The Nastification

     “The personal is political” – old Leftist mantra

     It’s been said many times that the world loves a good loser. No one enjoys losing. No one seeks to lose. Yet there are compensations for defeat that parents once taught their children to reflect on and appreciate. Recent developments suggest that the practice has waned:

     Stephen Colbert is what happens when you let politics take over your life.

     You become ugly, nasty and mean....

     Colbert broke character for CBS, revealing that he is actually angrier and pettier than his nearly 20-year-old Comedy Central alter ego. His jokes have become increasingly bitter and partisan, and his style of humor uncomfortably personal. Get him near politics and watch him froth.

     As the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch are no doubt familiar with the “comedian’s” tirade, I’ll refrain from repeating the details.

     (Methinks I can hear some of you muttering Glenn Reynolds’ wisdom: “Do you want more Trump? Because this is how you get more Trump.” As the professor himself would say: Heh. Indeed.)

     This episode is likely to become a landmark in television history, not because no comparable episode has occurred before – though I can’t remember one, I’d be surprised if there were none – but because CBS, Colbert’s employer, will not discipline him in any way. The network certainly won’t fire him.

     There’s a war on, you see. You can’t win a war, especially a war to the knife such as the media are waging against the Trump Administration, the Republican Party, and the American Right, while maintaining an image of your enemy as a good and decent sort. Thus, as long as the Left and its media allies are determined to destroy Trump et alii and claim power for themselves alone, the nastification of all things into which politics is permitted to insinuate itself will continue.

     Can it get even nastier without provoking bloodshed? I can’t imagine how, but then, I’m not trying very hard.

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     The entire project of the Left is to politicize everything. Let there be no private property, no private rights, no private decisions of any kind. All things must be subject to the approval of our political masters...as long as our masters are Leftists, that is. When the hated enemy holds the reins of the State, he must be opposed a outrance, and with every weapon at the Left’s disposal.

     For a while, those weapons consisted of explicitly political campaigning and the use of friendly media to spread and reinforce the Left’s pronouncements. No longer. Too much personal space remained in which private citizens could think, reflect, and talk to one another. It was obligatory that those spaces should be persistently, mercilessly squeezed, such that opinions contrary to Leftist dogma would find no forum in which they could be expressed. It was a challenging problem in a nation founded on such antediluvian notions as individual freedom, but that didn’t stop them.

     Perhaps they didn’t expect resistance. Perhaps they expected the protests of the enemy to be token, easily shouted down and overridden. (“Why am I not ahead by fifty points?” – Hillary R. Clinton) They certainly didn’t expect the resistance to give the hated Republicans absolute majorities in Congress and elevate Donald Trump to the White House.

     As Becket Adams observes above, the nastiness of the Left’s spokesmen is a natural consequence. Politics – the pursuit of power over others – is the one and only thing that matters to them. Being denied power, especially by someone they hold in contempt and have made a practice of defaming, is the most hurtful thing they could imagine...and in the United States of America in this year of Our Lord 2017, they don’t need to imagine it.

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     The nastification of our nation and its political discourse might be permanent. Indeed, it will persist for as long as one side or the other maintains the “power uber alles” attitude the Left holds today. Their Brownshirted tactics aren’t helping, neither when they prevail nor when they’re turned back. In the former case, it encourages them to press more forcefully and widely; in the latter, it enrages them, just as does any successful opposition.

     Worse may yet be upon us. The Right has maintained civility and public decorum in the face of steadily increasing harassment and violence. “Don’t sink to their level” has been the maxim, and most on the Right have abided by it. But the indications are that conservatives’ forbearance is about to come to an end...if it hasn’t already.

     There isn’t much that’s nastier than open street warfare. Nor is it guaranteed that the “forces of order” will stem the violence rather than exacerbate it. Cops equipped with MRAPs and other military hardware could succumb to the temptation to stage a few “demonstrations” of their own, to cow us back into nonviolence. And cops choose sides, too.

     Pray.