Last Friday I put together a list of the top six most annoying conservative subgroups, which didn’t sit well with some of my peers. That’s o.k.; I didn’t start blogging to make people feel good about themselves. Case in point: the following list of annoying liberal groups:
#5 9/11 Truthers
I know not all conspiracy theories are leftist, but come on. Has anyone witnessed a large anti-Iraq war protest that didn’t have a contingent of truthers waving more poster board than an arena full of pro wrestling fans? Their major arguments are based on ambiguous photography, a half-educated grasp of engineering, and the government’s initial difficulty explaining exactly how two huge planes flying into two massive buildings caused a smaller building right beside them to collapse. Yet the boring, somewhat complex reality of tragic events isn’t as satisfying to truthers as their own dramatic narrative. The endurance and intelligence that goes into supporting these theories would be commendable if it wasn’t coupled with paranoid contrarianism.
The truthers are not only annoying, but offensive. Truthers, not “neocons,” politicized the most horrible tragedy in recent American history. Instead of respecting the memory of 9/11’s victims, they use it as a springboard for self-indulgent activism. I can barely tolerate the prospect of “investigating” what caused 9/11, but it would be hypocritical of me to deny the importance of dispassionate inquiry in the midst of emotional events. Yet thoughtful curiosity isn’t what has leftist college students marching behind Republican crank Alex Jones (although after perusing his site, I’m more comfortable calling him the kind of libertarian whose adolescent conspiracy fetish keeps sensible libertarians form becoming a viable third option). 9/11 truthers are simply in it for the attention, using the tragedy as a proxy to act out.
The sad thing is half the truthers I meet cannot possibly believe 9/11 was an inside job, if only because they’re informed. It seems to be something they say just to needle conservatives. There is no “truth” behind the 9/11 Truther’s words, just a deep commitment to positing themselves on the opposite side of conventional wisdom. Even Al Franken , whose political career has consisted primarily of calling Republicans liars, doesn’t buy into the conspiracy. The fact that’s it’s impossible to tell the insincere sophists form the imbalanced true believers makes them especially irritating, earning them a spot on this list.
Telling Phrase: “Selected, not elected!” (This doesn’t have anything to do with 9-11? Well, neither does 9-11 trutherism).
Say something nice: As a whole, they’re interesting people.
#4 Europeans
Picture a vast group of people whose fundamental understanding of America comes from a half-educated knowledge of the young nation’s most damning history, coupled with western pop culture. Despite their limited perspective, they’re certain of their opinions about America, and as a consequence have no ability to relate to American conservatives, whose worldview rests on an entirely different foundation. Nothing about their approach to politics suggests that this will change in the foreseeable future. No, it’s not college freshmen. It’s not the entertainment industry. It’s not 9/11 conspiracy theorists, I just did them. It’s not even Detroit’s citizens (God help them). It’s Europeans.
Europeans think Americans are lazy, uncouth, easily lead dullards, and when the candidate who doesn’t reflect European sensibilities wins an election that has nothing to do with them, they publish snooty headlines asking “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?” They’re right to say our media plays to the lowest common denominator, but this is coming from a continent where less than two-thirds of the population acknowledges that Al-Qaeda was behind 9/11. While 9/11 truthers are a vocal but rightly marginalized minority here, in Europe they’re prevalent enough to form their own party!
Even though the American right owes much to Europeans such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, Europe seems to have forgotten its libertarian heritage. Elections on the other side of the Atlantic are usually choices between varied big-government nationalists and big-government internationalists. To put it in American terms, modern Europe’s political spectrum spans from Joe Biden to Barack Obama. Their phobia of successful businesses such as Wal-mart makes our most committed environmentalists anti-capitalists look sensible by comparison. A British jury once acquitted six Greenpeace activists for the vandalism of a coal power plant, which cost 35,000 British pounds to clean up, because the threat of global warming gave them a “lawful excuse.” We should expect no less from the continent that gave the world fascism, Nazism, and a generation of “youths” who apparently think rioting is a legitimate form of dissent.
Europeans are on this list because all of the politically active Europeans I’ve met are leftist tits.
Telling phrase: “Americans are stupid. ”
Say something nice: Europe produces a lot of great Metal and techno music. Henrik Zetterberg is my favorite active hockey player.
#3 Aging feminist baby boomers
Stubborn, moralizing, and unteachable, old liberal women may be the hardest people in the world to engage in constructive dialogue. It’s not that they’re incapable of it; it’s just that they don’t want to. They’ve spent decades marinating in their self-absorbed liberal revolution, and all the charm and logical force in the world could not convince them of anything but what they want to believe. As their lives are ending and their influence has been waning, the second wave of liberal feminism is collectively clinging to their perceived victimhood (which is paradoxically the foundation of their influence) despite evidence that women are doing all right in America.
At its worst, feminism is a microcosm of liberalism’s biggest flaws. It’s preoccupied with victimhood, it’s statist, and it’s emotive, rather than contemplative. The corny chanting and curious affection for mostly redundant legislation that comes and goes among mainstream Democrats has always been prominent in the feminist movement.
What earns old, liberal feminists a spot on this list is a personal as it is political. In a country infested by a fair amount of terrorist sympathizers, eco-terrorists, and race baiters, I can’t think of a crowd more unpleasant than defensive, over-intellectualized suburbanites such as Maureen Dowd and Gloria Steinem. If I were the list the ten most unpleasant experiences I’ve ever had, most of them would involve feminists.
Telling Phrase: “That’s not funny.”
Say something nice: Legal equality for women is a worthy ideal. Americans should keep living up to it.
#2 Teachers for social justice
There, I said it. Teaching for social justice is the practice of conflating education with politicization. It’s not good enough for some educators to raise self-sufficient, intelligent students; they have to be left-wing activists too. Whether they’re teaching in middle schools or graduate seminars, anyone who “teaches for social justice” falls into this category. Just to be safe, include those who administrate for social justice as well. While a good education is an irreplaceable component of progress, not all educators are praise-worthy.
Why I am being so hard on a certain segment of teachers, especially granted the fantastic job many of them do? For starters, teachers for social justice insist that their trendy educational approach isn’t ideological, just a way to make students “ask questions” and “challenge their own assumptions.” Take my word for it, they will ask you for an apology if you suggest otherwise. Many of those in charge of informing an entire generation won’t even acknowledge that their own paradigm of race, sex, and class is firmly rooted in leftist political tradition. To be fair, they probably never learned that in graduate school.
If your profession supposedly calls on you to convince young minorities and women that society is dominated by white males, and bellicose activism is the only way they can experience modern-day emancipation, your profession is demanding that you become a political being. If your overarching goal is to convince impressionable students that society is stacked against them, you’re only going to codify their worst fears, affirm their anger, and give credence to conspiratorial narratives. Teaching for social justice doesn’t encourage students to open their minds and understand America as it really is. No, it trains students to view society through a rigid, left-wing standpoint, inhibiting their understanding of everything that isn’t framed as such. They’ll grow up and confuse conservative arguments concerning civil rights as racism and critiques of feminism as sexism, because they will have never been given the tools to understand it any other way. In short, they’re making America more like the rest of this list.
Don’t even get me started on their sense of entitlement. For their truly hard work, public school teachers are paid more per hour than mechanical engineers, psychologists, chemists, and they only make 3% less than physicists. Yet one cannot escape complaints about how they’re underpaid. Then again, one shouldn’t expect gratitude from people who are put on a pedestal just for working with children. The only other job as universally praised as education is a career in the military. But everyone who joins the military is potentially risking their lives. In addition, military training, in contrast to grad school, isn’t meant to boost soldier’s egos, but to humble them. Perhaps the Secretary of Education should start running prospective teachers through boot camp.
Drill sergeant: “Face forward, Rainbow Brite.”
22-year old: “Excuse me, but my name is…”
Drill Sergeant: “Your name is Rainbow Brite, and if you don’t like it, you can spend the rest of the day in the cafeteria preparing square pizza!”
If you don’t believe that there are a core group of teachers who have allowed liberal politics to get in the way of their profession, consider that more than 4200 people, most of them educators, signed a petition in support of Bill Ayers, the self-satisfied domestic terrorist most Americans were introduced to in 2008. Nothing in the petition they signed denies that he was part of a terrorist group; they just gloss it over because he serves a purpose.
The most depressing part is that most of these folks are genuinely trying to make the world a better place. But just because they’ve been professionally trained to irresponsibly collapse personal activism with what is ideally an objective profession doesn’t make them right.
Telling Phrase: “I have to teach from a multi-cultural perspective because students can get the white, male, Eurocentric point of view everywhere else.”
Say something nice: I have friends who are teachers for social justice, and they’re generally okay people.
#1 Left-wing Evangelicals
“Not God bless America, but God Damn America.” Few things are more insulting than the premise that you’re not worthy in God’s eyes because you don’t adopt man’s earthly politics. Everyone knows about the right’s religious elements, but if Americans learned about their own culture in school, they would understand the left’s religious heritage as well. The reason left-wing evangelicals are #1 on this list isn’t due to their self-righteous ranting, which doesn’t distinguish them from their peers, but because without the Christian left, liberalism wouldn’t have such deep roots in American soil. According to historian Daniel J. Flynn, the very first communist community on American soil were the pilgrims in Plymouth colony from 1620-1623, who were forced to abolish private property. They were followed by numerous European imports, including the Shakers, Harmonists, and Owenites. Long before the 1960’s, the evangelical left would rail against capitalism, “false consciousness,” and the traditional family. Before the collapse of the U.S.S.R., these communities had already buckled under their economic ignorance and disregard for human nature.
The control freakishness comedians frequently attribute to the religious right is actually common in all types of moral crusaders; the religious left is no exception. Early twentieth century prohibition was a product of the puritanical Christian left. It was the leftist book Bible Communism which insisted that “God the creator has the first and foremost right to all property” in 1848. Today, multiculturalism and environmental regulation are often framed in religious terms. The evangelical left is no less prone to cheap, obvious appeals to faith such as “Jesus was a community organizer,” which insults the intelligence of faithful people everywhere.
For what it’s worth, I believe God’s a libertarian. He allows us to mess up our own lives and communities without divine interference, knowing full well that we’ll all be judged in the end. From war to high taxation, any coercion undertaken in God’s name should actually be credited to mankind. Anything else would be to impose our will on God’s, and I think we can humbly presume he’s not keen on that.
Telling Phrase: “Who would Jesus bomb?”
Say something nice: They have better things to do than sue people because a cross is mounted on a hill on public land.
Cross-posted at Modern Conservative.
Tags: europeans, feminists, left-wing evangelicals, liberals, social justice, teachers, truthers
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I was going to write about something else tonight, but this is too good to ignore. Via Hot Air (warning: strong language): a video of the recent New York University “Kimmel occupation” being calmly dispersed. If you don’t feel like watching the entire thing, (the narrator’s a bit much to take), jump to the temper tantrum at 5:36.
The story is a that a group of mostly New York University students forcibly occupied the school cafeteria for three days. During their sleepover, they produced a bizarre list of demands, which includes, among other things, full disclosure of NYU’s private budget, card check for a local union, a student elected finance committee, which will focus first on boilerplate leftist issues (investigation into possible “war profiteering,” possibly boycotting Coca-Cola), paid scholarships for Palestinian students, and donations to the University of Gaza. The University promptly ignored the demands and broke up the packaged rebellion. The aftermath, in the words of 18-year old Mitchell Goulding: “The general consensus right now among the student body is that they are a bunch of idiots,” (perhaps I’m too cynical about the younger generation).
To grasp the ridiculousness of the protestor’s behavior, imagine the same approach applied to another criminal activity:
Cops: Freeze!
Bank robbers: No. We need to democratically decide whether or not we should freeze. This is supposed to be a consensus; I don’t know if you guys understand that.
Cops: Put the money down!
Bank robbers: Are those guns? Don’t expect us to cooperate if you’re going to use devices of force.
Cops: Step out of the vault!
Bank robbers: You guys busted in here. Give us ten minutes to decide what we want to do. You’re making us very upset, and we can’t guarantee our cooperation if you don’t negotiate with us.