It is hypocritical of the left to ostracize Tea Party protesters. The language they use when criticizing this grass roots movement is vitriolic and hateful. One could say that it amounts to hate speech.
Hate speech is not new. It fits into the general category of logical fallacy called ad hominem which means to ignore the issue by personally attacking the opponent. It is like saying your opponent is wrong because he's a jerk. When the left uses it, for some reason, few in the media point out that such a tactic does not win the argument. It is nothing more than an indication that the attacker does not have an argument in the first place.
Today the Tea Party protesters are being vilified all over the media. In addition, the Obama administration is littering the streets with paid protesters from ACORN and SEIU to make it look as if the administration has broad-based support for it's health care plans. I think it is unprecedented in our country that the President of the United States now has available to him a cadre of professional protesters (supposedly representing "the people") who threaten and intimidate his political opponents. One could say that this tactic is immoral and coercive; that the government has no business using muscle to shakedown the American people. Indeed, the protesters of Obama's health care plans are innocent victims of a government that is engaged in a deliberate effort to minimize their import and correctness. This article on www.hotair.com spells it out:
“The political atmosphere crackles with charges of racism. President Obama’s functionaries and allies make dark insinuations about the racial motives behind all opposition to his agenda. Tea party protests against Big Government are portrayed as thinly veiled Klan rallies. The boycott of Glenn Beck’s TV show is based on the idea that calling a black liberal Democrat racist is, itself, an act of indefensible racism. The hilariously incompetent and biased MSNBC network was so desperate to portray town hall protesters as racists that it framed the image of a black man holding a rifle to obscure his face, then tried to pass him off as an armed white supremacist.
It’s not surprising to see desperate Democrats throw gasoline on America’s simmering racial fires, in a last-ditch effort to reverse their political fortunes. The Left believes debates are won when the other side is silenced, not when those listening to the debate are persuaded. Charges of racism would not be one of their preferred weapons, if a climate of tension didn’t exist to make them effective. Racism consistently ranks near the top of issues Americans say they are concerned about. Reducing racial tensions will require building a society that is the exact opposite of the one Barack Obama favors. No system of politics and economics is more hostile to racism than classical liberalism combined with free-market capitalism… and none provides a more fertile breeding ground for tension between races, sexes, religions, and other groups than big-government socialism.”(1)
The Democrats apparently believe that crafted imagery represents the will of the people; that “social” justice justifies the means and that hateful speech is justified if the enemy is an individual or a businessman who thinks for him or herself.
What is hate speech? Wikipedia:
“Hate speech is a term for speech that attacks or disparages a person [or] group of people based on their social or ethnic group, such as race, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or lack there of, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, language ability, ideology, social class, occupation, appearance (height, weight, skin color, etc.), mental capacity, and any other distinction that might be considered by some as a liability. The term covers written as well as oral communication and some forms of behaviors in a public setting.”(2)
One must ask if the following statements are hate speech according to this definition.
Keith Olbermann: “Congratulations, Pensacola teabaggers. You got spunked. And despite the hatred on display, a few of you actually violated the penal code. But teabagging is now petered out, taint what it used to be. And when you co-opt the next holiday, Fourth of July, try to adopt a holiday food that does not invite the double entendres like, you know, franks and beans. On a more serious note, we're now joined by actor, activist Janeane Garofalo. Good to see you.”(3)
What is truly offensive here is the sexual innuendo that insults the Tea Party protesters with the term “tea bagging.” Is this not hate speech? Garofalo starts:
“You know, there's nothing more interesting than seeing a bunch of racists become confused and angry at a speech they're not quite certain what he's saying. It sounds right and then it doesn't make sense. Which, let's be very honest about what this is about. It's not about bashing Democrats, it's not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks.”(4)
These kinds of statements made by anyone of any other political persuasion (than the left) would be the subject of outrage and even boycott in the public arena. Considering that hate speech involves racial statements(rednecks) and sexual statements (tea baggers), should Garofalo's words be considered hate speech? They certainly are hateful. I thought it was progressives who claim to be improving the dialogue by banning hate speech? We do mean what we say, don’t we? We do intend to practice what we preach, don’t we?
But hate speech is not just an isolated idea that hangs out there without a broader context. Hate speech requires prejudice and collectivism. Prejudice is the assignment of negative characteristics toward an individual that you presume to be part a group. With prejudice, you insult the individual as well as the group to which you claim he belongs.
To say that a Tea Party protester is a racist is a form of prejudice. And, as is all predjudice, it is false. There is absolutely no proof that the Tea Parties are based upon any racial consideration whatsoever. Furthermore, if you say that all Tea Party protesters are racists, you must include anyone who disagrees with Obama on any issue. You must certainly include liberals who disagree with Obama about Health Care. With this line of reasoning, you have destroyed all political disagreements of any kind. Obama has a blank check to do what he wants.
But we are missing the real hate here. The real enemies for the liberals are not Tea Party protesters or Republicans. The real enemy is reality. Liberals committed to the idea of “social justice” are at war with reality. Today’s progressive is insecure because, deep down in the bottom of his soul, he fears that his ideas will not work. He fears that the political opposition may actually be right when they say that central planning is an impractical idea. What his nightmares scream to him is that his idea of “social justice” is a laughing, screaming evil villain who will burn you alive if you give in to him.
These people, from Obama on down to ACORN and SEIU, have taken a massive “bold leap” into socialism; what they fear more than anything is to come face-to-face with the realization that they really don’t want a better society; that in the depths of their souls what they really want is to destroy the society that has fared so well under their hated capitalism. They need to destroy their imagined form of evil; a laughing, screaming evil businessman who wants to make a profit. They want to destroy, through manufactured imagery, manufactured majority opinion, manufactured protests and media lies, the real people who think that virtue consists of building, thinking, living, investing and enjoying life; they want to destroy the people who actually earn their living through honest work…and who don’t want to see their earnings squandered through false hopes offered by Faustian prophets.
Today’s progressive fears that the Tea Party protesters might actually have a better handle on reality than his Harvard educated heroes in the administration. After all, they are the people who actually produce the wealth that the left wants to re-distribute. They are the people who have some magical way of knowing how to survive - and the fact that they don't want to serve the collective willingly must be pretty scary for the progressive. It puts him in the precarious position of hating the very people who must willingly sacrifice for Obama's collective goals.
The left has to create a false moral equivalence between themselves and the people who want to see individual rights respected. This is where ACORN, SEIU and other sundry paid left radicals come in. This moral equivalence would give them the cover they need to cosmetically smooth over the differences between the Founding Fathers and nihilism, between builders and destroyers. As the real destroyers of civilization, the left must treat hard working Tea Party dissenters as if they were the most crudely vicious destroyers of all…and they must destroy them crudely and viciously.
But there is a problem with this strategy. Fake protest against capitalism might be a way to gain power, but what happens when you've destroyed the capitalists? Through out history the left has used protest against capitalism and the profit motive to gain power...while they destroyed the capitalists and plunged their societies into poverty. They are doing it again today through their hypocritical hate speech against the Tea Party people. This time, the capitalists, the Tea Party protesters, understand the game and they are standing up for their right to be left alone.
(1)http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2009/08/20/capitalism-versus-racism/
(2)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech
(3)http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/04/16/garofalo-tea-partiers-are-all-racists-who-hate-black-president
(4)Ibid
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A government cannot protect a man from hate, unfortunate events, nor even crime. The best any government can do is keep the use of force, when it has been initiated by someone, under control and organized. It can work to catch and stop the perpetrator and restore the victim his rightful property and his right to his life, liberty and to own his property. It's purpose is to control the process of retaliatory force.
ReplyDeleteA by-product of doing its job well is that it discourages other perpetrators, making the cost too high for most people.
The Left and the Democratic Party, which is dominated by it, have corrupted the legitimate purpose of a political party. It's a gang. It has arrogated unto itself to INITIATE force to cause something it can never produce - all of the desired end states of a human's existence.
The Democratic Party does not even go to the trouble of pretense anymore - except for the thinly veiled smooth-talking manner of Barack Obama and reference to the phony justification, the Greater Good. It can't be bothered to read its own proposed legislation. It could care less. All it is concerned about is controlling the mob to its end - macht uber alles.