Chris Cathcart:
The Left is "the party that started it" in treating politics as war by other means; we can now see a pattern in their using of the basic institutions of our social framework as weapons for their political causes. Obama/Lois Lerner weaponized the IRS against Tea Party groups; the Obama administration weaponized the FBI against Trump and on behalf of Clinton. Now they are weaponizing the language as per your posting on how Democrats are undermining rational discourse. This is most obvious in the case of the word "racist," which is no longer used as something with definite and delimited content, but as as an epithet basically against any political opponent who defends the (structurally) "racist" status quo. It is also used as a guilt-by-association weapon; if you start criticizing the lousy ways Democrats paint Trump as a racist, that opens you up to the very same charge of being a racist by implication. (This recently happened to me on a facebook group.) This sort of tactic brings to my mind the words "cult," "witchhunt mentality," and "Stalin-era Soviet Union." Of course, the Soviets, cultists and witchhunters have taken themselves to be the paragons of intellectual virtue, so - as you point out - reasoning with these folks becomes a futile exercise.
Right. Almost anything a conservative says or does will get him called a racist by these swine who obviously have no respect for their opponents, the English language, or the canons of rational discourse. You may recall that Brian Leiter called me a racist on the basis of a post in which I carefully sorted through various possible meanings of 'racist.' So even a discussion of what 'racist' might conceivably mean will get you labeled as one.
There is clearly no point in 'dialogue' with enemies who say, absurdly and shamelessly, that 'chain migration' is a racial slur and that people who use it want to put blacks in chains. Of course, they don't really believe what they say since they are not that stupid. This is proof positive that our opponents are morally defective people. For the most part they are not stupid, but vile. Nancy Pelosi, however, appears to be both.
This leads to the question of how most effectively to punch back. Of course to punch back at such degenerates is to punch down which will start them whining about 'punching down.'
Actually, Trump is the best weapon we have. He gets under their skin and causes them to go wild with rage. This 'inspires' them to take more and more extreme positions. This, one may hope, will alienate sufficiently many voters, including old-time Democrats, and seal their fate. Even lefties such as Andrew Sullivan see the danger here for the Dems.
What made Trump's masterful SOTU performance so enjoyable to watch were the cut-aways to the sullen faces of the Democrat obstructionists. What a sorry lot. I suspect many rank-and-file Dems are beginning to realize that their party has been hijacked by radicals. This is not the party of Jack Kennedy or Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It is not even the party of Bill Clinton in the '90s.
As 'the Amy Wax incident' (as I term it) at U Penn demonstrates with all too painful clarity, this leftist weaponizing mentality goes up very high in the chain of intellectual command and isn't merely a third-rate-mind political-activism phenomenon. (There, it got a little bit more nuanced, with the phrase "white supremacy" being weaponized in place of "racism.") My main two-part question: how is it that the rest of academia can sit by in silent complicity as if this is nothing out of the normal, and how can the UPenn philosophy department sit on the sidelines while standards of discourse on that very campus are flushed down the toilet?)
To answer your question, academics with the exception of those in the STEM disciplines are almost all leftists. They associate with their own ilk almost exclusively and reinforce their extremism. And of course they hire their own thereby perpetuating their decidedly un-diverse intellectual culture. So Amy Wax is to them -- wait for it -- a racist! Poor Professor Wax, brave girl scout that she is, thinks she can persuade the thugs with her little sermons about classically liberal values, not realizing that that they care not a whit about such values.
'White supremacist' has come to replace 'racist' as the Left's favorite term of abuse, presumably because it is more specific and more abusive. Perhaps our tactic should be to egg them on to even higher heights of abuse. How about 'white supremacist child molester'?
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