As WND’s Drew Zahn reported Monday, an obscure writer named David Masciotra – previously known for his hagiographic paeans to the likes of Jesse Jackson and Noam Chomsky, as well as occasional swipes at Israel and self-congratulatory promotion of his book on the band Metallica – published, in Salon, a fist-shaking temper tantrum condemning soldiers and law enforcement. “You don’t protect my freedom,” Masciotra sniffs. “Forced troop worship and compulsory patriotism must end.” Zahn distills Masciotra’s argument thusly: “It’s been 70 years since American soldiers fought a war about freedom. … ‘Put a man in uniform, preferably a white man, give him a gun, and Americans will worship him. … It is a particularly childish trait, of a childlike culture, that insists on [lauding] all active military members and police officers. …'”
On their face, Masciotra’s views aren’t remarkable. He is representative of most Democrats in his beliefs: He thinks Israel is oppressing the terrorists who lob rockets into Israeli cities and who murder Israeli children in cold blood. He believes Big Evil Corporate Interests are responsible for the war in Iraq; he sees the United States military, police officers and “white men” in general as intergalactic oppressors. He resents that President Obama was criticized for his lack of class (when Obama, showing the lack of regard he typically displays for those subordinate to him, lazily saluted his Marine guard while holding a cup of coffee in that hand).
Masciotra sees any notion that the United States is not, first and foremost, the enemy of all that is good and pure in the world as nationalism, as authoritarianism, as sexism. His heroes are the operatives of government bureaucracy: the social workers implementing government oversight of your parenting, the teachers inflicting Common Core on your children, the union thugs collecting inflated salaries and benefits. David Masciotra is, quite honestly, a typical liberal hipster.
But what Masciotra did not consider was how such opinions, expressed in the modern era, can so instantly and totally make a man famous. He isn’t alone in this failure. No doubt the “Ebola Nurse,” Kaci Hickox, had no idea she would achieve instant infamy, becoming a trending hashtag on Twitter. All Hickox had to do to was defy a three-week quarantine in the name of her “rights” (and any danger she might be posing to the public be damned). She almost immediately became a symbol for liberals’ inconsistent views on civil rights and individual liberties: Internet denizens argued over whether her refusal to stay home was what it was, dangerously selfish and delusional, or what it wasn’t, some brave statement about refusing to spread “fear.” After all, what reason did Americans have to fear an illness that has infected an unprecedented number of doctors and nurses, an illness spread in ways the CDC first denied were possible, an illness whose spread our government tried to persuade U.S. media outlets not to report?
Even celebrities have struggled with the immediacy, the rapidity, with which their public image can be obliterated through ill-chosen online comments. Bill Cosby’s public relations team recently (and disastrously) encouraged Internet users to “meme” the aging comedian. (For you Luddites, a meme, in this context, refers to a humorous caption attached to a photograph that becomes a running gag for a time.) Given the allegations of sexual assault that have been made against Cosby, the invitation was too much for gleeful Web trolls to resist. The flood of images skewering Cosby (some of them painfully macabre) easily obliterated any harmless images of Bill Cosby hawking pudding or wishing the reader a “happy Monday.”
It was on Twitter that Lena Dunham (a name few people knew before the recent controversy) claimed the outcry over her biography (in which she admitted to molesting her younger sister) was all a “right wing” conspiracy. Dunham’s self-serving comments betrayed such an inflated sense of entitlement, such a profound lack of introspection, that they fanned the flames of Dunham’s accelerating infamy. Almost overnight, people who had never heard her name (nor heard of her television show) were aware of her – and only too informed on her darkest of casual admissions.
In that, Dunham’s experiences (while much nastier) mirror those of actor Shia LaBeouf. LaBeouf is even now working the mea culpa circuit, apologizing, rationalizing and even taking responsibility for various and sundry bizarre incidents. Most of these stem from his self-immolation on Twitter, where he famously copied and pasted others’ apologies for his plagiarism of another artist’s work. Staggering under the tidal wave of online and real-world criticism that followed, LaBeouf declared he was “not famous anymore.” He is slowly rehabilitating his image (with the help of new films that showcase his considerable acting talent), but the heat and light of these Internet escapades certainly did him no favors.
Liberals like David Masciotra are herd animals. Their beliefs are remarkably homogenous. Examine any issue, analyze any set of facts, and identify those choices, positions and opinions that are most harmful, most destructive and most totalitarian in nature. These will be the liberals’ talking points, the planks in their legislative platform. Davod Masciotra and all Democrats like him hate the United States military for specific reasons. They hate freedom. They hate liberty. But most of all, they hate American power, which they consider to be unfair, unjust, offensive and embarrassing. This is why liberals hate patriotism. They consider any display of regard for this nation’s Constitution and its principles as “forced” and as “fascism.” Liberals hate America. Everything they say and do follows naturally from this position.
In this, David Masciotra is no different than his fellow Democratic cowards. Displaying what one user called the “courage of his convictions,” Masciotra deleted his Twitter account, not once, but twice, returning only to taunt those who were offended by his indecency. Democratic cowards, like all of us, have the right to express their opinions. Like all of us, they may become abruptly famous when they do it on social media. Like so many who have achieved this notoriety, they may subsequently burst into pillars of fire. When they do, it’s wise for all of us to remember that the flames were self-inflicted.
Media wishing to interview Phil Elmore, please contact [email protected].
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