Why I Left the Blue Team
Why I Left the Blue Team
First a couple of quick notes:
Due to a scheduling issue, this week's Q&A will be moved from Friday (7/3) to either Saturday (7/4) or Sunday (7/5). Thanks for understanding.
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Now, onto the column:
Even when I agree with Democrats on any particular issue, I don’t want to be on their team anymore.
I came to that conclusion years ago. Even though I’m the product of a blue collar Democrat family, and was a liberal Democrat myself in my younger days, the further left the party went, the more alienated I became.
And during this presidential campaign, I’m reminded once again of why I no longer wear the blue uniform.
What bothers me most, I guess, is their bleak vision of America, which they see as a deeply flawed, racist country. No, they don’t say that in a big country like ours there are bound to be some racists. I would have been on board with that. They say racism is in the country’s DNA.
They talk about “systemic racism” -- in police departments, in corporate America, in sports, literally in every single American institution. And we’re all expected to believe that this systemic racism mantra is undeniably true because the progressives say it’s undeniably true.
Bernie Sanders – remember him? -- liked to tell voters that, "We have a racist society from top to bottom." I don’t recall Joe Biden or any of the other Democrats saying, “Sorry Bernie but I don’t agree with that.”
We can all acknowledge America’s ugly racial history and deplore racism to the extent it still exists in our country. But I’m not asking anybody for forgiveness because I was born white. Nor do I plan to wash the feet of black people as a way of repenting for my supposed white sins – as some progressives are actually doing.
And if you think I’m overstating the lengths to which some on the left will go to atone for their racial sins, consider this from a piece in National Review Online: “A YouTube prankster named ‘Smooth Sanchez’ who walks the streets of New York demanding that white people kneel before him and declare their privilege receives surprising compliance, even as he signals his charlatanry by referring to George Floyd as ‘George Foreman.’”
And then there’s the sanctimony emanating from the progressive left. That’s another reason I left the blue team. I found their self-righteousness suffocating.
They’re the good ones, the ones who care about everybody. Only they know what’s right and what’s wrong. Conservatives, in their cartoonish worldview, hate everybody who isn’t a white male.
I’ve also had enough of those older, well-off, supposedly middle of the road, open-minded liberals who support the progressive mob -- a mob that in reality is destroying their so-called liberal values.
If you’re a white male and ever in your whole life wore a Mexican sombrero to a costume party, there’s a good chance you’ll lose your job.
Here’s how Matt Taibbi put it in Rolling Stone, not exactly a right-wing magazine:
“It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.”
Taibbi says the “shaming, threats and intimidation” are “replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony.”
Want proof of how the blue team shames and intimidates? The editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit, was forced to resign because at a Halloween party 16 years ago he and his wife wore t-shirts and bling that made them look like Puerto Ricans.
If you’re a basketball announcer and you tweet, “All Lives Matter” you will get fired. The one in Sacramento did.
If you’re the opinion page editor of the New York Times you will lose your job for publishing a conservative opinion young progressives at the paper don’t like.
It isn’t conservatives who are putting a torch to the spirit of free speech. This is the blue team’s dirty work.
And then, of course, there’s the routine bashing of straight white men who voted for Donald Trump.
Michael Moore, a lefty of some cultural prominence, didn’t mince words on the Rolling Stone podcast “Useful Idiot” when said that white men "are not good people" and you should "be afraid" of them.
"Two-thirds of all white guys voted for Trump,” Moore said. “That means anytime you see three white guys walking at you, down the street toward you, two of them voted for Trump. You need to move over to the other sidewalk because these are not good people that are walking toward you. You should be afraid of them."
As far as the sanctimonious left is concerned if you voted for Donald Trump you're either an out-and-out racist, or at absolute least, you're an enabler who supports white supremacy. One way or another, if you voted for Donald Trump you're deplorable.
And which party surrendered to the mob in the wake of the horrible murder of George Floyd? It was Democrats in city after city that let the mob burn and loot while ordering the police to stand by and do nothing.
Republicans and other conservatives aren’t saints; so let’s get that on the record. But they’re not the ones instituting de facto speech codes. It’s the progressive left these days that are the intolerant ones, the ones that want you humiliated and fired if you have an unacceptable opinion or tell the wrong kind of joke.
If the editor-in-chief of a hotsy-totsy magazine like Bon Appétit tcan lose his job for wearing an "unacceptable" t-shirt at a Halloween party, no one is safe. No one!
That’s why, even when I agree with Democrats on any particular issue, I don’t want to be on their team anymore.