As we have all learned from Joe Biden's presidency, the phoniest/baloney-est claim from liberals is that they have a deep desire for national unity. There is no unity in compromise, only in surrender to the Left.
At the end of Sunday's Reliable Sources, fill-in host John Avlon interviewed the PBS gasbag Ken Burns, asking him about national unity, and he's as phony as Biden. This is CNN, so Avlon demands unity in exaggerating the January 6 riot:
AVLON: You've made the point in terms of the quest for unity, that at the end of the day, Americans usually can rally together when something catastrophic has occurred. Sometimes that's what's required to focus it on our underlying humanity. And yet, the attack on the Capitol on January 6 does not seem to have united us. Instead, there is remains an effort to rewrite even that recent history. So, what hope do you have about a path forward when we have not been able to unite around an attack on our capital, the worst and the first since the War of 1812?
BURNS: Yeah -- it's terrifying. This is one of the great crises along with the Civil War, the Depression, and the Second World War that we have in large measure because things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere entropy is loosed upon the world.
How does anyone compare the January 6 riot to World War II or the Civil War? It's like comparing Hiroshima to the Portland riots.
Liberals love to pose that they are against "partisan echo chambers." They actually say this with a straight face on CNN....and on PBS. Burns whipped on the conservative media, as usual: "If you get your news from one echo chamber, you're in dangerous trouble risking now in the midst of this Coronavirus -- your own life and the lives of the people you love the most, and your friends and your community."
Burns then uncorked this weird lecture about freedom, there's "personal freedom," which is selfish, and then there's "collective freedom," when we all submit to liberal notions of what must happen:
BURNS: But let's remember in America, we have to parse freedom. There's freedom, what I want, personal freedom, you know, which is selfish. What I want? I want to do what I want to do. And there's our collective freedom, what we need. And we have always been our better selves, we have always appealed to our better angels when we have yielded to that collective what we need, rather than what I want.
So, when somebody is turned wearing masks into some anti-freedom statement or taking a vaccine, which will save their lives into some anti-freedom, we've lost the center. The center is not holding, you know, things will fall apart.
Where Burns really came apart is trying to insist "we can disagree" on things, but we really can't. Because there's this huge climate-change threat, and you can't disagree with that. There is no debate. Quibble with the Left about a Green New Deal, and you're the "Flat Earth Society."
BURNS: And I don't think there's any right- thinking American -- we can disagree on how you get things done -- what the role of government is that I don't think anybody wants this noble experiment to dissolve just when we have in our grasp the possibilities and the tools with which to solve these things. And we have looming ahead of us, this huge global threat of climate change that has to be addressed, and we can't now permit the Flat Earth Society any more time.
