By Hank Beckman -
Control.
Merriam—Webster lists it as a noun that is “an act or instance of controlling…power or authority to guide or manage.”
That apparently unquenchable thirst to be obeyed and tell everyone how to run their lives is really how one should understand the Democrats' freak show recently in the House Judiciary Committee hearings.
Asking Attorney General Bill Barr questions, then constantly interrupting him with the “I’m reclaiming my time,” nonsense, wild-eyed warnings by one congresswoman that she was losing her temper and brow-beating him as if he were not a witness to a formal congressional hearing but an actual suspect in a police station being interrogated pretty much sums up the Democrat's approach.
Gerald Nadler even went so far as to try to deny Barr a five-minute break toward the end of the hearings, prompting Barr to respond sarcastically that he was a “real class act.”
But don’t let their like high school bully act distract you from the main point here. Their behavior during the hearing reveals the essential truth about so many modern-day liberals—the desire for total control. And what could be more controlling than not allowing a person to speak?
The peerless Kimberly Strassel is on to them.
Speaking at a Hillsdale College event last year, she minced no words in describing the motives of modern liberals. Speaking of the left’s approach to policy, regarding health care and energy specifically, she put it rather bluntly when speaking of the their motivation.
“It’s power and it’s control,” she said, going on to note several other potential leftist power grabs, including packing the Supreme Court and abolishing the Electoral College.
Anyone familiar her Potomac Watch column in the Wall Street Journal and her two books, The Intimidation Game: How the Left is Silencing Free Speech and Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters are Breaking America knows Ms. Strassel has long been a passionate advocate of First Amendment rights. Her time in this one speech was limited and it came before the COVID-19 pandemic, or else she could have riffed on the Great Mask Debate of 2000 for the entire hour.
Masks being mandatory in public is only the latest hoop we have to jump through to be in agreement with leftist orthodoxy.
It doesn’t seem to matter to most liberals that there have been multiple conflicting versions regarding the effectiveness of wearing masks everywhere. Whether always wearing one in public is really efficient in stopping the spread of COVID-19 is actually open to debate. There have been so many different opinions put forth on masks (and lockdowns) that one can not help but be a little confused on the issue.
But don’t bother with specifics, just remember that to be in a liberal’s good graces, the key is to always listen to them and agree with their policy recommendations.
That’s really all there is to it. If liberals tell you that the only way to combat COVID-19 is to wear a mask and stay six feet away from people, even outside, just do it to keep the peace. (It’s not like they’re asking you to wear a Green Bay Packer hat)
Of course, if you’ve been paying attention to various policy debates in this century, you are already familiar with the we’re-always-right-about-everything rule.
You might think teaching women self-defense, arming them with concealed carry or developing fingernail polish that can detect when a date-rape drug has been slipped into a drink, as four North Carolina State students did, are all effective strategies for combating sexual assault. But various women’s groups were horrified at the notion, because they think the only way to combat sexual assault is to “teach men not to rape.”
How we would go about teaching people not to do what is already illegal is anybody’s guess. But if you listen to radical feminists long enough, you begin to realize that their real aim is too control people’s speech, especially hard-partying frat boys with their lewd jokes. What else but the desire to repress speech explains last year’s online debate over how the old Jazz standard, “Baby it’s Cold Outside,” is a actual cause of rape culture?
Stopping school shootings? That’s a tough one, especially in a free society where the population has the legal right to own firearms. (For now, at least)
We could arm teachers or put armed guards at school entrances. We could, and should, rethink that habit of announcing to the world that schools are gun-free zones. You might notice that these lunatics never seem to shoot up a police station or the hangouts of the Latin Kings or the Gambino Family.
But liberals seem only satisfied with the amorphous concept of “common sense” gun control, which has the advantage of seeming reasonable. But then you realize that most gun violence is committed by people already breaking gun laws, in addition to several other laws,
Given the left’s penchant for decades-long issue activism (see same-sex marriage, expanding affirmative action and open borders) one suspects that gun confiscation and the complete abrogation of the Second Amendment is the real goal; at least Beto O’Rourke is honest about his intentions.
Again, it’s control; the left will decide how law-abiding citizens can provide protection for themselves and their families.
We could improve inner city education by trying school vouchers or more magnet schools, but that might leave children outside the control of the liberal public eduction establishment, so liberals generally oppose vouchers. Vouchers would also reduce the cash flow from the teacher’s unions flowing to the left’s political home in the Democratic Party.
Access to health care might be improved by utilizing health savings accounts, the method that proved so popular by Whole Foods several years ago. But the left insisted on a the Affordable Care Act, a Rube Goldberg contraption that resulted in millions losing insurance and having to purchase insurance plans that covered things they’d never need.
To be fair, some liberals are open to new approaches to problem-solving and willing to give alternative policy recommendations a chance. Scholars who might otherwise be described as leftists have done important work that produced valuable results on issues like crime, welfare reform and race-related problems.
But too often they are drowned out by the politicians/activists that frame anything other than more gun control as a desire to kill children; strict adherence to job-killing environmental policy is preferable to what liberals deem science-denying approaches that will doom the planet; health care policy that isn’t Medicare for all is criticized as a subsidy to the insurance or pharmaceutical companies, and an attempt to kill off Grandma.
Just as there are conservative/libertarian approaches to various policies that might produce satisfying solutions to any number of problems, there are also many (most?) in the conservative community that are willing to give the other side a fair hearing.
But unless they’re willing to dial back the control impulse and shrill accusations of bad faith, we’ll never hear them.
