“Hate” seems to be the most popular word among liberals. If someone says almost anything about a controversial issue, or even asks a question concerning it, he or she is often accused of being a hater.
The latter happened with Judge Jeanine Pirro concerning Congresswoman Ilhar Omar after it was reported that Omar had said, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel” and later implied that supporters of Israel were pressuring members of congress to have “allegiance to a foreign country.” Pirro’s “offense” was to ask about Omar’s allegiance to the United States: “Omar wears the hijab, which according to the Quran 33:59, tells women to cover so they won’t get molested. Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?”
Cries that Pirro was demonstrating hatred of Islam and Muslims were heard throughout the press and are presumably on their way through the ether to distant galaxies. Nervous advertisers dropped her show and weak-kneed Fox executives suspended Pirro indefinitely.
To my knowledge, no news organization responded, “Wait just a minute. Omar’s slanderous remarks about Israel warrant asking exactly what Pirro asked! And why aren’t Omar’s remarks considered as hateful—for that matter, more hateful—than Pirro’s question? Why aren’t journalists demanding a retraction from Omar?”
The reason the media never respond this way is that they know the fundamental rule of the game liberals are playing. (They should know because many of them follow the same rule.)
The rule is that only Republicans and Conservatives are capable of hate. Liberals, Progressives, and Leftists are not only incapable of hate but have a cosmic commission to expose and condemn other people’s hate and excoriate them for it.
The hater-in-chief, of course, is President Donald Trump. He is “deplorable” and “loathsome.” His offenses are so grievous that they transcend the standard categories of hate—racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia and so on. Whatever he says or tweets is hateful. Even his greeting “Good Morning” offends the afternoon and evening. And his “Have a nice day” means “You are so pathetically unimportant that you need me to authorize an enjoyable day.”
Moreover, whatever actions he takes are by definition hateful. Building a wall means hating foreigners, opposing abortion means hating women, approving a pipeline means hating elk and geese. So hate-filled is the man that anyone who associated with him before he was elected, worked for him since, or voted for him is equally hateful. In fact, his despicableness is contagious even over a distance of more than 8000 miles! (Some blamed him for the mosque shootings in New Zealand.)
Accusations against him strain the lexicon of hate: collusion with Russia, treason, grand theft (of an election), contempt for refugees, defiance of the Constitution, insanity, megalomania, and on and on. Millions upon millions of tax dollars have been spent to find him guilty of something—anything—that could succeed in getting him impeached. And what is the logic behind these hateful accusations against him and all who support him?
Everyday logic goes like this: Someone does hateful things; therefore, people hate him. First comes the evidence, then the judgment. But anti-Trump logic is the opposite: Trump is hated; therefore, he must have done hateful things. First the judgment, then the search for evidence. Notably absent from this thinking is the presumption of innocence, the benefit of the doubt, and elementary fairness.
In short, Trump is hateful for no other reason than that liberals hate him. The more they hate him, the more hateful he is. And the more hateful he is, the more hateful he becomes in their minds.
The liberal logic is sheer fallacy, of course. And the wild attributions of hate are nonsensical. Yet neither fact lessens the harm they are doing.
The first victims of hatred are the haters themselves. By focusing so intently on the real or imagined faults of the person hated, they lose the ability to see any merits. “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” For example, Trump’s record of achievement is remarkable, exceeding in many ways the record of the past several presidents. Yet the haters are unable to acknowledge his achievements. Similarly, the elected officials who hate the President cannot bring themselves to support his efforts even when those efforts help the citizens who elected them!
What has made liberal hate of conservatives especially powerful is that it is widely embraced, not only by politicians and academicians, but also by legions of people in the communication and entertainment industries. Left leaning journalism, social media, television, and films continually promote the narrative that conservatives are haters, ignore conservatives’ responses to the allegation, and withhold facts and news favorable to conservatives’ views and values. Then they have the gall to blame President Trump and those who support him for causing division in the country.
Such devious tactics have manipulated millions of people into embracing liberal hatred. Many of those people no doubt believe that they are too independent minded to have been influenced. Yet decades of psychological research have confirmed that ideas can quite easily be “planted” in people’s minds and later recalled as facts and acted upon. For example, in their research on memory, Professors Cara Laney and Elizabeth Loftus have proved that people can be made to “remember whole complex events that never happened at all.” And once those false memories are in place, “it is extremely difficult to tell them apart from true memories.” They add that “a memory is no less ‘memorable’ just because it is wrong.” I would add that a hateful memory is no less harmful because it was planted in one’s mind rather than reached through judgment.
The consequences of liberal hate, I submit, include these few, among many others:
Professors spending precious and costly class time sermonizing on behalf of the liberal social and political agenda and, in some cases, punishing students who dare to disagree by publicly shaming them and lowering their grades on the assumption that to disagree with them is a sign of intellectual deficiency.
The denial of free speech to non-liberals on innumerable college campuses by shouting down conservative speakers, tearing down non-liberal signs and banners, threating non-liberal students with violence, and in some cases physically attacking them.
New York governor Andrew Cuomo publicly announcing that “Right to life, pro-assault weapons, anti-gay [people] . . . have no place in the state of New York because that’s not who New Yorkers are.” (This statement qualifies not only as hateful but also as mindless given that it has very likely been a factor in the number of New Yorkers that have moved to Florida and Texas, causing New York’s already troubling fiscal deficit to increase.)
Renowned historian Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History (1988 edition) made this observation about what he called the “critical periods” in history: “[They] are marked by the collapse of the consensus and by the disintegration of society into dissenting and mutually hostile fragments; status is questioned, relationships become fluid, and in the ensuing struggle for power the relative capabilities of the contending classes and individuals are forgotten.”
Expanding on this thought, Toynbee cites Thucydides’ description of the fall of ancient Greek society: “The customary meaning of words was arbitrarily distorted to cover the conduct of those who employed them. Reckless irresponsibility was treated as courageous loyalty… A frenzied fanaticism was the popular ideal of conduct… Violence of feeling was [considered] a warrant of honesty, deprecation of violence a signal for suspicion.”
If history is a reliable measure, liberals’ current penchant for nurturing hate in themselves and promoting it in others could be gravely dangerous to America.
Copyright © 2019 by Vincent Ryan Ruggiero. All rights reserved
