By John Ruberry
The one great comet of my lifetime was the Hale-Bopp Comet of 1997. But its spectacular night time display was overshadowed by the mass suicide of the 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult. Because they believed that here was a spaceship traveling behind the comet they took some barbiturates, drank some vodka, and put hoods over their heads so they could reunite with one of the founders of the cult, who they believed was a passenger on that craft.
They had faith, or something akin to it, in their beliefs.
On a lesser and of course non-deadly scale is the cult-like beliefs Democrats, and their media allies, have in themselves and their policies.
There are exceptions here and there, James Carville being a notable Dem who has decried the liberals’ wokeness, but after the victory of Republican Glenn Youngkin over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia gubernatorial race and the GOP near-miss in New Jersey, leftists are doubling down on failure, despite clear evidence that their policies are unpopular.
Just like cult members.
Let’s start with Critical Race Theory. I was one of many conservatives who switched the channel over to MSNBC to see how the left was responding to last week’s election coverage. Commentator after commentator said, like the sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that CRT was not being taught in Virginia schools or anywhere else for that matter. I laughed particularly hard when former Obama HUD secretary Julian Castro said so on a program that Brian Williams, no stranger to fiction, hosted. Castro is a lawyer and while probably in a lie-but-avoid-perjury mode he fixed his mind on a mental crumb–that no one anywhere in pre-college classrooms is teaching the arcane original Critical Race Theory texts from the 1970s–the Dead Sea Scrolls of leftist bigotry. What is being taught in some schools is that American society is inherently white, meaning racist, and that white people, even children, are oppressors.
For instance, shortly before Election Day a mother said she was told by her six-year-old daughter in a Loudon County, Virginia classroom that she was “born evil” because she is white. Not surprisingly CRT is hated by most parents–and not just white parents.
I don’t want to dig too far into semantics but the meanings of words and phrases evolve. Critical Race Theory now means dividing people into those oppressor and oppressed camps and that our society is rigged and incurably racist. Well there is one antidote–leftist indoctrination in schools, or so liberals believe.
Yes there are white supremacists. There are far fewer of them than when I was a child and those remaining should be shunned.
Oh, MSNBC talking heads I have a message for you: CRT is not a “racist dog whistle.”
Now let’s move on to infrastructure. Many left-wing experts, that is, people who know a lot of things about stuff that isn’t true, made the ludicrous claim that if Joe Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure bill had been signed into law before Election Day McAuliffe would have won. I’ll try to be brief on this whopper of a fallacy but for starters, infrastructure was not a major issue in the Virginia governor’s race. Also, as Barack Obama learned, enacting infrastructure legislation doesn’t make thousands of building projects “shovel ready.” Part of Build Back Better was signed into law on Saturday–I’m not breathing the smell of hot asphalt today. But it will be many months before BBB construction projects commence and even longer before they are completed. Okay, the food and beverage improvements on Amtrak, part of the infrastructure bill, could be available soon.
Do you remember Obama’s not-so-shovel-ready stimulus bill from 2009? Only about $100 billion of the $800 billion bill actually was spent on infrastructure.
On the other hand, inflation is a problem in America for the first time in decades. There is a growing belief among voters that government is getting too big too fast. And the Democrats have been the party of Big Government since the presidency of Joe Biden’s idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt. As for the current president, he was elected because he passed himself off as a moderate, or perhaps as an old school liberal–but certainly not as Bernie Sanders.
There is a deeper problem for Democrats, particularly among hard-left members such as the members of The Squad. As I mentioned earlier Dems have a cultist faith in their policies. I encounter left-wingers regularly here in the inner-suburbs of Chicago. On those rare instances I engage in a political conversation with them, I am usually told, “Well, you just aren’t properly educated on the issues. You listen to too much talk radio and watch too much Fox News–you are indoctrinated.” But unlike them, I am regularly confronted by the other side. For instance, I sat for hours in a hospital waiting room last month. First I endured former Bill Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America and then the leftists on The View, although I was in for a minor treat as Joyce Behar was not on the couch that day. And overall mainstream entertainment media is drenched with covert and overt liberal bias. Take a look at late night comedy shows, excluding of course Fox News’ Gutfeld! And as I mentioned earlier, I dabble with watching MSNBC–and CNN.
So yes, I am educated and I am exposed to multiple political views.
In the post-mortems among Democrats, again with a few exceptions, there was no call from them to moderate their policies and to address what went wrong on Election Day last week. It’s still full steam ahead.
I’ve mentioned this quote many times before but too many people still haven’t seen it “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant,” Ronald Reagan said, “but that they know so much that isn’t so.”
You can’t reason with most leftists.
And there was no spaceship hiding behind the Hale-Bopp Comet.
Oh, no one is always right. Yep, not even conservatives.
The last words I’ll leave to Dr. Martin Luther King.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.
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