This is in essence a continuation of my blog of May 8.
Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s Global Public Square, deems himself a centrist whose opinions generally lean to the political Left. Yet on a recent episode of Firing Line [PBS], he stated categorically that Donald Trump’s immigration policies made much more sense than those pursued by Joe Biden. “The whole system is broken,” he said. “You have to apply from your home country.” This, of course, entails the end of the supposedly compassionate “asylum” protocols which compromise the well-being not only of millions of American citizens but of many of those they are designed to assist. Is it in any way surprising that the admission of millions of undocumented and ultimately untraceable foreigners into one’s home country have resulted in a multitude of problems? Zakaria seems to think that returning to the protocols of America’s traditional immigration system makes perfect sense, yet strangely when Donald Trump defended that very same policy in his 2019 campaign, he was almost universally reviled by the mainstream media, including CNN, as an ignorant, racist, White supremacist jerk! Hmmm?
Al Sharpton, staunch supporter of Black Americans’ civil rights and certainly no Republican, nevertheless outraged the Left leaning hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” when he appeared on that program on May 2. Sharpton found it incredibly hypocritical that those who had ranted relentlessly against the horrors of the Jan. 6 “insurrection” were remaining relatively neutral about the multiple anti-Israeli protests disrupting American university campuses from coast to coast. While the couple he was addressing found it absurd that he should even consider comparing the events of Jan. 6 to the protests presently under way, Sharpton insisted all such expressions of dissent cease to advance their cause when they brazenly violate the law and resort to violence. Those who share his own Democratic beliefs, he said, “lose the moral high ground” when they engage in such tactics.
On May 4, The Blaze News Network expanded upon Sharpton’s logic by pointing out that while Jan. 6 had resulted in approximately 2.7 million dollars in damages, BLM’s 2021 rampage had destroyed 2 billion dollars worth of property, including 97 police cars, while producing over 2000 assaults on individual cops. As I have discussed in several previous blogs, the “insurgents” of Jan. 6 were clearly not intent on overthrowing the American government. While he has been convicted of multiple crimes, Richard Barnett’s scornful pose as he sat with his feet up on a desk in Nancy Pelosi’s office, seems a perfect expression of the disdain “conservatives” have come to feel for a “progressive” culture that is “systemically” hypocritical and narrow minded in its approach to all who dare question its sanctimonious certitudes. No one is exonerating those who invaded the Capitol building, but their behavior and the extent to which they were Not armed suggests they were clearly not intent on overthrowing the American government. The extent to which they have been prosecuted in comparison to the extent to which the 2021 rioters of BLM have Not, is a perfect example of the double standard to which “conservatives” are submitted day after day. Here in Canada the same double standard is evident in the depiction of our Truckers’ Convoy as pervasively violent, which it was Not, as well as the continuing prosecution [persecution?] of its participants by a government deemed to have over-stepped its constitutional authority [i.e., the seizure of private bank accounts?] in a number of recent court rulings.
That individuals such as Zakaria and Sharpton, neither of whom are “conservatives,” have chosen to speak out at the behest of Reason rather than the simplistic, amoral “progressivism” that has come to infect our culture over the last decade or so, truly gives one cause for hope. Indeed each new week seems to herald the abandonment of some absurd policy formerly championed by the Left. In April The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics [NAIA] ruled that trans females would no longer be allowed to compete with biological females in athletic competitions held within its jurisdiction. The more prominent NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association] is also apparently reconsidering its protocols in an effort to give girls a fair chance to excel in the sport of their choice. Sadly, had a White, Male “conservative” proposed such changes a year ago, he would have immediately been denounced throughout much of the media as just a hate-filled, transphobic, right-wing fanatic!
Fact is that the “conservatism” espoused by the many commentators to whom I regularly refer, is barely distinguishable from the genuine liberalism which sought fairness and freedom for all 70 years ago. Contemporary “liberalism,” that is to say, in its abandonment of Reason, is little more than a form of Fascism.