Another examination of a root cause.
https://www.weeklystandard.com/barton-swaim/the-madness-returns
The Madness Returns
The ferocious incivility Americans have witnessed for decades has arisen largely from the left—and for good reason
FTA:
The news media are attempting to draw parallels between these recent events and spectacles that appear to cast Republicans and conservatives in the role of delirious demonstrators or would-be assassins—the 2011 shooting of Democratic congresswoman Gabby Giffords or angry voters shouting at congressmen after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2009. The parallels don’t work. Giffords’s assailant wasn’t any kind of conservative or Republican. The anti-Obamacare protesters did not appear to hold partisan or ideological allegiances (Republican lawmakers got earfuls, too) and their protests were nothing close to the shrill malevolence and outright violence carried out by today’s more strident progressives.
...
Senate Republicans, by contrast, even when they strongly opposed a Democratic nominee, refrained from engaging in anything close to such tactics. Nothing remotely similar was done to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, or Elena Kagan. Merrick Garland, Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee, appointed late in the president’s second term, was denied a vote on his nomination but accused of no crimes or of holding retrograde opinions. Liberals complained bitterly about the Garland nomination, but who wouldn’t rather be garlanded than borked?
Unless we’re prepared to believe that Republican presidents tend to nominate bigots and sexual criminals whereas Democratic presidents do not, we are left to conclude that Democrats and liberals are more comfortable with imputing base motives and dishonorable conduct to their adversaries than Republicans and conservatives. The question is: Why?
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Think of power in two parts: cultural power and political power. Liberals hold nearly all the cultural power the United States has to offer. They dominate the universities, even the universities in the South, where liberalism is anemic. Cultural institutions—museums, arts agencies, opera houses—belong almost exclusively to liberals. Their control of the entertainment industry is nearly complete. The media, too: Fox News and talk radio notwithstanding, liberals still dominate the most eminent and authoritative divisions of print and televised news. How they acquired all this cultural power is a dense topic; suffice it here to say there was no concerted effort to get it. The sphere of cultural power attracts a certain kind of person—a person who believes society ought to be arranged along rational lines and in keeping with the most advanced thought of the day—and such persons are, almost by definition, liberal. To put it less charitably, the cultural sphere attracts people who view themselves as part of an elite, and most elites believe that society should be run by elites.
Political power is something altogether different and, in a republic modeled on universal suffrage, cannot be dominated by the elite simply because they are elite. To achieve the kind of hegemony in the political sphere liberals have achieved in the cultural sphere, they would need a philosophy of government and a field of candidates capable of appealing to people who live in places they would rather not visit. They would need people who can win elections, not just in the boroughs of New York and in L.A. County, but also in Kentucky and Arizona and Nebraska and Alabama.
The problem for liberals is that they believe their political power should correspond to their cultural power.
...
[It just stays this good for the rest of the long article.]
This article repeats what we already know, but in a concise, sensible, intelligible way that makes it a good article to pass on to those who only know current events through glancing at the MSM.
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/illegal-immigrant-caravan-election-meddling/
Illegal Immigrant Caravan: Real Election Meddling By The Left
FTA:
The “caravan” of illegal immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras now making its way to the U.S. border is no accident. The timing, planning and financing of this tragic parade has but one intent: to disrupt and influence our midterm elections. Is this what the left means by “election meddling”?
The heart-rending shots of dirt-poor people from Central America have been making the evening news, which pretends this is some kind of spontaneous movement to come to the U.S. rather than an organized attempt at disruption.
Women and children have been shoved to the fore of the columns to hide the fact that many of the 4,000 to 10,000-strong throng of people are in fact working-age males, not families.
...
And what if they do make it to the border? No doubt, President Trump will have bolstered security significantly. He already has said he will send the U.S. military to the border. Will one or more troublemakers in the group try to provoke violence, as they already did in Mexico? No doubt, the leftists and the sympathetic media would like that. For them, chaos isn’t a tragedy, it’s a strategy.
In the case of the media, they’ve covered this caravan as if it were a second Children’s Crusade, not a leftist political stunt. They’ve done little if any digging into the origins and financing of the caravan, pretending instead that it’s an honest response to “gang violence” or the three countries’ failure to create economic opportunities for their own citizens.
Americans shouldn’t fall for the lie.
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We need to send a message to the world: You’re welcome here to visit or to immigrate through legal channels. But we won’t tolerate further violations of our immigration laws. We can’t allow large groups of people, even if some are desperate, to violate our borders. It’s time to build that wall, stop all illegal immigration, and restore our border.
Gotta read this one later too.