For an interesting thought exercise, imagine there are two buttons. Push the first, and your political opponents, people whose actions you believe have been hurting the country, become “enlightened,” embrace all your views, and support your agenda. There is unity and all discord ends.
Push the second button, and your opponents’ don’t change at all. But they’re rendered powerless, and you’re able to punish them harshly so that they suffer intensely. Which button would you push?
If the first, you’re perhaps driven by love. If the second, your passion drives from hatred.
“Perhaps” is in the second-to-last sentence because there’s nuance here. If you have a strong visceral desire to push button one, love is in your heart; if you’re torn or on an emotional level desire to push the second but nonetheless choose the first, love is lacking or wholly absent but you at least have an intellectual understanding that it’s an imperative — and you’re disciplined enough to be ruled by your head and not your heart.
If you have neither the love nor the understanding, you’re, well, where much of the Democratic Party is today.
Minus the philosophy, Fox News host Tucker Carlson noted this last night in a segment titled “Democratic Party is planning a war on half of America” — the people Hillary Clinton called the “deplorables.”
Carlson mentioned something that had struck me, too: The Democrats should (theoretically) be ecstatic. They not only defeated the hated Orange Man, but seized control of the federal government’s entire legislative branch the last election. And having long controlled Washington’s permanent bureaucracy (the Deep State) as well, the Democrats have close to free rein.
But they’re not happy. Angry as ever, they’re “plotting revenge” against the vanquished, “thinking of new ways to injure, humiliate and degrade their political opponents, make it impossible for them to work again, throw them in jail, and destroy their lives,” as Carlson puts it. They should be “taking victory laps,” he says — instead, they want to take a victory lap over their opponents’ ground bones.
“The leaders of the Democratic Party have now decided that 74 million Trump voters … are, in fact, terrorists,” Carlson explains, “and must be dealt with in the way that you deal with threats like that.”
Supporting his assertion, the host quoted retired general Stanley McChrystal, who led the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. “I did see a similar dynamic in the evolution of Al Qaeda in Iraq,” McChrystal said, “where a whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their violence. This is now happening in America.”
Next is “Andy McCabe, the former high-level FBI official who was canned for lying and corruption,” Carlson stated. Likening Trump voters to ISIS terrorists — you know, the people who burned innocent victims alive in cages — he said that when “we looked at those Americans who traveled to Syria for the purpose of joining the Islamic State, when you put all those faces and names down in one place, you had doctors, lawyers…”
“Some people are very vulnerable to and drawn into that, that core lie of any extremist movement,” McCabe continued. “And that is exactly what we’re seeing now with these, this particular group of Trump supporters.”
Then, playing on a convenient Capitol-violence-related lie, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) warned that the “threat of White supremacy looms large, and it is tragic that it took this insurrection and this attempt to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power and, moreover, injury and loss of life for many to appreciate just how formidable the threat of White supremacy is.”
Of course, how she, a black woman, is in power — and how it is that 85 to 90 percent of our post-1967 immigrants have come from the Third World — in a “white supremacist” nation was not explained.
What was explained, says Carlson, is what needs to be done with all these white supremacists: You “reeducate” and “deprogram” them. Enter Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
“We had a program addressing white supremacists,” she could be seen saying in another video clip Carlson played. “We had programs, federal programs, that went towards funding organizations like these that deradicalize people, and President Trump pulled the plug on federal funding for some of these programs. And so one thing that we know is that we have to get that funding right back up and we probably need to double, triple, quadruple or increase funding for these deradicalization programs.”
Summarizing the Left’s totalitarian, hatred-driven goals, Carlson then explained, “First, you strip people of their right to speak out loud honestly; then you prevent them from defending themselves and their families. And then, because you now can, you force them at gunpoint to read your catechism and accept your orthodoxy.”
Moreover, “Sandy Cortez and her friends are no longer a fringe element within the Democratic Party,” the commentator noted a sentence later. And their agenda is clear: “They’re planning a 9/11 commission, blanket censorship, mass arrests, deprogramming,” Carlson later warned. “These are not subtle indicators. These are fire alarms and everyone can see them. In the last week, CNN and The Washington Post have called for Fox News to be shut down by force because they don’t like our views” (excellent video below).
In reality, though, with President Trump and other conservatives having been banned from social media and well-established cancel culture just now reaching fever pitch, the fire has already long been raging.
So for how long can the Left “keep talking like that and acting like this before something breaks?” Carlson asks. For sure, if you wanted to stoke civil war, this is precisely how you’d do it.
Of course, the Left’s goal is different. Leftists who aren’t solely driven by blinding emotion may be betting that, controlling the culture and now the federal government as well, they can complete their “pacification effort” (or “Normalization”) without its victims mounting effective opposition.
What seems certain is that what Carlson calls for — “reasonable” Democrats to step up and cease the war — is spitting into the wind. Why?
Because they hate.
A story: In one of the very interesting prison interviews with the late notorious mafia contract killer Richard Kuklinski (the “Iceman”), it was pointed out, and he admitted, that hatred was all he ever had in life. When asked what his hatred did for him, he replied that it allowed him to “put one foot in front of the other.”
Likewise, I remember hearing many years ago a very passionate female radio-show caller who exclaimed to the host, “My hate keeps me going!”
It’s hard living without meaning in life, and passion animates us a bit as fuel does an engine. And just as passion can be derived from love, so it can from hate.
Ancient Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu counseled to not just “know thy self,” but also to “know thy enemy.” We shouldn’t deceive ourselves into thinking that all Leftists are driven solely by lust for power or money, though this certainly describes people such as Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and many others (and some have multiple motivations). For there are millions of agitators and activists who absolutely are consumed by hatred — and they’ll consume you with it if they can.
There’s no question as to which button these people would push because, as with love, hatred needs its object.
