Rarely, does a single interview capture so much of what is wrong with our politics today, highlighting both the deep denialism of supposedly mainstream Democrats and further cementing that party as one completely adrift from anything resembling traditional American principles of government.
Last week, two time presidential loser and perennial election denier Hillary Clinton re-entered the political fray as only she can, saying out loud what many Democrats undoubtedly think, but dare not speak. While lamenting the halcyon days of the past, presumably when her husband was sleeping with interns, selling pardons, and raising millions from monks who’d taken a vow of poverty, she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, “That’s the way it used to be. I mean, we had very strong partisans in both parties in the past, and we had very bitter battles over all kinds of things…but there wasn’t this little tail of extremism, waving, you know, wagging the dog of the Republican Party as it is today. And sadly, so many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure. He’s only in it for himself. He’s now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions. And when do they break with him? Because at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen.” Rarely, does a few sentences capture so much of what is wrong with our politics today, highlighting both the deep denialism of supposedly mainstream Democrats about what is actually happening in their party and further cementing that party as one completely adrift from anything resembling traditional American principles of government at the same time. Something needs to be done about me and my family because we disagree with Ms. Clinton and hers? We’ll return to the disturbing notion of “formal deprogramming” in a moment, but in the meantime we should consider what “little tail of extremism” is truly wagging which party because wherever this observer looks, the Democrat Party is so owned by extremists at the moment they have taken to completely denying the reality around them, demanding strict obedience to ideas that would have been outright laughed at just a few years ago.
After all, this is the party that has suddenly decided a man can truly become a woman and vice versa. The party that for decades championed women’s rights, but now claims women themselves don’t exist and openly encourages lesbian women to embrace male genitalia. To them, biological women no longer have the right to compete in exclusive sports, seek safe spaces for themselves, or even be locked up in their own prisons. Children, meanwhile, suddenly have the right to – entirely on their own – decide their sex and pursue permanent procedures to fundamentally alter their bodies and chemical make up. Radical and extreme doesn’t even begin to describe it, and yet rarely does any mainstream Democrat question this new orthodoxy, acting instead like it is totally normal, going so far as to claim it’s science itself. Thus, they have no comment when a future female Supreme Court Justice claims to be incapable stating what it means to be a woman, or when someone testifies before Congress and insists you need to be a medical doctor to say for sure that a prime Mike Tyson would knock the head off of any woman foolish enough to get in the ring with him. They are equally silent when female inmates in these prisons are summarily raped, students in schools with trans-friendly policies are sexually assaulted and their parents locked up like criminals, “trans influencers” take jobs and money from women’s athletes, and the women athletes themselves watch their hard won records get blown away by a man who couldn’t compete with those of his own gender. The abuses against women and common sense seem to come daily at this point from any and all progressive directions. Last week, it was the United Nations informing us “trans lesbians are lesbians too. Let’s uplift and honour EVERY expression of love and identity,” by promoting the idea that biological women lesbians should dutifully perform sex acts with biological men. Tell me again, who needs to be formally deprogrammed?
If this were the only instance wherein Democrats were so distant from the facts as to be located on another planet entirely, perhaps we could forgive Ms. Clinton for glossing over extremism in her own ranks. This, however, is also the party that has decided the police contribute to crime rather than stopping it and believe that more criminals on the streets has no effect on the crime rate. They, of course, do not state it this plainly, at least out loud in mixed company, but they have sat idly by while crime rates in major cities spike to levels not seen in decades, advocating the outright defunding of the police, the abolition of federal prisons, and no-cash bail policies in response, while claiming the root cause of violent crime is anything other than the criminals themselves. In addition to what might euphemistically refer to as “traditional” crimes, we’ve also witnessed the rise of dramatic and brazen new criminal tactics like smash and grab flash mobs, organized online. Dozens if not hundreds of mostly young people descend on department stores and shopping malls in masks, terrorizing employees and shoppers, and stealing everything they can get their hands on. Philadelphia was in the news most recently for this particularly disturbing trend, but similar events have happened across the country to the point where some major stores are pulling out of urban areas entirely. CBS News reported on the incident in Philadelphia earlier this month, writing that “Business owners have been left to pick up the pieces nearly a week after swarms of thieves looted retailers Tuesday night.” In total, 72 people were charged in this most recent incident. “One video shows police and alleged looters clashing outside the Lululemon store on Walnut. Then, just down the street, a security guard tried to hold off people forcing their way into the Apple Store. Sporting goods stores, a Foot Locker, a GameStop, a medical marijuana dispensary and a streetwear business were also among the shops hit. Several liquor stores are also closed ‘until further notice’ after 18 Fine Wine and Good Spirits stores were targeted. Now, city leaders said they’re looking to come down hard on anyone involved in the looting spree.” The media, meanwhile, is keen to tie these incidents not to the criminals themselves or the broader breakdown of civil society, but to much vaguer and more benign sounding “civil unrest.” The criminals, you see, were not stealing, they were upset about developments in a legal matter. “The chaos started hours after a judge dismissed all charges against a former police officer who shot and killed Eddie Irizarry. However, police have said that none of the looters were connected to the peaceful protesters who came out in support of Irizarry.” Tell me once more, who needs to be formally deprogrammed?
There is a similar pathology at work on the southern border, where progressive activists demand that the border itself essentially be erased while the average American still believes that a country cannot function without having control over who is coming in and going out. The result is a disturbing pattern of lies and confusion from the Biden Administration, who simultaneously insist that the border is closed despite record numbers of crossings, so many that states and cities governed by Democrats far from the border have begun calling it a crisis. The equivocating rapidly turned into a farce last week after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced there was an acute need to build a new border wall despite his boss promising during the campaign that they wouldn’t construct a single foot on his watch. On Wednesday, the Homeland Security Secretary issued a memo in the Federal Register citing an “acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers” to prevent people from entering the country illegally. “The United States Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector is an area of ‘high illegal entry,’ ” he explained. “Therefore, I must use my authority . . . to install additional physical barriers and roads in the Rio Grande Valley Sector.” This was correctly seen as a radical reversal in policy after the Biden Administration shut down construction that had begun under its predecessor and President Biden himself said it was a “waste of money.” By Thursday, however, the Administration was simultaneously insisting there was actually no change of policy and the President still didn’t believe a wall would be effective. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked during the daily briefing, “So, who’s right, the statement from the DHS Secretary overnight or the President’s comments today saying they don’t work?” Ms. Jean-Pierre responded by claiming “A couple of things, so it showed up on the Register today, but this is not new, it’s from six months ago.” The reporter noted, correctly, that that the recent announcement was new and included the waiver of some 26 laws to expedite construction. Still, she insisted “this was something that was put out six months ago. What I am saying is DHS announced this back in June that the agency would do so, they actually said they would that…that’s what I know to be true and is a fact.” When the reporter noted that the Department of Homeland Security and the President appear to be directly contradicting one another, Ms. Jean-Pierre said she can only speak for the President and he does not believe a border wall is effective despite the claims of his own department. Ultimately, she decided to blame Congress under President Trump, claiming they appropriated the funds in 2019 and it would be unlawful not to proceed – despite that they haven’t proceeded in close to three years because President Biden halted all funding for the wall. Was that illegal? She then moved onto insisting we need “comprehensive reform” to “fix a broken system,” ever the platitude that means amnesty and uncontrolled immigration, and President Biden has already proposed that. Overall, it is impossible to make sense of any of this – except it has to be President Trump’s fault. I ask one more time – who needs formal deprogramming?
Of course, Ms. Clinton wasn’t content to simply identify the need for presumably Soviet or Orwell inspired deprogramming. She also needed to add what she considers the root cause of MAGA discontent because clearly, no rational person can simply believe that a man cannot become a woman, cops do not cause crime, and borders are required for security in good faith. No, there must be a problem with these sorts of people, who she’d previously described as “deplorables.” This time around, she explained it as “a classic tale of an authoritarian populist who really has a grip on the emotional, psychological needs and desires of a portion of the population. And the base of the Republican Party, for whatever combination of reasons – and it is emotional and psychological, sees in him someone who speaks for them, and they are determined that they will continue to vote for him, attend his rallies, wear his merchandise because for whatever reason, he and his very negative, nasty form of politics resonates with them.” As to why this might be the case, Ms. Clinton posited a few things, all of which we’ve heard before. “Maybe they don’t like migrants, maybe they don’t like gay people, or Black people, or the woman who got the promotion at work they didn’t get, whatever the reason. So it is like a cult and somebody has to break that momentum.” In other words, one must be inherently racist, bigoted, or sexist to be a Trump supporter, passed over for promotion like Shakespeare’s Iago. It could not possibly be that we are deeply, deeply dissatisfied with a political establishment that produces only failure, continually abrogates power to itself above all else, no longer believes in basic political freedoms such as speech and association, has betrayed this country in every way imaginable, and has embarked on a globalist economic crusade that has decimated major American industries. None of that is a factor to Ms. Clinton or the broader establishment, and you must be formally deprogrammed if you share these views.
How do we know Ms. Clinton is not an outlier in this belief and this, in fact, is the view of the broader establishment of which she has been a fixture for three decades? Ms. Amanpour’s reaction tells us everything we need to know in that regard. By any standard, an American politician calling for the formal deprograming of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of their fellow citizens for the crime of continuing to support a former President of the United States against their wishes is shocking. A truly fair minded person would necessarily react in something close to horror at the idea that their own friends and neighbors need to have their opinions forcibly changed given the history of totalitarian states that have tried to do exactly that. Is she truly envisioning A Clockwork Orange style Ludovico Technique or Room 101 out of 1984? How would people be chosen for this deprogramming and what if they refuse to comply? We might also expect a little mild pushback on the notion of who is a radical these days, people calling for secure borders or those encouraging young women to surgically remove their breasts? At a minimum, we should have expected a little skepticism and some additional clarifications about what Ms. Clinton considers extreme and who specifically she is referring to with the overly broad and not particularly helpful “MAGA extremist” label. We might also hope she would ask exactly what credibility Ms. Clinton has left as a two time loser, an election denier, and the orchestrator of the most destructive misinformation campaign in United States history, wherein she compiled false information from Russian sources and used it to prompt a multi-year long investigation into her political opponent on completely fabricated pretenses. Why should anyone listen to her at this point? Lastly, the idea of a Clinton saying someone else is in it only for themselves is its own unique irony. Needless to say, Ms. Amanpour did precisely none of that. Instead, she just sits there, nodding in completely agreement, leading Ms. Clinton onward as if she was some kind of sage, a modern political Oracle at Delphi. When Ms. Clinton advocated the “formal deprogramming” of Trump supporters, Ms. Amanpour giggled like a schoolgirl who just heard a dirty joke. She might not have put it that way herself, but clearly she believes it as does all of her kind because they hate you and yours. It’s only that they rarely say it out loud, and perhaps we should thank Ms. Clinton for pointing it out if nothing else.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 