Here’s one little story that shouldn’t really surprise anybody, but apparently it has.
This man went to a Kamala event wearing a Trump shirt, and a Trump event wearing a Kamala shirt. The difference in how he was treated was stunning.
Look, the Left (especially in the Western hemisphere) has always been characterized by its boorish (and often dangerous) behavior when it comes to dealing with people who don’t share their loony little vision of a perfect world.
Of course, that boorishness extends to “Establishment” institutions as well. I remember Brando’s immortal line from On The Waterfront The Wild One where he is asked just what, exactly, he has got against the Establishment (or, in the modern idiom, the belittling term “normies”). His snarled answer of “What have you got?” typifies the attitude.
“Whatever we want is great and wonderful; opposition to that — no matter how well-founded or realistic — is not only wrong, but evil.”
Hence the vituperative reaction of Lefties to a Trump t-shirt at one of their rallies.
Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to be a lot more tolerant, even accommodating in the opposite scenario, which is probably one reason why the Left has been able to extend and indeed entrench its various little substitutions: free love for morality, intolerance for opposition, and so on.
Taking just one comparison: when the Left — in the shape of the loathsome Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman and their cohorts — took over college campuses in the late 1960s and the decades which followed, conservatives allowed them to occupy campus administration buildings in the name of “Free Speech!”, only evicting them when their behavior became too extreme to bear. Of course, that takeover had dolorous consequences, because those Leftists and their philosophical progeny took over campuses really took over universities and entrenched their foul little political philosophy by becoming lecturers and administrators. (One has only to look at what the Ivy League colleges have become to see exactly how rotten this takeover has made them.)
Now, of course, as the Left occupies most of academia and the media, not to mention popular culture, any opposition to them is not treated with the same respect as they were accorded, but with feral hostility. (One has only to see the reaction of the Left when Elon Musk turned Twitter from a Leftist organ into something more open-platformed to find evidence of such.)
One would expect such hostility from younger people, because young people are often passionate about their beliefs (even when, as is often the case, when they are demonstrably wrong). But if there’s one unifying characteristic of the modern Left, it’s that even their older adherents are similarly intolerant, and often as violent.
The comments to the above post are quite telling, and mostly reveal the stark differences between conservatives and the Left, e.g.:
You see, we make jokes about tossing Lefties from helicopters (thank you, General Pinochet); but the Left is the side which actually has the death squads, mass executions, gulags and “re-education camps”.
And if you think that such an outcome is impossible in the United States, you’re as delusional as they are.
Of course, Brando’s quote was from “The Wild One”. Lileks did a takedown of this preposterous line far better than I ever could, so I won’t try here. But it is noteworthy how so many people who want to destroy civilization (no need to modify the noun with “Western”, this is the only one there is) have suckled at its teat all their lives and would be utterly helpless (and useless) without it.
Thankee for the correction. They all look the same to me.
I’ve been saying for years that if the Right is so violent how come Jane Fonda has not been worm food for fifty years?
Or how January 6 didn’t end with a single dead politician.
This is what happens when a segment of society abandons reason and props up feelings and experience as their sources of truth. When questioning someone’s lived experience somehow becomes tantamount to making a death threat against them, the modern left is the result.
The late Charles Krauthammer once said that conservatives think liberals are good people with bad ideas, while liberals think conservatives are evil. Since then liberals have taken to calling themselves progressives, democratic socialists, woke, etc., and they’ve turned it up way past eleven on the dial. How much further will they go is the scary question.