Left loudly celebrates lack of civility
What do you call someone who disrupts someone’s dinner at a restaurant, who hassles their families at home and shouts profanities at them over their politics? A jerk? A boor? Hard to say.
But I know precisely the right word for someone who behaves this badly and then brags about it:
A “liberal.” Politically inspired stupidity is nothing new. People’s emotions take over and they say or do something shameful or embarrassing. What is new is the Left’s attempt to hold the moral and moron high ground simultaneously. They are arguing, seriously and sincerely, that harassing people in public or hassling their families at home makes them the good guys.
Ayanna Pressley, a Boston city councilor and future member of Congress (sorry, Rep. Michael Capuano), told the Herald that, in the era of Trump, “calls for civility to meet an uncivil threat to our liberties, our rights and our basic humanity are deeply misguided.”
“We cannot be afraid to make people uncomfortable,” Pressley said.
By “uncomfortable,” she means gangs of angry progressives showing up in public places to shout profanities at Sen. Mitch McConnell and his wife; threats against the children of Federal Communications Commissioner Ajit Pai; restaurant employees cursing people stopping to pick up dinner; or simply refusing to serve them at all.
Note Pressley isn’t saying, “I understand the passion” or “Sometimes we all get carried away.” No. She’s advocating incivility as a civil good.
Profanity in the defense of progressivism is no vice, Pressley is arguing.
She’s hardly alone. Forget the obvious example of Rep. Maxine Waters literally calling on liberals to “harass” people over their politics. From Glamour magazine (“Sarah Huckabee Sanders has no right to eat in peace”) to celebrities like Wil Wheaton (“Mitch McConnell should never have a single moment of public peace for the rest of his miserable life”) to serious liberal publications like The Nation and Forward, the left has decided that the lowest, loutish behavior is their highest civic calling.
Our own taxpayer-funded radio station, WBUR, recently posted a piece titled “The Civility Myth.” The writer, Miles Howard, is a member of something WBUR calls its “Cognoscenti” group (“Cognoscenti” is a word people use to describe themselves when they’re afraid you won’t otherwise notice how brilliant they are on your own).
“The forms of dissent that Trump’s child-snatching policy has inspired … are designed to make Trump administration officials feel shamed, scared and unwelcome in the civilian world,” Howard said. Now, making people “feel shamed, scared and unwelcome” isn’t typically what you hear on public radio. These are people who find the phrase “unauthorized migrant” too upsetting to utter in public.
But if you’re going after Republicans, it’s A-OK, Howard says, because “post-2016 America is full of “resentment, stress and rage that are almost begging to be exploited by a white nationalist grifter like Trump.”
And what does that make the more than 60 million Americans who voted for this “white nationalist grifter”? You don’t have to be a member of the cognoscenti to figure out what Howard thinks of the American people.
At Forward, another liberal bastion of tolerance and compassion, they’re even more direct: “The Trump Regime Deserves Our Hatred, Not Our Civility” is the headline. The author, Nylah Burton, argues that “no one has the unfettered right to eat in a restaurant. And that’s a good thing.”
(On whether there’s any “fetter” on your right to force a baker to design a cake celebrating your same-sex marriage, Ms. Burton is silent.)
“Sometimes, the most patriotic thing we can do is say ‘(bleep) civility,’ assert our rights and speak our truth.” Just as long as you use their preferred pronouns while you’re insulting them, right?
I’m no Trump fan. I didn’t vote for him. But I’ve never been tempted to harass and assault the people who did. I believe in debate and persuasion and civil discourse to try to make change.
I guess that’s why I’ll never be a good liberal.