The Viciousness Of The Righteous

     Don’t take the title too literally, Gentle Reader. There’s a dollop of sarcasm in it.

     I’ve ranted many times about how the Left’s assumption of moral and intellectual superiority seems to license it to do all manner of vicious, amoral things. History offers us many examples of its big crimes. Its lesser sins against honesty and decency tend to go unnoticed, except by those who are the targets thereof.

     This vignette by Jim Trageser provides us a look at one such “lesser sin:”

     In the early 1990s, I was the opinion pages editor of the Oceanside Blade-Citizen in San Diego County. We were a 30,000 circulation daily serving Oceanside, Carlsbad, Vista and Encinitas. At that time, California and a few other states were pioneering new laws that required financial institutions to share with customers the files they kept on us - and to provide a process for challenging inaccurate information.
     The editorial board - publisher Tom Missett, managing editor Rusty Harris, and myself - were in favor of this development, and wrote a series of editorials in support of it. Then we went a step further, and in another editorial argued that political and activist organizations that keep files on American citizens should also have to disclose those files on request, and have a process whereby inaccurate information could be challenged.

     Please read the rest.

     There’s a curious tension in there. The notoriously brutal tactics of the Southern Poverty Law Center were already well known, at least among conservatives. Yet that organization clearly felt that it had to maintain the secrecy of its operations. From Trageser’s tale, the SPLC’s masters regarded anything that might breach that secrecy to be a threat to it. Yet there could be no question about the magnitude or the direction of the SPLC’s activism; it made its accusations quite publicly.

     Would the exposure of the SPLC’s files have done it harm? Probably, though I can’t see that harm being mortal or near-mortal. Its orientation and agenda were too plain. But as Trageser tells us, it was willing to use its methods to bludgeon a relatively small and local newspaper, rather than allow even the suggestion that activist groups of its kind should be transparent about their recordkeeping.

     I must conclude that the SPLC’s masters were aware that what they were doing was wrong, despite their belief in themselves as morally superior to those they were targeting. That awareness didn’t seem to have any effect on their behavior. They went on righteously denouncing anyone to their right as purveyors of “hate.” The recent revelation of their funding of public demonstrations of “hate” and “racism” surprised few conservatives.

     Cognitive dissonance doesn’t quite cover this. I don’t know what would.

     This is one of those “How can they possibly sleep at night?” questions that arise repeatedly about left-wing organizations and activists. It’s not far from the usual run of such things, apart from its blatancy. Still, add it to the catalogue. Keep it handy for the next time some leftist blathers about the Trump Administration’s “lack of transparency.”