Earlier this month, I wrote an op-ed for The Hill where I argued that Republicans should support President Trump and follow his electoral formula, or “die” — i.e., face extinction as a party.
The piece had an obvious target audience — establishment Republicans — with an obvious goal in mind — to get wishy-washy GOP elected officials on board with the President’s agenda.
You might expect a critical response from a #NeverTrump conservative like The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol or Conservative Review’s Steve Deace. But instead, a progressive Salon columnist, Chauncey DeVega, took the bait and responded in classic social justice warrior fashion by implying that I was a white supremacist and a right-wing terrorist:
“Cannon’s threat that Republicans face a binary choice between Trump and death is but one more example of the nightmare-dreams of violence and a second civil war that are peaking under Donald Trump’s regime. Movement conservatives and Trump supporters want blood. Their opinion leaders are inciting them to violence...
“Appeals such as Cannon’s have already caused death and harm to the American people. Dylann Roof, a white right-wing terrorist who killed nine black people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015 was radicalized by the right-wing media.”
Good grief.
I really don’t want to pick on Chauncey DeVega. He is simply a product of what modern identity-obsessed progressivism has now become: everyone is a white supremacist, and everything is white supremacy. Racism is everywhere in every quote, in every headline, and in every policy. White people are inherently evil — unless they flash their LGBT get-out-of-privilege free card. “Hate” is unacceptable, unless you’re hating people you deem to be “haters”, in which case, it’s totally reasonable.
Gone are the days of intellectual liberalism, replaced, sadly, with social justice warrior illiberalism that traffics exclusively in immutable characteristics and perceived sociological privileges and disadvantages.
Once you understand the basis of this flawed, closed-minded ideology, DeVega’s anti-intellectual screed makes more sense. He, like many progressives, simply can’t comprehend the idea that voters of all races might appreciate Trump’s support for economic policies that benefit the working class. How could that be? After all, according to DeVega, Trump is an “overt white supremacist.”
Because progressives can’t win in the marketplace of ideas, they resort to shutting down debate and shaming via shrieking pejoratives. They employ the same strategy over and over again: declare conservative beliefs outside the realm of acceptable political discourse, then identify them personally as people of bad character.
It happened at the Emmys. It’s happening on ESPN. It’s happening everywhere. It’s the progressives’ weapon du jour.
The same week my article appeared in The Hill, Ben Shapiro, a mainstream Jewish conservative columnist, was labeled a “white supremacist” and a “Nazi”, and Ben Carson was called a “black white supremacist” by liberal starlet Chelsea Handler. Rather than refute conservative arguments or acknowledge that a diverse American people can often have a diverse set of ideas, the Left uses dehumanizing rhetoric to shame and bully in an effort to force everyday people to disassociate from those the Left wants to destroy.
This strategy is anti-free speech and, frankly, anti-American. But here’s the good news: it’s not working.
America is rejecting the Salon Left’s hateful ideology and their shameful bullying tactics.
We saw it in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump. And, as the absurd shrieking grows more pronounced in 2017 and beyond, we will continue to see it at the one place we have a voice louder than Hollywood, than Big Business, and than the liberal media: the ballot box.
If Democrats and their allies continue to traffick in “hate,” seeking to divide us by immutable characteristics, such as skin color, rather than uniting us as one American people, voters will reject them soundly come Election Day.
