Conservatives must reject an alternative brand of hate.
Before Hillary Clinton appeared to collapse while boarding a Secret Service van on Sunday, weekend Twitter was ablaze over Hillary’s assertion that fully half of Trump’s supporters belonged in what she called “the basket of deplorables.” In her words, that meant they are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.”
The comment triggered enough of a backlash that she pulled the rarest of Clinton maneuvers: an immediate backtrack. “Clinton, in her apology, said, “I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong.”
But she still vowed to fight “bigotry” in his campaign.
So now of course there’s a cottage industry dedicated to determining exactly what percentage of Trump voters are bigoted. I’m under no illusions about the virtue of many of Trump’s supporters, and I certainly don’t believe in political fictions regarding the “great and good” American people. The American people are a collection of human beings, and that means that many millions can be truly vicious, and many millions more can believe truly evil things. Indeed, scripture teaches us that we’re all “evil,” so in the truest sense, I’m a “deplorable” also — a deplorable redeemed at the foot of the Cross.
The true cultural danger is not so much the presence of evil men (such people will always be with us), but the descent into depravity where evil becomes good and good becomes evil. There are elements of the Right — namely the alt-right — that have landed firmly on that ground and deserve to be condemned. The Left, however, has mainstreamed its evil. It loves its “deplorables.” And in so doing, it tempts and beckons even well-meaning men and women to embrace the darkness of its worst policies and actions.
Doubt me? While Donald Trump’s allies (and sometimes Trump himself) have provided aid and comfort to the alt-right, you would never see a President Trump attend a white-supremacist convention and end his remarks with “Thank you, Daily Stormer, and God bless you,” but Democrats have so mainstreamed abortion — the industrialized killing of innocent children — that President Obama is proud to invoke God’s blessings on Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortionist. Hundreds of thousands of children die in its “clinics” every year, yet praise for Planned Parenthood is virtually mandatory within Democratic politics.
Moreover, large sections of the Democratic intelligentsia giggle at the most profane and blasphemous trolling — so long as it’s trolling for the sake of abortion. Witness the far-left cheering section when abortion activists chant “Hail Satan” as pro-life protesters sing “Amazing Grace.” Or watch lefties smile when self-described Satanists pour milk all over women, allegedly simulating the oppression of breast milk.
Related: Meet the New Public Face of Abortion-on-Demand: Satanists
It is a simple historical fact that the modern abortion-rights movement is the grandchild of progressive eugenics, the thoroughly racist enterprise designed to scrub the human race of so-called “undesirables.” It is a simple fact that abortionists kill a disproportionate number of black babies. Yet now a movement builds to “shout your abortion,” as if a person should be proud of hiring a doctor to kill their child.
A movement is now building on the left to ‘shout your abortion,’ as if a person should be proud of hiring a doctor to kill her child.
Beyond matters of life and death, it is now considered a positive good in some quarters of the Left to suppress religious liberty, to hound faithful Christians out of their careers and livelihoods merely because they believe — and practice — the fundamental tenets of their faith. Social-justice warriors attack the nuclear family and traditional sexual morality in spite of overwhelming evidence that the breakdown of the family is responsible for immense human suffering. Democrats rightly condemn Trump for stoking violence at some of his rallies, yet the party openly embraces Black Lives Matter — when its rallies have featured violence on a scale that dwarfs anything seen at any Trump rally.
For conservatives, the single most alarming thing about the Trump movement is the alacrity with which many of his supporters have embraced or excused his crassest, most vicious, and sometimes even racist comments in the name of “defeating political correctness,” “punching back twice as hard,” or — to quote a neighbor — “kicking ass.” His core supporters have tried mightily to find the good in evil actions, and some small percentage have gone much farther than their leader, launching vile and threatening hate campaigns across the length and breadth of the Internet. For a party built around a man who sought to appeal to the “better angels of our nature,” this is a devastating development.
#related#The Left’s conscience, however, is already seared. It calls out bigotry on the right even as it accepts and sometimes openly celebrates death, intolerance, and oppression. This is not irredeemable, and — when evil is so loudly portrayed as good – it is often even understandable. But it is still deplorable. It would be a great tragedy of this election if virtue fled the scene entirely, leaving two sides of deplorables, each calling out the other’s unique sins. The Left has staked out its vile positions. Will the Right soon follow?