RUSH: I want to try… Folks, this is gonna be really tough ’cause I’ve got six pages here. But as they say, “It’s important.” I’m holding here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a column/essay written today by Victor Davis Hanson. It’s published at www.Hoover.org. He works at the Hoover Institute, which is on the campus of Stanford. The title of his piece is “A License to Hate,” and it is a piece that points out and marvels at the ability of the left to engage in some of the most insultingly hate-filled rhetoric in the form of allegations against you, me, and Trump, and they never get called on it.
He’s a card-carrying Never Trumper and just despises Trump, just hates his guts — irrationally so. “Recently on CNN … Rick Wilson characterized Donald Trump’s supporters as his ‘credulous rube ten-toothed base.'” It’s in quotes, “‘credulous rube ten-toothed base.’ Wilson was not original in his smear of the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump. He was likely resonating an earlier slander of Politico reporter Marco Caputo.
“[Caputo] had tweeted of the crowd he saw at a Trump rally: ‘If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.’ Was the point of these stereotypes that poor white working-class people who supposedly voted for [Trump] ate improperly, did not practice proper dental hygiene, or did not visit dentists — or all three combined,” or are they just plain stupid and that’s how you describe somebody stupid as having no teeth?
“When challenged, Caputo doubled down on his invective. He snarled, ‘Oh no! I made fun of garbage people jeering at another person as they falsely accused him of lying and flipped him off. ‘Someone fetch a fainting couch.’ Caputo’s ‘Garbage people’ was also a synonym for the smears that two career FBI agents on separate occasions had called the archetypical Trump voters,” garbage people. That would be Peter Strzok Smirk, Lisa Page, some of that cabal there.
“In the released trove of the Department of Justice text communications involving the Clinton email probe, an unidentified FBI employee had texted to another FBI attorney his abject contempt for the proverbial Trump voter and indeed middle America itself: ‘Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS [‘pieces of sh*t’].’ In fact, Trump in 2016 received about 90% of all Republican votes, about the same ratio as won by both recent presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney.”
These are people, by the way, who never expect this stuff to be seen. This is how they’re talking to each other. This is the contempt. These are elites. These are establishmentarian types. This is part and parcel of the contemptuous, arrogant condescension that the people in Washington have for everybody else. “Recently actor Jim Carey tweeted a picture of Trump supporters as apes…
“Rep. Hank Johnson (who … believed that too many American troops based on the shoreline of Guam might ‘tip’ the island over and capsize it) recently compared Trump to Hitler, and characterized Trump’s supporters — which included 90% of the Republican Party — as ‘older, less educated, less prosperous, and they are dying early. Their lifespans are decreasing, and many are dying from alcoholism, drug overdoses, liver disease, or simply a broken heart caused by economic despair.’
“For former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump supporters are ‘virulent people’ and ‘the dregs of society.'” Of course, Hillary and the deplorables comes to mind. “Note the force of such dehumanizing invective that transcends political differences. Trump voters were not just mistaken in their political allegiances. Instead, they looked like toothless zombies and stunk up stores, and are not quite human, and are destined to die off. And all this from supposedly progressive [liberals’, quick to demonize others who would mimic their venom.”
You know liberals are right there; if they hear anybody talking like this about them, why, it’s the end of the world. “At about the same time as Wilson’s recent smear, multimillionaire TV personality Donny Duetsch [sic] weighed in on television about the Trump supporters who favor building a barrier on the southern border… ‘This is all [Trump] has left. That one metaphor, that one thing that talks to that 39, 40, 41% base that says:
“‘Either the black man, or the brown man, or the Jewish man, or the media man, or the banker man is coming to take your wife?’ According to Duetsch’s analysis, were the legions of Democrats — including Sens. Biden and Chuck Schumer—who supported the Secure Fence Act of 2006 … also worried over their virility or is just the working middle class? Both Wilson and Deutsch in the past had also characterized Trump supporters as Nazi-like.
“Both, in lieu of any analyses of why or how Trump got elected or has found success in restoring the economy to robust growth, resorted to crude stereotypes of a constituency in a fashion they knew would be exempt from criticisms of bias and crude stereotyping. Similarly, for historian Jon Meacham and Rep. Stephen Cohen (R-TN) [sic],” he’s a Democrat from Tennessee, “Trump’s audience and appeal are similar to those of the Ku Klux Klan’s of the 1920s. The New York Times takes loud pride in its adamant opposition to hatred and racial, class, and gender bias — at least in theory.
“That is why it both hired and understandably fired in the same day tech writer Quinn Norton, once it discovered that she had remained friends with notorious alt-right racist Andrew Auernheimer, despite claims of frequently disassociating herself from his repugnant views.” He goes on to describe other hires by the Times like “the racist Harvard Law School grad Sarah Jeong. She had not just befriended a racist,” and goes on and on. “For decades race and gender studies academics had argued that overtly expressed racism against whites was not real racism, but could be contextualized by prior white oppression.”
Meaning, whites are fair game because they’re the original racists, they’re the original oppressors. So you can say about whites whatever you want. “In the age of furor against Trump, their theories now went off campus and were being adjudicated by a wider constituency—and yet they did not seem to win agreement from the general public.
“But the hatred was not confined to the media and politicos, but rather also came from the very top of the Democratic Party. After the election, a defeated Hillary Clinton openly doubled-down on her earlier smear of Trump’s base as deplorables and irredeemables, in recalibrating Barack Obama’s old saw of the white working class as ‘clingers’ who had failed to appreciate his transformative candidacy.
Mr. Hanson goes on with examples like this for numerous pages and then asks, what does all this hate speech, as uttered by people on the left, signify? “One, there is terrible frustration among both the progressive Left (and the Never Trump Right),” terrible frustration. “So far Trump has not been stopped. His foreign and domestic agendas often find success and resonate with about 40-45 percent of the American people. Much of the uncouthness, then, reflects their own frustrations and sense of alienation that millions of Americans have tuned them out.”
And, boy, is this bingo. I think what all this is is these people used to think of themselves as the great opinion leaders, opinion makers, and they’re being ignored. They’ve warned everybody for all these years about Trump. They’ve told everybody that Trump’s this kind of reprobate and that, and they can’t get his numbers below 42%! And that’s been their objective, to drive him down to the thirties or twenties and they can’t get it done and they’re frustrated and they’re mad at you for not believing them.
So they’re piling on. They’re adding on. They’re intensifying. And also they’re cowards. “Most of the slurs are voiced by elites, especially politicos, journalists, and celebrities. Perhaps their angst is driven by class—as in how can their own superior logic and reasoning fail to resonate with 63 million voters?”
How come Trump can talk to these people and we can’t? Why do they listen to him and not us? Answer: Well, obviously Trump voters are stupid, hopefully stupid, they’re ignorant, they’re ugly, they’re filthy, they’re dirty, they can’t take care of their own personal hygiene, and now they’re becoming like apes and Nazis! That’s how arrogant this crowd is, plus cowardice.
“We are learning that the entire idea of political correctness was never much about universal ideas of tolerance of the other, or insistence that language and protocols must not stigmatize individuals by lumping them into stereotyped and dehumanized collective groups. What we are witnessing, instead, is that it is fine to demonize millions, from their appearance to their purported hygiene and smell to affinities with feces and apes—if it serves political or cultural agendas.”
In other words, you can be as mean-spirited and extremist and filled with hate all you want, as long as your target is Trump voters and Republicans. You’ll be hailed and applauded and invited back over and over again on cable news to continue the vitriol and the hatred. “Cultural progressivism is about raw power, not principle.”
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