’t give a damn about the Environment, each of these apparently renders one little more than a mindless simpleton! Or is it Katie who is so?
She of course is not alone in her hyperbole. Biden, outraged that Ted Cruz was pushing the narrative that the election had in fact been stolen, compared him to Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels. It is not, I would point out, an accusation that was ever lodged at Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi who each repeatedly suggested that the 2016 election was stolen via Russian collusion. Nor, as far as I know, were those Democrats and their media minions who declared relentlessly that W stole the 2004 election compared to Nazis! As always in this era of Leftist fanaticism, the double standard!
“Conservative” Benny Johnson of Turning Point U.S.A. recently expressed his horror that C.N.N had allowed one Alex Stamos, a computer scientist at Stanford University and, not coincidentally, a former security officer at Facebook, to rant on unopposed suggesting that Republicans who questioned the integrity of the 2020 election were little better than the members of ISIS. Johnson points out that, quite aside from Pennsylvania which I have already discussed, several States altered the criteria for mail-in voting in direct defiance of their Constitution, a document which only “conservatives” are apparently obligated to respect. Impervious to his hypocritical double-standard, Stamos earnestly recommends the cancellation of all those “conservative” websites which appear to be garnering more attention than the mainstream media, a phenomenon which he is of course utterly incapable of understanding.
Tulsi Gabbard is a Democrat who served as the U.S. representative for Hawaii’s second congressional district from 2013 to 2021. But as a rationalist, she is not opposed to criticizing the sometimes absurd inclinations of her own party. Indeed she has recently been featured on a number of platforms of a decidedly “conservative” orientation. A Tweet addressed to Joe Biden perhaps best explains her perspective: “Your leadership is needed now to denounce those like John Brennan & Representative Schiff who are advocating for targeting half the country as domestic terrorists.” Tulsi finds it absurd that more than 70 million U.S. citizens should be stereotyped as terrorists simply because they supported Trump. Indeed she says the authoritarians at Facebook, Twitter, etc., are themselves engaged in a form of terrorism far more dangerous than those they are trying to silence.