I’m finding it increasingly difficult to contextualise any of today’s news stories, parsed as they are through the polarising lens of the legacy media; to make matters worse, it is almost impossible to have a meaningful or even a light-hearted discussion with anyone, quite literally anyone, outside of a very narrow social circle, about any of today’s current affairs, without getting embroiled in a venomous exchange.
Whether it’s the Trump-Kim talks, the gay wedding cake ‘outrage’, continued batshit crazy coverage of Tommy Robinson by The Guardian, or something utterly trivial like the media’s hyperventilating about ‘fascist’ Lauren Southern’s speaking tour to Australia, the Left’s propaganda machine is running at full speed, turning once-affable liberals into mouth-breathing ignoramuses.
Seriously, read the piece from The Independent about Trump’s meeting with Lil’ Rocket Man, the comments in particular are breathtakingly paranoid, ignorant and delusional – brought to you by a “journalist” with serious mental problems, and an editorial staff utterly devoid of honesty and the ability to discern reality.
When I realise where colleagues get their information from, so uninformed are their views on these topics, I’m forced to adopt a position of quizzical indifference to all of this given how deeply they’ve drunk from the Kool-Aid, and how baffling and offensive they find a contrarian viewpoint.
Yes, leftists, Trump is meeting with Kim because he wants to adopt a North-Korean leadership style in the US, and just as soon as the bilateral talks are concluded, he’ll commence rounding up his political enemies and shipping them off to Guantanamo Bay!
Yes, leftists, Tommy Robinson is a Nazi, dedicated to persecuting Islam by crudely exposing innocent Muslim rape gangs, because as we all know, the appropriate response to benign Muslim rape gangs is to understand their behaviour as being perfectly acceptable – that’s why authorities covered up the crimes for three decades!
The growing level of cognitive dissonance amongst those on the Left is truly scary.
I wonder though – is the spirit of confected outrage and the protest culture that’s grown up around the Left in the past few years borne out of desperation or exuberance? In other words, does the unreality that pours off the pages of the leftist media feel more like the portrayal of an ascendant sub-culture or one approaching terminal hysteria? I suspect it’s the latter; the ratcheting up of excruciatingly partisan opinion pieces, and divisive anti-anything-vaguely-traditionally-Western-hetero-or-male narratives tainting genuine news coverage is growing more viral by the week.
For me, I find it far more beneficial to take stock and look at the historical rather than the hysterical.
It’s quite surreal to look at stock footage of the anniversary of the 1968 student riots that swept several Western countries, Germany , the US (via Columbia University – destination of Frankfurt School alumni for those that recall), and particularly France, the 50th anniversary of which was celebrated exhaustively by the legacy media last month. With SJW’s and Marxist journalists with degrees in socialist theory and minors in political activism waxing lyrical about the incredible advances made by these heroes of a golden age of protests, the coverage of these events could not be more glowing in their descriptions of the glorious struggles of the poor, oppressed students against a society rampant with capitalism and traditional beliefs.
In reality, these over-sexed, quasi-Marxist, proto-Green warrior, North Vietnam-sympathiser malcontents were doing the same thing fifty years ago as we are seeing across universities and college campuses from Berkley to Evergreen College, from Sydney to Cambridge University – with media sympathisers providing an almost impossibly threadbare defence of leftist violence and social justice activism.
Flushed with revolutionary spirit and pumped full of dogmatic anti-Western literature and philosophy by their post-modernist lecturers and professors, the Class of 1968 sought to overthrow whatever it was they thought deserved overthrowing, basically because they were bored with the status quo and felt that was the fault of those in charge. They were chasing a gay-rights, women’s-rights, anti-authority, revolutionary Utopia.
Just as their bolshie, purple-haired, genderless peers are doing today.
The bullying, perm-offended social justice class of 2018 presses their diversity and divestment narrative across any number of progressive causes, in an alarming parallel of the hysteria-laced account of the heroes of 50 years ago; given the sycophantic nature of the media’s coverage of these events past and present, is it any wonder that today’s SJW’s are absolutely convinced that this sort of behaviour renders positive results and societal progress?
To learn from the past is to better understand the present; leftists are losing their minds and it’s nothing new. As they double down on their rhetoric, as the fabric of the society that they would see replaced frays and as the Left becomes more and more disconnected thanks to propagandist mainstream media, keep informed and hold their feet to the fire.
This decade of SJW-ism will pass; as both the tantrums and the victims are exhausted, and as the legacy media and Hollywood realises they can’t make money selling products to those who expect free stuff. History will record this period as the aberration that it is.