The Patriot Post® · The Left's Catch-All Strategy to Redefine Issues
When The New York Times and The New Yorker first published stories last year exposing the long-running sexual predation and abuse of women within the movie industry by powerful Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, few would have predicted at the time that a new movement had been birthed. Suddenly, stories about other well-connected men in positions of power within the entertainment, news media and political industries began to hit the headlines on an almost weekly basis. Women who had experienced varying degrees of sexual manipulation and abuse suddenly found an eager media willing to shine the light on a long-protected class of individuals. The movement was quickly dubbed #MeToo, with the message being that, finally, women who had not been believed now had the ear of the entire country to tell their stories without the fear of being ignored.
But it wasn’t long before the original idea behind #MeToo was warped into a broader pro-feminist message decrying the supposed western patriarchy. In other words, to question the feminist assertion of the gender pay gap, for instance, is now to be interpreted in light of #MeToo — it’s indicative of the problem of men oppressing women. It’s a sneaky broadening and redefining of the movement’s original intent.
How about the term “racism?” Here is yet another example of the Left taking a well-understood and defined term, which meant the prejudicial judgment of individuals based solely upon their race or ethnicity, and turning it into a term that conflates the neo-Marxist ideology of class warfare with race. For example, the new definition of racism preaches that the denial of the concept of “white privilege” is indicative of someone harboring racist sentiments. Or, on the flip side, that only members of the majority race and culture can truly be racist.
They’ve done it with global warming, too. Once upon a time, that meant that the planet was getting warmer and government must step in to regulate a solution. Now, the all-purpose term “climate change” has expanded the debate to encompass any and all weather events and, of course, the need for government to do even more to limit our Liberty. In this, too, there are victims and oppressors.
Why this constant grievance culture promoted by the Left? Why are they expressly looking for new ways to redefine various groups of the oppressed and oppressors? Well, for leftists, the revolution is never over. So long as there are instances of inequality, then there can be no “justice.” And the means of judging whether or not something is justice is based not upon the standard of equal opportunity and freedom of the individual but upon that flawed neo-Marxist paradigm of equality of outcome. It’s not an ethic born out of genuine concern for justice for the individual but out of communal sensitivities that sacrifice the rights and freedom of the individual for the sake of group identity. Truth is the first casualty of those promoting this ideology.