Success Is the New Hate Crime: Conservatives Advised to Stay Small, Stay Quiet, and Maybe Stay Alive
In the death throes of the postmodern left, being a conservative means assuming that any day you could be killed for your ideas. Perhaps we’re now in a position to become a threatened minority and start enjoying social benefits. I hope they begin with tax breaks. The mainstream media wants us to normalize the fact that they’ve once again tried to assassinate Donald Trump. I won’t.
If you’re a conservative and you feel threatened, there are two ways the radical left might spare your life. One is to become anti-Trump, but that’s exhausting, costly, and rather stupid. The other is not to succeed. In general, if you’re a failed man, someone nobody knows and nobody respects, you shouldn’t be a target for the left. (RELATED: Who Gets Canonized — And Who Gets Condemned?)
I’ve experienced this several times throughout my career: the left isn’t bothered by my opinions, among other reasons, because they’re written down, and the radical left rarely stands in front of a text longer than a tweet. What truly excites their worst instincts — the most violent comments — is when an article succeeds and goes viral. (RELATED: Sanctimony and Street Protest)
The same is true for any journalist, whether in print, radio, or television. And for content creators, speakers, writers, politicians, and even social media users. If you’re a conservative, as soon as you achieve some notable success, you’d better start alternating your usual routes and avoid offering too many details about your location on social media. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: The Wrath of the Savages)
We are supposed to assume that all this is normal in a democracy. And don’t think it’s a problem limited to the United States. My experience is essentially European. It’s assumed that here no one can easily carry weapons. There are still idiots who think that stops the bad guys. It happened a few days ago with the young Quentin Deranque in France; it happened for years with the socialist terrorist group ETA in Spain; and it happened to former politician Alejo Vidal-Quadras, here in the heart of Madrid, shot point-blank by Iranian hitmen and surviving by a miracle.
The left is violent out of pure desperation.
We have normalized the idea that there are two kinds of demonstrations: those of the conservatives, which usually end without victims, without smashed shops, and without police officers being beaten; and those of the left, which end with deaths, with streets in flames, and with several officers injured. The left is violent out of pure desperation. It always has been, but now more than ever, because the post-woke left lives in suffocating desperation: they insisted on banging their heads against reality and nature, and reality and nature won. Now they’re stuck in a stupid dead end, their numbers shrinking, nobody taking their stupid identity politics seriously anymore, and the only way they try to keep their arguments alive is through hatred, resentment, and violence. In fairness, it must be acknowledged that hatred, resentment, and violence are the only things connecting the postmodern left with the left as it originally existed centuries ago.
The mainstream progressive media has reported yet another assassination attempt on Trump (does anyone know how many there have been? Does anyone know of any other president they’ve tried to kill so many times?) as if it were just the chronicle of another peaceful day at the office. Some outlets even insinuated that an innocent young man had been murdered for being in the wrong place. Don’t think this is a lack of journalistic rigor. Most of these people know how to do their journalistic work well when they want to. It’s not even crude manipulation. It’s something worse: there are thousands of left-leaning journalists who have internalized the idea that Trump deserves to be dead, and a good handful of them are eager to break the news. Everything else, including their own credibility, matters less than that. Remember that being a good or bad journalist is just one way of looking at things; “The word ‘good’ has many meanings,” wrote Chesterton, “for example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”
The West said goodbye long ago to the century of dictatorships and totalitarianisms. Now it boasts — presumptuously — of its democracy and speaks of nothing else. H. L. Mencken would be amused to learn that the word “democracy” has become a kind of god. Democracy and freedom. Sounds good, if you ask me. There’s just one problem: in what kind of democracy does half the nation have to assume it could die any day at the hands of the other half if it is too outspoken and too successful in defending its own ideas?
We can go on boasting about how far we’ve come, if you like, but in a way, we conservatives live like our most distant ancestors: trying to avoid being killed by beasts. I imagine many conservatives feel the same. As a Christian, I have no problem with death. But as a sinner, I’d like to be able to plan it a little, you know.
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