Pop star Madonna let everyone know that in the era of Donald Trump she’s choosing love over hate—though the decision was apparently very difficult. Speaking at the Women’s March on Washington, the aging “material girl” mentioned that she’d spent a lot of time wallowing in thoughts of blowing up the White House. Thankfully she decided against it though not because she had any moral qualms about terrorism. It’s just that, according to her, blowing up the White House “won’t change anything.” It’s good to know that Madonna opposes killing the First Family and a slew of incoming staffers for purely tactical reasons.
It occurs to me that Madonna was doing nothing more than virtue signaling—that is, demonstrating what a good person she is without doing much of anything. She wants a pat on the back for not succumbing to political terrorism as an outlet for her rage. If that’s not a testament to her loving nature, what is?
This is the same woman who produced a music video on the eve of the Iraq War in which she tossed a hand grenade at a George W. Bush look-alike. After filming, she decided not to release that video for fear that it might be misconstrued as anti-military. But can you see the pattern? Whenever someone Madonna doesn’t like occupies the Oval Office she indulges her darkest assassination fantasies.
Madonna’s speech, just like the march itself, relied heavily on the theme of love conquering hate. She began by shouting “Welcome to the revolution of love!” to the adoring audience. The crowd responded with about as many hoots and hollers as when she admitted her terrorism fantasies several minutes later. She ended her speech by leading the crowd in chanting “We choose love.” This basic dichotomy of love on one side—their side—and hate on the other, has become so hackneyed that I can hardly believe that people still use it; but they do. Like a one-trick pony, the American Left reaches for different variations on this dummy-proof bumper sticker slogan over and over again, usually to the exclusion of reasoned argument.
One clever version trotted out in 2016 was “Love Trumps Hate,” a double entendre that played upon their hate object’s surname. For another example, think back to California’s Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that allowed Californians to decide how they would define marriage. The name of the initiative was unfortunate because it lent itself so easily to the disparaging “No H8” meme. When the choice was presented in those terms—love on one side and hate on the other—it wasn’t easy to stand against the forces of “love,” no matter how vengeful and bilious they proved to be.
The reason this love-versus-hate juxtaposition is so often employed is because it’s effective. Why learn another trick when the old one works so well? Politics is a propaganda war and we conservatives have been on the losing side of it for a long time because we don’t see it for what it is. A well-framed, emotionally-charged slogan does more to persuade than a million think tank white papers. That’s just reality. The intellect matters less than the heart—and the gut matters most of all.
Far too often, conservatives’ ineffectual response to the love-versus-hate formulation is to point out that the other side is pretty hateful too. Which it is, of course, though I would caution against drawing any equivalence. While the Left is clearly nastier, they are also shameless which means that no amount of highlighting their vitriol ever makes them blush.
Even in Madonna’s speech, the one she kicked off by welcoming the protestors to the “revolution of love,” she still said “F–k you” to her detractors. And the crowd roared. But that’s different, you see, because Madonna was merely hating on haters. As the hack journalist Jonathan Capehart once said on MSNBC, tolerance “should not be a two-way street.”
And clearly it isn’t. On the same day Madonna spoke, across the country in the other Washington, a Trump opponent shot a man in the stomach outside of a Milo Yiannopoulos event, mistakenly believing him to the Trump supporter and a white supremacist. In reality, the victim was a Bernie Sanders supporter. The audience was evacuated from the hall through a parking garage for fear of the vicious mob awaiting them outside. Police advised those in attendance to remove any gear that might be considered pro-Trump for the sake of their own safety. Earlier in the day, anti-Trump “protestors” had been throwing bricks, paint, rocks and fireworks at Seattle cops. They also attempted to block the entrance to the forum so that no one would be allowed to hear Yiannopoulos speak.
Can’t you just feel the love?
‘Isolated incident!’ the Left shouts. Well no, not really. Episodes like these are beginning to feel like Groundhog Day, only less funny. The scene in Washington State wasn’t quite so different than the one in Washington, DC. On Inauguration Day in the nation’s capital 217 leftist “protestors” were arrested and six police officers were injured, in addition to lots of smashed windows and a few scattered fires. The AP report labeled all counter-Trump voices at the event “protestors,” even those who were clearly engaged in wanton destruction. Other media reports were quick to point out that the so-called protests were “mostly peaceful,” a throwaway line that reporters like to include whenever people on the Left engage in mayhem, lest anyone draw broad generalizations. Left-wing riots aren’t really riots, you see, unless it can be proven that every person in attendance took part. The old “mostly peaceful” canard is never used when the protestors are conservative. When conservative protests are entirely peaceful, the media focus instead on what potential violence might happen in the future or on the protestors’ “tone.”
It seems that there are so many “isolated incidents” of leftist mayhem that we should stop seeing each one in a vacuum. For those with eyes to see there is a clear pattern. Leftists convince us to ignore the pattern by accusing us of judging the “protestors” by a few supposed bad apples. Funny how many bad apples seem show up at anti-Trump rallies all across the country, just as they showed up at Black Lives Matter events, Occupy events, anti-Iraq War events, anti-WTO events, and wherever else two or more leftists scheme.
What happened in DC was not a peaceful protest gone wrong. It was a pre-meditated riot gone right. Responsible journalists should stop talking about it as if it were anything else.
Of course, not everyone in attendance necessarily got the memo that the whole thing was slated to be an orgy of destruction, though they would have to have been naïve not to foresee what eventually happened. An organized coalition promised that they would wreak so much havoc that DC would be shut down. Does that mean that every protestor who attended was part of this coalition? No, though they would have been treated that way if it had been conservatives crashing a hypothetical Hillary inauguration. Even still, anyone who attended the Washington riot and pretends that he thought he was taking part in a nonviolent protest is either lying or stupid.
Yet no matter how many times we point out that there is just as much hate on their side—if not more—they brush it off. In their minds, their hate is not hate because they only hate people who deserve it. Never for a moment do these people lose faith in their own goodness. They don’t doubt that they are the most benevolent, the most open-minded, and the most accepting of all people; in other words, that they are liberals in the truest and finest sense of the word. If they occasionally fantasize about killing the president that’s not really hate because a) they don’t actually follow through with it, and b) the president kind of deserves it.
My hope is that some day the scales will fall from their eyes and they will see what grotesque monsters they have become. It’s a long shot, I know, but it may be our only chance for survival. As long as the Left remains self-righteousness, it will continue to terrorize the rest of us. If only we could strip them of their unshakeable conviction that they are the good guys they might start to see what demented psychos they have become. This is will be no easy task, of course, because most leftists have dehumanized their opponents so thoroughly that they don’t see hating them as a fault. It isn’t even hate. Nonetheless, we must get inside their heads. We must show them how they appear to people who don’t share their politics—like bullies.
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