Thursday, December 14, 2017
How the Left Became So Intolerant
When most people think of intolerance, they imagine a racist taunting a black person. Or they think of the white supremacist who killed a demonstrator in Charlottesville, Virginia.
It seldom occurs to them that intolerance comes in all political shapes and sizes.
A protester storming a stage and refusing to let someone speak is intolerant. So, too, are campus speech codes that restrict freedom of expression. A city official threatening to fine a pastor for declining to marry a gay couple is every bit as intolerant as a right-winger wanting to punish gays with sodomy laws.
There is a word that describes this mentality. It is “illiberal.” For centuries, we have associated the word “liberal” with open-mindedness. Liberals were people who were supposed to be tolerant and fair and who wanted to give all sides a hearing. They cared about everyone, not just their own kind.
By contrast, illiberal people were hardheaded in their opinions and judgmental about others’ behaviors, hoping to control what other people thought and said and to cut off debate. In extreme cases, they would even use violence to maintain political power and exclude certain kinds of people from having a say in their government.
Sadly, the kind of liberalism we used to know is fast disappearing from America. While the intolerance of the far right is well known, its manifestations on the far left are less known and often not fully acknowledged.
All too often, people who call themselves progressive liberals are at the forefront of movements to shut down debates on college campuses and to restrict freedom of speech. They are eager to cut corners, bend the Constitution, make up laws through questionable court rulings, and generally abuse the rules and the Constitution in order to get their way.
They establish “zero tolerance” regimes in schools where young boys are suspended for nibbling breakfast pastries into the shape of a gun. They are supposedly great haters of bigotry but sometimes speak of Christians in the most bigoted manner imaginable, as if...
‘How Many More People Have to Die’ Before Congress Ends ‘Visa Lottery?’
Malkin attacked the GOP-led Congress for not having already ended the visa lottery, where 50,000 visas are randomly given out to foreign nationals from a multitude of countries. Those countries include ones with known terrorist problems, such as Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Yemen, and Uzbekistan.
Partial transcript as follows:
There are millions of people around the world who are clamoring to get in here the right way and the fact that we still do it randomly tells you how much insanity — politically incorrect sanity — has set in. I mean, it was just seven weeks ago with the truck jihadist, who also got in here through the Diversity Visa Lottery and also benefitted from the chain migration insanity that we had people saying ‘Oh yeah, we’ve got to get rid of it! We’ve got to get rid of it!’And I’m so exasperated my friends because I’ve been calling for the end of this program for the last 15 years.
We should value citizenship and entry into this country much more than we have been and both parties have shrugged their shoulders. There have been legislative bills, stand-alone bills, to eliminate the Diversity Visa program for the last 15 years. They’ve gathered dust. The SAFE Act, before the House Judiciary Committee in 2011, just sat there doing nothing. We’ve got the RAISE Act, which is co-sponsored by Tom Cotton and David Perdue, which would have eliminated the...
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