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The Left Is United by Who They Despise, Not What They Support


POSTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | APRIL 29, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/29/the-left-is-united-by-who-they-despise-not-what-they-support/

The theories of a French philosopher might hold the key to understanding the left’s organizational success – and the means to defeat the woke regime.

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While the right continues to undergo a process of factional introspection, it can be easy to forget that our opponents in the culture war aren’t a monolith either. And while it seems that the Cathedral pushes our society to the left via a unified front, the progressive coalition’s unity is not just sustainable, it’s artificial.

The left’s ability to patch together a truly bizarre coalition is, however, undeniably impressive. It’d appear they’ve learned how to apply the Saul Alinsky-esque tactics of community organizing across, rather than just within, communities. How else can one explain the puzzling composition of the coalition? Consider just how divergent the interests and identities of so many of the Democratic Party’s supporters truly are. 

What, for example, do the drug-addled Antifa of Seattle, the residents of CHOP, have in common with old money East coast liberals with summer homes in Nantucket? What do the technocratic middle managers in the hills of Palo Alto share with illegal immigrants on the other side of Silicon Valley? What does your average attendee of the Women’s March share with an H1B recipient from China or India, and what do either have in common with a hardcore Black Lives Matter activist? Perhaps more glaring than the rest, what is it exactly that a transgender activist in San Francisco and a traditional Muslim can bond over? 

Is the progressive mythos of “global citizenry” really that binding? The reality that this coalition is maintained while leftwing messaging amplifies, not downplays, the role of identity makes it all the more intriguing. Unifying this bloc is no small feat.  

Progressivism’s Enemies Provide Scapegoats

In trying to discern how the left has effectively bound together a coalition of disparate interests, it is vastly more useful to examine what they oppose rather than the policies they support. It’s much easier too. 

One would think that natural political discord would occur between those who want to “eat the rich” and the rich themselves, or between those who abide by a patriarchal sexual ethic and a movement that endured a collective aneurysm when Florida told them teachers couldn’t talk about sexuality with elementary schoolers. The natural splintering of this leftwing coalition is delayed through what the French philosopher Renee Girard referred to as the scapegoat mechanism.

Through the scapegoat mechanism, internal social conflict between groups or individuals can be deferred by identifying a villain, the scapegoat. The scapegoat is held responsible by the conflicting parties, who mutually, although not always consciously, cast the blame on those who simultaneously fulfill the role of the victim and the villain.

This scapegoat then cannot be regarded as a guiltless Christ figure who dies with the sins of its sacrificers, but is identified as the very source of the sin — the inciter of conflict. Accordingly, overcoming this scapegoat is naturally regarded as a necessary prerequisite to the avoidance of conflict. 

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains: “the victim must be thought of as a monstrous creature that transgressed some prohibition and deserved to be punished. In such a manner, the community deceives itself into believing that the victim is the culprit of the communal crisis, and that the elimination of the victim will eventually restore peace.”

Identifying our woke regime’s scapegoats isn’t difficult. Simply observe the cultural messaging from any of the institutions that are owned and operated by progressives. The regime media and their allies throughout much of the government, academia, and the non-profit complex offer frequent reminders of who you are supposed to disdain.

Masculine men are turned into scapegoats when they are dubbed toxic, sexist enforcers of patriarchy. Christians similarly face accusations of oppressing women and those who are LGBT. White people are also approved targets, thought to be inherently racist and privileged, simultaneously the beneficiaries and the managers of an intangible but ever-present system of oppression. Even stable nuclear families are to be viewed with skepticism, either for perpetuating gender roles or straining the environment by daring to have kids.

The terms for the regime’s scapegoats are many. Hostility for the “deplorables,” the sexists and the racists, the rednecks and the retrogrades, the bigots, the “karens” and all different stripes of -phobes, is what holds together such a fragile coalition. Party operatives blame their internal conflicts on those who are regarded as the oppressors and pit Americans against one another. The terms differ but serve the same purpose: to designate a scapegoat as a regime-approved target.

Those who fall into one of the several oppressor identity categories but align with the left are offered the opportunity to prove themselves – but never absolve themselves – as dutiful allies through ritualistic self-degradation. If they’re servile enough, they might even get promoted to the rank of “co-conspirator,” delaying their inevitable designation as scapegoats until their expediency runs dry. 

The grand irony is of course that none of these collectives wield significant power and are instead openly maligned by the ruling class. Nevertheless, we are constantly told that America and her institutions are engaging in organized oppression on a mass scale.

In the left’s worldview, our institutions enforce the patriarchy and the gender binary, all while they are governed by white supremacy. It’s a self defeating argument when one realizes that it is these very power structures that pay diversity consultants their exorbitant fees, fund pride parades, push transgenderism, and adopt discriminatory affirmative action policies. It is, of course, vital to note that the right’s gripe should be with these hostile institutions, not the everyday Americans who are influenced by them, to the detriment of all.

Bloc-Busting

The simplest way to expose the incongruity of the leftwing coalition is to merely ask questions that highlight the absurdity of the progressive bloc. Raise ethical inquiries about abortion or transgenderism among Democrat-aligned Muslims, or ask Austin tech workers why they support H1B visa programs that threaten their job security. Ask progressive white women if they truly believe that they and their “white tears” will be able to maintain their rapidly deteriorating status among the oppressed and the immunity that comes with it.

Question radical feminists who rage against toxic masculinity, asking why they support mass immigration from highly patriarchal Islamic countries. Or ask a Seattle communist what the appropriate tax rate is for the millionaire who funded the neoliberal candidate he ended up voting for.

This must be done without trafficking in the same dangerous divisiveness that the left used in their ascent to power, without engaging in scapegoating ourselves. The goal is not to weaponize the coalition’s parts against itself because the coalition isn’t the problem — it is the institutions that sought to bind their base together by haphazardly casting blame on entire collectives. 

Done correctly, this approach will offer much needed nuance and obstruct the woke regime’s attempt at fostering conflict. It will also expose how Democrat apparatchiks and their co-conspirators across sectors have taken advantage of their constituency while they constructed it, weaponizing identities in cynical power games.

It’s a necessary step in ensuring that whatever unity our country attains is based on healthy, sustainable foundations — not institutionally manufactured disdain for the regime’s scapegoats.

Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.

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No, Those Who Pushed Lockdowns Can’t Hide from the Consequences Now


Reported BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 11, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/11/the-people-who-brutalized-children-to-grab-emergency-powers-are-not-experts-theyre-evil/

Boy wearing mask while playing baseball

Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the world’s ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a “meritocracy” strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and other vulnerable people.

This ruling class used all their massive financial, communications, and government powers to ensure these tragic outcomes, even though anyone who was an actual expert—or, like me, just someone who reads and has common sense—predicted this false “cure” would hurt worse than the disease.

Now that people are beginning to more deeply feel the foreseeable evil consequences of ruling class responses to a novel virus, that ruling class is pulling what propaganda experts call a “limited hangout.” That’s admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.

So we have outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, which have throughout the Covid era worked as government butt-coverers, now publishing articles admitting that lockdowns and continued rolling blackouts of school instruction is irrevocably damaging Americans, especially children and even more especially the poorest. The kids, as I pointed out in April 2020 and numerous times thereafter, will never as a generation recover.

Now that the damage is done, major corporate media organizations have decided to pivot to acknowledge just enough of the truth to cover their complicity. The Atlantic, for example, last week published an article titled “America’s Covid Rules Are A Dumpster Fire” (It took you two years to figure out what was apparent within the first month?).

CNN’s Brian Stelter recently did a segment acknowledging the foreseeable “mental health crisis” from lockdowns that is causing suicides, ruining marriages, putting formerly perfectly normal kids into rocking fetal positions, and erasing the credibility of formerly mostly ignored “public health experts” at institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Stelter made multiple statements that have gotten numerous conservatives punished by and erased from social media, such as that “Covid zero is…an impossibility” and “the CDC has turned into a punchline.”

Where was Stelter a year and a half ago, when data reflecting the exact same outcomes were also plentiful? Heck, Stelter was still legitimizing Covid panic one month ago, when CNN and other news organizations reinstituted lockdown measures amid omicron panic they helped inflame. Six months ago, Stelter was indicating Fox News had “blood on its hands” for reporting less hysterically than all the other major media organizations about Covid.

Clearly, Democrats are becoming ensnared by their own trap, and they’re trying to get out with this public reversal of their messaging. The limited hangout is afoot.

Brave NYT truth-teller David Leonhardt also recently published an article and an accompanying tweetstorm on the topic.

“The number of E.R. visits for suspected suicide attempts by 12- to 17-year-old girls rose by 51 percent from early 2019 to early 2021, according to the CDC,” he tweeted.

“Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the virus’s spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit,” he noted in the article.

No sh-t, Sherlock. So why did The New York Times run hit pieces on Trump medical advisor Scott Atlas for being one of the few scientists courageous enough to point this long-ago known data out more than a year ago, when the damage could have been mitigated? Why did Stanford University colleagues and formerly respected medical journals, boosted by corporate media attack campaigns, try to discredit Atlas and colleagues such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for saying things The New York Times, Atlantic, and CNN are admitting now?

Why did the CDC punish world-renowned vaccine scientist Dr. Martin Kulldorff for publicly disagreeing with them on vaccine safety? Why does Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook shadowban nearly every Federalist article on anything touching Covid-19, and why did they spend two years on massive information suppression campaigns against scientists, politicians, podcasters, and just ordinary citizens who had some questions, contrary data, and objections to elites’ demanded Covid response?

Because it was politically expedient to sacrifice science, Americans’ civil rights, human lives, and the world’s future then, and it is not politically expedient to face the consequences for that choice now. And they think nobody can or will hold them accountable for their deadly and despicable lies.

All the misery these too-late admittals underscore appears to be true, but it also could have been prevented. CNN and The New York Times not only did nothing to help prevent this kind of irreversible damage, they willingly, even gleefully, participated in this completely unwarranted mass abuse of Americans. The left lied, children committed suicide.

The corporate left’s morally abominable Covid propaganda operation demands justice. The people who could and should have known, and in fact likely did know, that lockdowns would harm millions of innocents while not protecting the vulnerable can never be trusted again.

Did any of these people tell the truth back when it could have saved the generation that comprises the world’s future? Nope. They not only watched it happen, they cheered it on and viciously ostracized all who told the truth.

All these people have erased all their moral authority and their claims to expertise. The same goes for all the education “experts” and “leaders” who didn’t spend the last two years screaming at the top of their lungs that school shutdowns are a stupid, scientifically unwarranted, and evil idea. Yes, that’s basically all of them.

Experts who knowingly allow mass child abuse because they don’t want to harm their careers are not experts, they are cowards. They deserve not one ounce of public trust or even to retain their jobs. They certainly should have no public funds nor authority over any portion of the upbringing of American children.

Not one parent or elected official should give these education and public health “experts” the time of day. In a time of dire need, these keepers of the nation’s children and controllers of billions in public funds piled American children on a funeral pyre, lit it on fire, and cheered as it burned. Requiring that they find a more honest line of work would be an act of mercy.

These “experts” and “leaders” have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent at discharging their crucial public trust and duties. They should be relieved of those duties as soon as possible. If state lawmakers will not do it, citizens must. If they do not, they are also complicit cowards and also deserve to be sanctioned and socially shamed for their willingness to sacrifice the most vulnerable for their personal comfort.

For a long time now, American parents have registered deep dissatisfaction with the public schools they feel forced to stick their kids in. Even before lockdowns, unscientific and education-damaging forced masking in schools, ridiculous repeated quarantines of healthy kids, and rolling “brownouts” of in-person schooling, polling shows most American parents wish they didn’t feel like the public schools in their ZIP code were their only option.

After all this incompetence-imposed life chaos, the current surge of parent outrage at local school board meetings is only the tip of the spear. As more evidence emerges of the unnecessary harms we knew beforehand would result from lockdowns, public anger will only grow. It won’t be limited to schools, either.

If more exciting school board meetings, primaries for craven politicians, and parents yanking funding from schools that don’t serve them are what it takes to run every one of these moral cretins out of every position of power they’ve abused throughout their careers, then go, Americans, go. Do it for the kids. Our future will remember who stood up for the truth, lives, and liberties, and who made billions of precious humans needlessly suffer.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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5 Big Things We Learned About Our Elites In 2020


Reported by John Daniel Davidson DECEMBER 28, 2020

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/28/5-big-things-we-learned-about-our-elites-in-2020/
5 Big Things We Learned About Our Elites In 2020

For as difficult as the past year has been, from politics to the pandemic, it has at least helped to illuminate and clarify certain things about the state of our country.

Above all, 2020 has illuminated and clarified the relationship between America’s elites—in government, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, corporate America and the corporate press—and everyone else. In short, our elites believe, contra Thomas Jefferson, that most people were born with saddles on their backs while a favored few were born booted and spurred to ride them, legitimately.

The rigors and suffering of the coronavirus pandemic demonstrated the perseverance, resilience, and generosity of the American people, but also exposed—sometimes in mind-boggling detail—the greed, hypocrisy, and indifference of our elites.

We like to think we live in a country where everyone, rich and poor alike, is equal before the law. But we know now, thanks to the exigencies and emergencies of 2020, that isn’t true—or at least it’s only true sometimes, when the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to weigh in and enforce equal treatment.

But left unchecked, as many of our leaders were over the past year, we all know what they will do. In no particular order, then, here are the five big things we learned about America and its elites in 2020.

1. Democrats Don’t Care About Science—Or Religious Liberty

This year we learned Democrats aren’t the “party of science,” and in fact don’t care about science at all—especially if it gets in the way of their policy agenda or the exercise of emergency powers.

How else do you explain the actions of Democratic governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo and California’s Gavin Newsom? They both tried to ban indoor religious gatherings based the unscientific belief that people are more likely to contract COVID-19 in a church than in a liquor store or a Lowe’s. In both cases, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such restrictions were unconstitutional because they singled out houses of worship for unequal treatment.

Lost in the media coverage of these and similar cases was the disturbing fact that these governors weren’t basing their pandemic-related restrictions on science or data. When a Los Angeles judge earlier this month struck down an outdoor dining ban issued by county health officials, he noted that the county hadn’t presented any scientific evidence justifying the ban or even done a basic cost-benefit analysis on the effects of shutting down more than 30,000 restaurants.

“It’s not rational to make a decision without doing everything you’re supposed to do, and you haven’t,” the judge said. “You’re imposing restrictions but there’s no reason to believe it will help with ICU capacity.” In all these cases, science had nothing to do with the attempted shutdown. Power and prejudice did.

2. Lockdowns For Thee But Not For Me

Speaking of Newsom, he became the poster boy for elite hypocrisy when he was photographed at a fancy Napa Valley restaurant with a bunch of wealthy and powerful friends right after imposing harsh pandemic-related lockdowns on much of the state.

He wasn’t alone. All over the country, elected officials—almost all of them Democrats—were spotted flouting their own pandemic rules and restrictions. My colleague Tristan Justice catalogued some of the most high-profile instances.

There was Austin Mayor Steve Adler telling residents to stay home—and threatening them with more restrictive measures if they didn’t comply—while he was vacationing in a Mexican resort town.

There was Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, who boarded a flight for Houston to visit his daughter for Thanksgiving right after telling residents to “avoid travel if you can.”

There was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, mask-less, visiting a shut-down hair salon in San Francisco, and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot doing the same thing—then getting caught mask-less in the streets with a bullhorn at a rally celebrating Joe Biden’s victory. Her excuse (they all have excuses) was that the “crowd was gathered whether I was there or not.”

On and on, all over the country. The mayors of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, D.C., all of them Democrats, all of them caught flouting their own lockdown orders.

We can conclude two things from this. The first is that our ruling elites, despite their grave intonations and warnings, don’t really believe the coronavirus is very dangerous or that their lockdown orders are necessary—at least not for them. The second is that they hate you and think you’re stupid.

3. Lockdown Elites Don’t Care If Small Businesses Die

The elites’ hypocrisy went beyond their personal behavior. It also affected the pandemic policies they supported and imposed. Especially in blue states and cities, elected officials opted for pandemic restrictions that disproportionately harmed small businesses and working families, while giving generous carve-outs and exemptions to special interests.

Nothing illustrated this better than a viral video by a distraught restaurant owner in Los Angeles, who was justifiably upset over an outdoor dining ban that shuttered all bars and restaurants but exempted the film and television industry. Angela Marsden, owner of the Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill in Los Angeles, had spent tens of thousands of dollars to create an outdoor dining space that complied with Centers for Disease Control and county health guidelines in an attempt to save her business, only to have the rules changed on her without warning.

The real slap in the face, though, was an outdoor dining area for a television production set up not 50 feet from her restaurant. The two dining spaces were nearly identical. The only difference is that she, a small business owner, wasn’t powerful or important enough to get an exemption.

4. Silicon Valley Wants You to Shut Up

Another disturbing revelation in 2020 was that Big Tech doesn’t care about free speech or the free exchange of ideas, and will, given the right circumstances, censor what you can read and share on their platforms according to criteria they invent out of thin air.

We saw this over and over again, not only with COVID-19 commentary and reporting but with coverage of the presidential election and the many instances of fraud and illegal electioneering that were documented in the days and weeks after the vote. Twitter and Facebook in particular were aggressive in their censorship of any opinions or information that challenged their chosen narratives about the pandemic and the election.

Again, science and data and verifiable facts didn’t factor into these decisions. Experts like former White House advisor Scott Atlas were censored by Twitter for sharing studies that showed the ineffectiveness of masks. Amazon did the same thing to former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson’s booklet on the ineffectiveness of masks.

On election night, Twitter repeatedly censored President Trump but not former Vice President Joe Biden. Facebook “fact-checkers,” some of them funded by China and Russia, repeatedly flagged content critical of Democrats.

Most infamously, Twitter and Facebook conspired with corporate media before the election to impose a blackout on coverage of the Hunter Biden scandal, including an unprecedented move by Twitter to suspend The New York Post’s account for breaking the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails. This was done rather straightforwardly to shield voters from the Biden family’s corruption. After the election, the FBI confirmed that it is in fact investigating Hunter Biden.

5. Elites Are Okay With Chaos and Violence From the Left

Another glaring instance of elite hypocrisy in 2020 was the reaction to riots and looting in American cities throughout the spring and summer. Because Democrats and corporate media agreed with the ideology and politics driving this violence, and approved of groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM) that were fomenting it, they excused it. Over and over, reporters and commentators characterized violent riots and urban unrest as “mostly peaceful protests,” sometimes even while showing images of burning buildings and mayhem in the streets.

By contrast, peaceful and orderly protests of pandemic lockdown orders in the spring were reported as dangerous and threatening, not because they were actually dangerous or threatening but because the protesters were mostly conservatives and Republicans who thought governors and mayors were overstepping their authority. At the same time, these same outlets downplayed or simply refused to report on the many instances of violence, including shootings, perpetrated by Antifa rioters and BLM demonstrators across the country.

When armed groups began showing up at these BLM “protests” to protect property and businesses from being looted and burned down, major outlets like The New York Times pretended the gunplay and violence started with the right, not the left. Biden’s deputy campaign manager even went on air and accused Trump of “inciting violence,” as if the mere fact of Trump presidency justified widespread violence and rioting.

We learned from all this that the left is prepared to burn down cities to seize power, and will make excuses for rioters and looters as long as it serves their political and ideological agenda.

That’s of a piece with everything else we’ve learned about our elites in 2020. They don’t really care about the things they claim to care about. They don’t care about science or data or even keeping us safe during a pandemic. They don’t care about small businesses or working families or getting kids back to school. They don’t care about free speech or the free exercise of religion or anything else that hinders their power—and they certainly don’t care about you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

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Without President Trump, On Whom Will The Left Blame Their Failures?


Written by Nathanael Blake NOVEMBER 20, 2020

Without President Trump, On Whom Will The Left Blame Their Failures?

There is honor among thieves. There has to be, if they are to be successful. Even lawbreakers require some sort of law, both in reality, where organized crime requires organization, and in fiction, where it is a standard trope that the Guild of Assassins (or whatever) has rules. The wicked still need some virtue to be effective, although it must be severed from the whole of virtue.

This explains a lot about politics. The rules and organization necessary for societal or group survival and success are not the same as justice; indeed, they may be nothing more than a predatory morality that enables cooperation in oppression.

Governments often begin as the biggest band of brigands around, and many never rise much beyond that. As Augustine put it in “The City of God,” “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?” He illustrated this point with the tale of a captured pirate who told Alexander the Great that the difference between piracy and Alexander’s empire was only of scale.

Adherence to the norms and manners of the ruling class does not assure personal virtue or political justice. This is obvious to those on the outside, but members (and aspiring members and hangers-on) of the ruling class have an interest in not seeing it. This willful blindness also explains a lot about the recent election.

The Biden campaign told us that the election was about the soul of the nation. A multitude of Democrats, media figures, and Never-Trump leftovers told us that it was about restoring decency to the White House. Even now, in apparent victory, they remain appalled that anyone voted for President Trump, let alone more than 70 million Americans—don’t we know how indecent he is? But it is not that we think Trump is decent, it is that we doubt that his opponents are.

We suspect that by decency they mean nothing more than the professional civility of the educated class, and we know that true decency is more than civility. It is certainly more than not being Donald Trump.

This is not to say that civility does not matter. Conservatives know that manners matter. Manners can force us to be restrained, to at least make a show of treating political opponents with respect, and by inculcating these habits, they can make us better.

But manners can also be weaponized. They can become tools of exclusion that keep those with different beliefs and backgrounds out. They can conceal great wickedness behind a pleasing mask.

There is a persistent temptation to focus on the superficial form of decency (as manifest in politeness) over the substance of virtue. So we are treated to lectures on decency from men who have cheated on a succession of wives or traded in the wife of their youth for a young research assistant—and from a presumptive vice president who slept her way into politics.

Nor is such wickedness confined to personal sins; it extends throughout political positions. Consider the Democratic Party’s fanatical support for abortion. There is nothing decent about tearing a baby limb from limb and displaying her still-beating heart on a tray—if decency encompasses support for unrestricted, taxpayer-funded late-term abortion, then to hell with decency and the decent.

Likewise, the bipartisan establishment embrace of China is indecent, unless decency merely means civility in the service of ruling-class interests. There is nothing decent about closer bonds with the Chinese Communist Party and the genocidal totalitarian slave state that it runs. All the civility and cheap consumer goods in the world cannot wash away that guilt.

The pretense of decency also asks us to ignore that our ruling class is neither civil nor trustworthy. The same people who spent years suggesting that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election are now outraged that he has not conceded this one. And remember when Senate Democrats accused Brett Kavanaugh of being a high-school gang-rape mastermind?

Remember when the media tried to destroy a high school student for smiling awkwardly while wearing a Trump hat? Remember when they told you the most expensive riots in American history were mostly peaceful? Remember all the times they’ve called you and your friends and family ignorant, racist bigots—as epitomized by Hillary Clinton’s consigning you to an irredeemable basket of deplorables?

The response to this litany of leftist indecency is predictable—what about this and that and the other thing Trump did and said? Well, what about them? People who have concluded that our leaders are corrupt and indecent will not support them just because Trump is also indecent.

Furthermore, Trump will soon be out of office, while our elites will remain in their positions in media, academia, entertainment, business and government. Without President Trump, what excuse will they then have for their failures of virtue and justice?

Trump leaving office will not make America more decent if it just returns power to those whose garb of civility covers corrupt hearts. What is needed is not further recriminations over Trump, but a commitment to seek justice and the common good. This renewal must be led by those who have the power to shape institutions and culture.

I don’t say this to deny the need for all of us to repent of our sins. I merely state the obvious, which is that those with the power to shape the culture bear the most responsibility for it. If we are as indecent a nation as they say, then perhaps the likes of New York Times writers, Ivy League professors and pop stars should spend less time lecturing Trump voters and more time in sackcloth and ashes.

Nathanael Blake is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist. He has a PhD in political theory. He lives in Missouri.
Photo Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian

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