I spent many Sundays in evangelical churches and hung out with 15,000 evangelical youth at the Urbana conference. I wasn’t sure what to expect among thousands of college-age evangelicals, but I certainly didn’t expect the intense discussion of racial equity and refugee issues — how to help them, not how to keep them out — but that is what I got.Like everyone else in the US, I've spent my life marinating in progressive lectures from the media, entertainment and academia. Recently, I've taken to following second-string progressive thinkers and politicians on Twitter, just to get of sense of how they think, what is important to them and to make sure I'm not living in a bubble.
The progressives all see me as evil. I'm racist, sexist and homophobic. I hate immigrants and Muslims. They are fighting against a massive tide of hate, at least in their minds. That's where the quote above is so destructive. Once you realize the normals aren't full of hate, what do you have left? Debt? Social pathologies? Crime? Mountains of dead babies outside of the Planned Parenthood abortion mills?
Blue states like Illinois are in serious financial trouble because they followed blue policies. The workers' paradise of Venezuela is in full meltdown. The actresses who lectured us on Trump's misogyny were covering up for Weinstein's worse misogyny all along. Obamacare is in its death-throes and it's hard to find defenders of the previous administration's foreign policy outside of the Ivy League idiots who constructed the mess. Black America is an ultra-blue, self-inflicted train wreck of violence, failure and suffering.
Oh sure, the hard results of the progressives' work have been less than ideal, but you have to realize that all this time, they were fighting against the forces of hate.
I certainly didn’t expect the intense discussion of racial equity and refugee issues — how to help them, not how to keep them out — but that is what I gotIf the normals are motivated by love and concern instead of hate, then what do you really have left?
It's best just to flip them off and seal up the levee as best you can. Otherwise the whole construction of the progressive world view will dissolve in the flood.
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| Here we see progressives fleeing for safer locations such as universities and late-night |
OK, so I think the big reason that the general stereotype of "conservatives" is so at variance with reality, is because the "conservatives" that are visible are the idiot pundits who are trying to stir up controversy, because their career depends on being scare-mongering jerks. Of course they aren't at all representative, but it is easy to forget that when they shout over pretty much everyone else that they are claiming to represent.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, though, that the same effect goes the other way too: the stereotypical "liberal" is based on a different set of loud, idiot, scare-mongering pundits. What makes you think that the "second-string progressive thinkers and politicians on Twitter" are any more representative of a larger group of people than their "conservative" equivalents?
Tim, I would agree with you because it's a whack job liberals that get all the media time. They're entertaining, and that's what counts.
ReplyDeleteHowever, this was the CEO of NPR. It's his freaking job to see past the stereotypes. If I was so bad at my profession that I only figured out I'd been 180 degrees out of sync with a huge part of it after I retired, I'd write under a pseudonym out of pure shame.
Well, a different pseudonym. I already do that.