Ugly Mascots

     This past Sunday, the city of Toronto experienced a mass shooting. From the reports, the shooter fired a handgun into a number of restaurants and cafes in a spree that lasted for several minutes. He killed two people, one of them a ten year old girl, and injured at least thirteen others. His rampage ended when he was killed by Toronto police.

     Toronto Mayor John Tory immediately announced that the shooter’s motive was “unknown.”

     On Monday the shooter’s identity was released to the press: Faisal Hussain, a 29 year old Muslim. His family was quoted as saying he suffered “severe mental health challenges:”

     Our son had severe mental health challenges, struggling with psychosis and depression his entire life. The interventions of professionals were unsuccessful. Medications and therapy were unable to treat him. While we did our best to seek help for him throughout his life of struggle and pain, we could never imagine that this would be his devastating and destructive end.

     I have not yet learned what sort of mosque Faisal Hussain attended, or what literature has been found in his room, or what sort of statements he’d recently made to other Muslims. But I have my suspicions. And I do know this: Canadian law makes it a felony for someone diagnosed as mentally ill to acquire or possess a gun. So what was its provenance? And the extra, fully loaded clips for that gun, and the rounds in them: where did he get those?

     The silence is deafening.

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     Traditionally, a mascot was an animal whose adoption was supposed to confer good luck upon its adopters. However, that’s not the function of a political mascot. That sort is intended to display the adopter’s “good intentions.” The Left has made mascots out of the most repulsive groups in our country:

• Muslims
• Criminals
• Psychotics
• Drag queens
• The “homeless”
• Disease carriers
• Militant feminists
• Violent street gangs

     Moreover, it’s probed ever deeper into realms of repulsion and savagery. Most recently, its balloon has floated toward the embrace of pedophiles. Perhaps the Left is consumed by an overpowering need to emphasize its unequaled “tolerance.”

     Or could it be that the prime qualification to become a mascot-group of the Left is a hatred of Western civilization and its norms? That would be consistent with its vilification and steadily intensifying assaults on we in the Right, whose mission is to conserve those norms.

     The evidence points toward one firm conclusion: Ugliness, dysfunction, depravity, and danger are no bar to winning the Left’s affection. They might even help.

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     In his landmark work The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell declaims as follows:

     The ideals of “a government of laws and not of men” and “equal protection of the law” are at the heart of American constitutional law and the democratic process. Yet, increasingly government has come to be seen as a way of benefitting particular groups adopted as mascots, often without much regard for what that does to other groups or to the integrity of the system as a whole. Groups disliked, distrusted, or feared by the general public are particularly eligible to symbolize the superior wisdom and virtue of the anointed.

     He cites a truly horrifying case later on:

     A classic case of the rights of particular mascot groups overriding the rights of others are cases involving people with contagious diseases, including fatal contagious diseases. The landmark Supreme Court case in this area involved an elementary school teacher with active tuberculosis, who was fired because of fears that she might infect the children she taught. The teacher sued, charging discrimination against the handicapped, in violation of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
     A majority of the Supreme Court ruled that it was indeed discrimination because tuberculosis could be considered a handicap.

     Here is the majority opinion in the case, written by left-liberal Associate Justice William Brennan:

     We do not agree with petitioners that, in defining a handicapped individual under Section 504, the contagious effects of a disease can be meaningfully distinguished from the disease’s physical effects on a claimant in a case such as this. Arline’s contagiousness and her physical impairment each resulted from the same underlying condition, tuberculosis. It would be unfair to allow an employer to seize upon the distinction between the effects of a disease on others and the effects of a disease on a patient and use that distinction to justify discriminatory treatment....
     Allowing discrimination based on the contagious effects of a physical impairment would be inconsistent with the basic purpose of Section 504, which is to ensure that handicapped individuals are not denied jobs or other benefits because of the prejudiced attitudes or the ignorance of others.

     What does this sort of “reasoning” say about the rights of children, their parents, and their associates to avoid infection by a deadly disease? What does it say about the reach of “anti-discrimination” law? What does it say about the cavalier attitude toward the rights and well-being of others the Left displays by its choice of mascot groups?

     Never mind all that, the Left’s luminaries would say; it’s the principle that counts! Discrimination is evil! Thou shalt not discriminate! All the best people say so. But then, the “best people” tend to live in gated communities guarded by men with guns...guns they don’t want the rest of us to have.

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     If normal people animated by normal convictions and healthful preferences are against it, the Left is for it. If often seems that no other consideration matters. The key shibboleths are “discrimination” and “oppression.” Moreover, the Left will champion it with “pride” parades and other sorts of spectacle. The accumulated evidence is unambiguous.

     In light of the Left’s demonstrated intolerance toward conservative, libertarian, and patriotic sentiments, its repeated proclamations of an obligation to “tolerate” all manner of disruption, destruction, and disease ring tinnily in the ear. The accelerating recognition of this contradiction is powering a wave of disaffiliation from the Left and the Democrat Party, best expressed in the burgeoning “#WalkAway” movement the Left has been at such pains to dismiss.

     At the base it’s fairly simple: you cannot repeatedly violate the rights or sensibilities of others in the name of a non-principle such as “non-discrimination” or “oppression” without reaping the consequences. Clinging to the belief that it’s possible has already cost the Left electorally. I predict that it will do them even further damage in 2018. Should present trends in their leadership continue, that will only fuel their efforts to find other forces and villains on which to blame their setbacks.