The Patriot Post® · An Unhinged Left Doubles Down

Despite all the maddening uncertainty surrounding Donald Trump and the GOP, the 2016 election represented one of the most clarifying moments in American history: “Progressives,” the Democrat Party and their Leftmedia allies — long used to congratulating themselves for their inclusiveness, tolerance and fairness — were revealed as utter frauds.

“In the wake of the Trumpocalypse, many in the deepest blue cores have turned on those parts of America that supported the president’s election, developing oikophobia — an irrational fear of their fellow citizens,” writes Daily Beast columnist Joel Kotkin.

Not fear. Loathing. Loathing epitomized by “comedian” Stephen Colbert, who referred to Trump’s mouth as “Putin’s c—k holster” on his late-night TV show.

Loathing so intense, New Republic columnist Kevin Baker wants to separate “We Pay Our Own Damn Way” blue states from “poor” red states he hopes will wallow in misery without their leftist “benefactors.” “We have funded massive infrastructure projects in your rural counties, subsidized your schools and your power plants and your nursing homes, sent you entire industries, and simultaneously absorbed the most destitute, unskilled, and oppressed portions of your populations, white and black alike,” he writes. “All of which, it turns out, only left you more bitter, white, and alt-right than ever.”

More bitter than Baker himself? He and Colbert exemplify the pompous hypocrisy that animates far too many leftists. Leftists who regularly eviscerate conservatives for their “homophobia,” but will hail Colbert for his “edginess.” Leftists like Baker, et al, who tend to forget, despite Kotkin’s reminder, that “the bulk of the food, energy, and manufactured goods consumed in blue America” is supplied by those “bitter clingers” who feed what Kotkin calls the “blue bourgeoisie.” A blue bourgeoisie who “might seek to give the unwashed red masses ‘cake’ in the form of free health care and welfare,” he writes, but nothing more “than a future status as serfs of the cognitive aristocracy.”

Serfs dismissed as beneath contempt by self-serving progressives.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson aptly illuminates how that poisonous mindset affects his home state of California, where progressive coastal elites “virtue-signal from the world’s most exclusive and beautiful enclaves,” while ordinary Californians endure “another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty.”

Columnist Aaron M. Renn sees a bigger and far more troubling picture. “Those who are succeeding in America no longer need the overall prosperity of the country in order to personally do well,” he explains. “They can become enriched as a small, albeit sizable, minority.”

It is a minority scrupulously protected and reverently promoted by the Leftmedia. A Leftmedia that “really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008,” Politico columnists Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty reveal. “And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county — odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties.”

As statistician Nate Silver revealed, as recently as 2013, those journalists who identify as Democrat outnumber their Republican-identifying counterparts by a four-to-one margin.

More telling? Not one registered Republican is part of the White House press corps. The same press corps that alternated between feeling sorry for itself and bashing Trump at last weekend’s White House Correspondents Dinner.

Thus it should surprise no one when the Media Research Center (MRC) reveals a whopping 89 percent of ABC, NBC and CBS’s coverage of Trump since the inauguration has been negative — or that those same entities virtually ignore stories that accrue to the administration’s benefit.

Leftists apparently need their media-manufactured bubble. That became evident when the New York Times published a column by newly hired conservative (and virulent NeverTrumper) Bret Stephens questioning the legitimacy of the progressive global warming agenda. After it was published, the paper was flooded with threats of cancellations by furious readers. Leftists also slammed Stephens himself via Twitter, and nearly 30,000 signed a Change.org petition demanding the Times fire him.

From whom do such “tolerant” people take their cue? President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan “don’t give a s— about people,” newly elected DNC chairman Tom Perez has stated — on more than one occasion. On Monday Perez upped the ante on his mindlessness, insisting, “[N]o human being is illegal” during one of the many Communist Party-supported May Day protests across the nation. One suspects the families of victims murdered by MS-13 gang-bangers on Long Island — 92% of whom are here illegally — might disagree.

Perez is the tip of the iceberg. “Democrats are completely focused on placating their frothing, left-wing, anti-Trump base — and the American heartland thinks these people are insane,” writes Marc Thiessen. “They see women marching in anti-Trump rallies wearing ‘pussy’ hats. They see left-wing mobs attacking Charles Murray at Middlebury College and trying to stop Ann Coulter from speaking at the UC Berkeley. They see ‘Bill Nye the Liberal Guy’ … asking whether people should be punished for having ‘extra kids.’”

Most Americans also see no future with the Democrat Party. An ABC News/Washington Post poll published last week revealed a paltry 28% think Democrats are “in touch with the concerns of most people in the United States today.”

The same poll should hardly reassure President Trump or the GOP. Only 38% of Americans say the president is in touch, and only 32% say Republicans are.

The fundamental difference? Trump and Republicans control Congress and the presidency, giving them a grand opportunity to better those numbers, if they can overcome their sophomoric squabbling and seize the moment at hand.

It is a moment that will either be “a defining and positive turn in American history of great importance, or an interlude in American decline of histrionic and comedic note only,” explains columnist Conrad Black, who insists the upside of the equation “depends on the revival of economic growth,” which in turn “depends on the proposed changes to the tax system and the health-care system.” Black also makes it crystal clear that time is of the essence.

“It must happen in the next year,” he warns.

If it doesn’t, the proverbial joke will be on millions of decent, long-belittled “deplorables” who went all in for “draining the swamp,” and giving an insufferably imperious ruling class — in both parties — the kick in its collective shins it so rightly deserves.

Day after day, a demonstrably unhinged army of progressive rabble-rousers reminds America they have made anger, hatred and violence their political platform. The GOP and Trump? Ultimately, their success or failure will be entirely of their own making.

Here’s a big hint going forward: claiming a government shutdown would be “disastrous” for Republicans — thereby necessitating a certain level of capitulation to the Democrat agenda — doesn’t fly. The Democrats and their Leftmedia allies hammered Republicans for the 2013 government shutdown.

A year later the GOP gained 13 House and 9 Senate seats in the 2014 mid-term election. Disaster? A victory of tsunamic proportions is more like it.

In short, genuine leaders don’t make excuses. They lead.