Five Quick Things: The Facts of Life Are Conservative, Even After Tulsa - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Five Quick Things: The Facts of Life Are Conservative, Even After Tulsa
by
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (YouTube screenshot)

It was Margaret Thatcher who first popularized the saying that “the facts of life are conservative,” but that perspective has been around through the ages. It’s axiomatic, as conservatism’s very name implies the conservation of things that are known to be salutary and workable … as opposed to the other ideologies, which offer things that are supposedly new but are in fact mere reproductions of that which has already proven to fail.

And fail leftism does. Always and forever, and usually in spectacular form.

To illustrate, we’ll do something a little different with this installment of Five Quick Things — namely, five current examples of narrative implosions proving that the Left simply can’t seem to hold its act together.

And away we go.

1. The sabotaging of Trump’s rally also destroys the argument for mail-in balloting.

By now we don’t have to get too far into this. The president’s campaign is taking it on the chin since Saturday over the fact they touted some million people who had entered Eventbrite ticket requests for his rally in Tulsa, but something on the order of 7,000 people actually showed up.

This has been described as a disaster, though it’s not exactly clear why. Other than a few leftist protests here and there, including one promoting black trans people in Brooklyn, drawing 7,000 people to a political event in this COVID-19 era is a monumental feat. Certainly one that couldn’t be duplicated by Joe Biden, who refuses to leave his basement for anything associated with a public speaking engagement — largely, assuredly, for fear that a scant few people would actually show up.

But Trump’s rally was designated a major disappointment and a disaster, despite the fact it drew nearly eight million television viewers on broadcast and cable TV and another four million on streaming platforms, making it the gold standard for 2020 presidential election speeches and quite possibly the single most important political event of the first six months of 2020.

Nevertheless, the media narrative is it’s a failure because of the million Eventbrite signups, some 300,000 came from Democrats aiming to sabotage the event. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed credit for “teens on Tik Tok” signing up fraudulently for Trump Tulsa tickets, while other Democrat activists bragged about the number of Eventbrite signups they were able to spam their way into soaking up.

Nobody on the Left, in their triumphal reveals, bothered to pay attention to the fact that what they’d done in taking credit for sandbagging Trump’s event was to bolster the argument against their No. 1 procedural issue of the 2020 election cycle — namely, the promotion of mail-in balloting.

To hear the Democrats talk about it, mail-in balloting is the most important solution to the COVID-19 pandemic, because it’s too dangerous for people to be together at a polling location. That is, of course, ridiculous — there have been lots of election dates across the country that have necessitated in-person balloting, and scant evidence those have led to incidences of the Wuhan virus spreading out of control.

The argument against wholesale mail-in balloting is simple and obvious; namely, it’s a bad idea to put big-city post offices in charge of ballot security when there are so many dishonest and corrupt partisan slimeballs out there who would tamper with elections.

Half the Democrat Party scoffed at that contention, while the other half proved its validity by tampering with Trump’s rally numbers in order to create the narrative that the most-watched political event of the 2020 cycle so far was a fizzle.

Sorry, folks. That’s an unmitigated #FAIL. Do better next time.

2. The absolute and utter self-generated collapse of the gun control narrative.

If you’re tempted to assume this has to do with the fact that school shootings have vanished when kids aren’t at school, and mall shootings have similarly vanished when malls aren’t full of unarmed people who are otherwise sitting ducks, we’ll give you credit for, if anything, overthinking this question.

It’s simpler than that.

What was the leftist narrative on gun control and Second Amendment issues? It was that nobody needs an AR-15 or some other scary-looking “assault rifle” or “military weapon” that possesses the capability for firing lots of bullets in a short period of time.

You’ve all seen the arguments, and you’ve all likely laughed at them.

The school shootings, which made people reflexive about getting rid of those scary weapons, probably have more to do with the boring, hellish existence our Left-dominated public schools have been for a generation than anything else. Now that they have petered out with COVID-19 emptying the schools, something else has risen to the forefront.

Following the George Floyd fiasco, we are now in a national anti-cop moment — in which depending on the level of leftist police reform you’re on board with provides impetus for eliminating qualified immunity, or defunding the police, or, in the case of Minneapolis and Antifastan, disbanding the police in a manner that Bane would find quite satisfactory.

You want gun control, which gives a monopoly on gun violence to the cops you want disbanded?

Really?

And then, as was 100 percent predictable, those neutered police did little but watch as a horde of Democrat voters in New York, Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, among other cities run by the American Left, proceeded to burn out all of the neighborhoods where the Thin Blue Line had prevented utter anarchy all these years. Thousands of businesses were looted and set ablaze, mostly because they weren’t manned by men with AR-15s and other, more potent firearms.

Remember when the argument for gun control was that you didn’t need an “assault rifle” to kill a deer? Yeah, OK. One sure comes in handy when the animals come to loot your store or burn you out of your home, though.

Narrative #FAIL. Visible from 1,000 miles away. All it took was to be alive during the L.A. riots, and this one was easy.

3. You’re irresponsible for not submitting to COVID-19 house arrest — unless it’s for “mostly peaceful” protests.

Is it 100 percent necessary to flesh this one out? It’s so obvious a failed narrative it almost feels like an insult to the reader’s intelligence to go further.

But Trump’s rally was panned as a dangerous, irresponsible thing by the same people who said 15,000 people at a Black Trans Lives Matter rally in Brooklyn was a pinnacle moment in American democracy, and everybody not 100 percent on board with the Left’s narratives fell out laughing at the juvenile hypocrisy of the activist hackery disguised as journalism. And when somebody ginned up more than 1,200 Democrat medical professionals for an exercise in supreme cognitive dissonance, we weren’t supposed to even notice what a joke it was:

A group of health and medical colleagues has penned an open letter to express their concern that protests around the United States could be shut down under the guise of coronavirus health concerns.

The letter — which went on to draw more than 1,200 signatures — focuses on techniques to reduce harm to people protesting racial injustice.

“We created the letter in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health because of Covid-19,” according to the letter writers, many of whom are part of the University of Washington’s Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“Instead, we wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises.”

LOL. Whatever, guys.

This went further. In New Orleans, after more than two weeks of daily street protests, which involved blocking an interstate highway, attempting to topple a statue of Andrew Jackson in the square bearing his name, and the depositing in the Mississippi River a statue of 19th-century entrepreneur and the founder of the city’s public schools John McDonogh, the local health department scolded local bar patrons for contributing to a purported COVID cluster.

“But, if you are white and privileged, COVID-19 is still coming for you, and to act irresponsibly because you think you may be safe is unconscionable during a pandemic,” said the city’s health director, Jennifer Avegno.

Nobody from the city government showed the faintest concern about the virus’ spread during the “mostly peaceful” protests. But let a Happy Hour get rolling at the Rusty Nail and it’s time to call in the SWAT team.

Sounds very persuasive for the swing voters, guys. Keep it up and let’s see what happens.

4. We’re just after those racist Confederate statues. Honest!

We dealt with this a little in this space last week, when we had our conversation with Doug Bandow over the issue of Robert E. Lee’s statue being torn down across the country. Some of the more polite, or perhaps better put more accommodationist, conservative pundits out there, which on this issue Bandow could be said to be one, have made various arguments that defending Confederate monuments in Southern states isn’t a hill worth dying on.

That might be a debatable point. The fact is that most of those monuments honored Confederate figures less out of a celebration of Southern racism than as an expression of other virtues the people erecting them might have felt. Regional pride, perhaps. Honor, certainly, especially in Lee’s case; he was seen in both South and North as a figure whose honor was pristine despite trying, if not impossible, circumstances. A celebration of sacrifice to a cause, without a doubt.

All of those things can be debated by people of good faith. Sure, the South’s insistence on preserving the Peculiar Institution marks it as morally deficient and those who claim the War of Northern Aggression was about states’ rights and not slavery have a quite heavy burden to carry, but on the other hand the individual stories of a Robert E. Lee or P. G. T. Beauregard or Stonewall Jackson are unquestionably transcendent of their time and worthy of memorials.

We can have those discussions among people of good faith.

We are not having such discussions.

Let’s remember that the very people involved in defenestrating American history by demanding the destruction of Confederate memorials — perhaps most specifically by removing portraits of Confederate-leaning former Speakers of the House on Capitol Hill — are doing so as they prance around while culturally appropriating African kente cloth.

As we discussed in the previous entry in this space, kente cloth was invented and perhaps popularized by the West African Asante empire, who served as, literally, the sales agents for the international slave trade. To wear kente cloth is to celebrate a national entity that profited off the misery of West African people, captured and sold into chattel slavery over the course of centuries by fellow Africans. And yet congressional Democrats have on multiple occasions donned those colorful scarves while brazenly declaring themselves friends of the black community their own party has historically subjugated, oppressed, and disrespected for two centuries.

Yeah, OK.

And if your argument isn’t destroyed by kente cloth, then please explain why the bowdlerization of America’s monuments hasn’t stopped with Lee and Jefferson Davis? In San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi’s hometown, statues of U. S. Grant and Miguel Cervantes were destroyed. Monuments to Washington and Jefferson have been defaced, and worse. Idiot rioters vandalized a statue of Pennsylvania abolitionist Matthias Baldwin. Now they’re after the Teddy Roosevelt statue at the New York Museum of Natural History.

If you think this is about doing away with memories of the Confederate States of America, you aren’t paying attention. This is about defenestrating the United States of America. The Left has proven that as this campaign has broadened. As a means of presenting a reasonable, good-faith argument about public political hygiene, it’s an abject failure.

But it has never been about that. Anyone who paid attention knew that from the beginning.

And finally …

5. Black Lives Matter, except not in the womb or on the streets of cities run by Democrats.

This one might be the least entertaining of our handful of obvious examples of left-wing narrative failure, but it’s probably the most heartbreaking.

If you weren’t aware, while there are a number of tributaries to the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s generally thought that as currently constituted BLM arose from the efforts of three left-wing activists, whose names are Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. Interestingly enough, all three women identify as lesbians or transgender.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

You would think, though, that while BLM has conducted a vigorous campaign of accusing as racists anyone who might respond to the “Black Lives Matter” narrative by saying “all lives matter,” they would studiously protect the back door of their argument by at least paying lip service to the more statistically superior causes of black deaths in America.

And you would be wrong.

Take, for example, the leading cause of death among black Americans. Namely, abortion. Blacks are 13 percent of the population of the country, and 40 percent of the abortions performed in the United States are on black babies — more than 1,000 per day. Such stunningly disproportionate numbers would seem to be perfect grist for the Black Lives Matter mill, and one might expect high-profile marches against Planned Parenthood facilities in black neighborhoods to match those responding to much less deadly slights.

But nope.

From BLM’s mission statement, as expressed by Khan-Cullors, Garza and Tometi, they’re all about making black lives disintegrate in the womb:

We deserve and thus we demand reproductive justice [i.e., abortion]  that gives us autonomy over our bodies and our identities while ensuring that our children and families are supported, safe, and able to thrive.

Well, so much for that.

And what of the black Americans killed in violent incidents involving other blacks, which account for more than 90 percent of violent deaths in the black community, like for example on the chaotic and ultra-violent streets of Chicago every weekend? That community celebrated the Father’s Day weekend with two days of abject mayhem in which more than 100 people were shot and 14 were killed.

That’s more black people killed in Chicago in one weekend than were killed by police in all of 2019, in this epidemic of police violence against unarmed black people the narrative says proves the systemic racism of America.

And what did Black Lives Matter activists have to say about that deadly weekend of black-on-black violence?

Nothing, that’s what.

So what is it, again, that we’re supposed to credit these people for? Why are we supposed to take their arguments at face value and assume they’re made in good faith?

Your author would suggest we do not. These, and lots of other examples, show the Narrative is a fraud. It’s intended to obstruct the truth rather than reveal it. And it isn’t even effective in that regard.

Scott McKay
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator  and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It's All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
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