Just a few weeks after the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and we’ve had a lovely object lesson illustrating the difference in character between those on the political left and, well, everybody else. Despite standing in stark opposition to everything Ginsburg stood for, numerous politicos and pundits articulated gracious and even glowing reviews of her life and work, rather than expressing glee that this stalwart leftist had “left the building” forever.
The difference in character of which I speak was of course exemplified last week when the White House announced that President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, had tested positive for COVID-19. Almost immediately, liberals across the country expressed glee at the diagnoses, with countless individuals voicing the sentiment: “I hope they both die!”
As pro-Trump crowds gathered outside of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center where the president was being treated earlier this week, confrontations occasionally broke out between these groups and groups of detractors who taunted the Trump supporters and chanted their hope that the president would languish and die. As anyone who has frequented social media over the last week will be aware, that bunch has been even more vociferous as regards expressing the same sentiment.
There’s far more to this disagreeable dynamic than a widespread demonstration of juvenile or vindictive character, however, and it is vitally important that we recognize and acknowledge same.
For some time now – although I’m tempted to say “once upon a time” – we in America have held the sanctity of human life in extremely high regard. Some of this has been due to our foundation in the Judeo-Christian ethos, but a great deal had to do with the evolutive nature of our society. Somewhere along the line – and to our credit – we became aware of the value of each and every human life.
As the founders of our nation inculcated into our collective worldview, when you steal a person’s freedom, in many respects it is analogous to taking their life. If we’re being honest, we’ll have to admit that the pogroms of socialist and communist regimes of the 20th century (such as the Holocaust) went a long way toward cementing our belief that every life has value, from the unborn to the near-dead.
Consequently, we went from a nation in which viewing the public execution of criminals was a form of community recreation, to one in which many people of conscience don’t believe that any life should be taken, even those of unrepentant convicted murderers.
As one might expect – and as we are seeing play out before our eyes – this has changed in an insidious and sinister fashion with the rise of socialism and its sibling, liberalism. While many leftists oppose the death penalty as a point of their anti law-and-order stance, they obviously take no issue with the half-million to million-plus abortions that are performed in the U.S. annually, nor with euthanasia (in the form of assisted suicide), nor with the thousands who die violently each year in deeply dysfunctional, Democrat-controlled enclaves.
Even socialized medicine – for which leftists advocate and toward which we gravitated significantly with the passage of Obamacare – invariably imposes expedient and even draconian measures that devalue the life of the individual. Finally, despite the left’s ceaseless admonitions that their opponents on the right are the intolerant, hateful and potentially violent ones, we can now see that they have no compunction as regards committing acts of violence in order to attain what they desire. The contrived violent demonstrations that continue to plague our cities further illustrate the left’s penchant for murder and mayhem.
For those of us who’ve seen this coming for a long time and who are well-versed in the way socialists and communists operate, this is old hat. In real numbers, socialists and communists maimed, murdered and enslaved close to a half billion people during the 20th century, with quite a few in the latter group still suffering enslavement.
Many will recall the controversy surrounding former President Obama’s relationship with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. His revolutionary group, the Weather Underground, was once recorded discussing the prospect of having to kill off around 25 million nonconformists in order to secure communist ascendancy in America.
That the political left embraces a culture of death is, at this point, a self-evident proposition. This proclivity for rejoicing at an opponent’s death or the prospect thereof simply reflects leftists (as individuals) having abandoned notions relating to the sanctity of life, and thoroughly embraced that culture of death.
In light of this, continuing to deny the left’s penchant for killing whilst shrinking at their accusatory invective – which is calculated to engender passivity on our part – could prove to be a demonstrably fatal mistake.
