Congressman Steve Scalise, Republican from Louisiana, was shot by a radical leftist on June 14, during a practice session for the annual Congressional Baseball Game. Almost before he was even transported to the hospital, Democratic politicians, the left-wing establishment media and most every other left-winger in the country piled on with their usual hate and lack of decorum. The left’s reaction to this act of political terrorism should serve as a stark reminder of how utterly different their worldview is from that of ordinary people.
The baseball game itself was played the following day and preceded by the screening of a message from President Donald Trump. The president appeared on the stadium’s giant screen and delivered a message of unity that contained no trace of partisan acrimony, despite the undeniable truth that the shooting was motivated and inspired by left-wing ideology and violent rhetoric. It was a message that one would expect of the nation’s leader:
In Washington, we all have our disagreements, but we all agree that we are here to serve this nation we love and the people who call it home. That’s the source of unity and, more than ever, we must embrace it.
As Trump delivered his address, however, some congressional staffers in the stadium jeered and booed. Such an appalling act of disrespect was a useful reminder – if one were needed – of the left’s utter contempt for the very notion of unity the president sought to promote. The narrative immediately pushed by the left was that Scalise had it coming, based on his record as a supporter of traditional values. This, alone, should be of great concern to all Americans – and, particularly, to the nation’s elected leaders. In essence, the left has decided that political violence, up to and including assassination, is acceptable behavior – and will become more so with every election lost. It highlights the left’s most basic rule of political struggle: The ends justify the means.
This statement – the ends justify the means – is described in the Cambridge Dictionary as “a situation in which the final aim is so important that any way of achieving it is acceptable.” Understanding this is the key to comprehending the mindset of the radical left. It is why conservative intellectuals, who believe that they can defeat left-wing ideology with the use of reason, logic, and truth are mistaken; employing these factors in any philosophical debate with the left is akin to comparing apples to oranges. Progressives and other left-wing extremists choose to define their own standards of truth, logic, and reason – and, for that matter, of civility. They have no interest in how the right chooses to define these things. If making people believe that up is down, and south is north effectively advanced their agenda, leftists would insist that those things were real and anyone who chose to dispute these claims would be branded as uneducated, stupid, anti-science.
Conservatives, libertarians and the ever-growing political sect of conservatarians spend an inordinate amount of time pointing out the rampant hypocrisy of the left. This is nothing more than a quixotic exercise in the futile expenditure of energy. To achieve their goals, leftists simply do not care that they are hypocritical. They do not care whether their argument is based upon fact and they see reasoned debate as nothing more than an obstacle — an unnecessary delay of their journey toward a twisted vision of utopia.
Certain factions on the right, variously known as ‘alt-right’ and ‘new-right’ have chosen to employ the left’s tactics against them. Responsible or not, they do this precisely because they understand the insurmountable disparity between conservative values and leftwing intentions, which see values and principles as deceptions to be used – and revised – as necessary.
Whilst conservatives should never abandon their principles, their entire ideology will, eventually, be swept away unless they fully accept that those principles mean less than nothing to the radical left.
