[Billthedrill]

It's obvious that the far left has decided there are no longer constraints on what it can do to anyone who disagrees with it. How did this happen? Who let the dogs out? The answer is not university presidents. The answer is that the Obama administration let the dogs out.

This is the rotten fruit of the tree of "transformative government". It has become painfully obvious that there is an enormous cultural push taking place and that those of us who have been identified as enemies will not simply be stilled, but eliminated. The perpetrators know perfectly well that they are not the majority, but a temporarily empowered minority that may, through violence, have an effect disproportionate to their actual numbers.

No single election is going to stem this relentless hatred, this deliberate provocation, this totalitarian insanity. The culture war has turned hot. It didn't need to be this way but we have what we have.

[nathanbedford]

Back in the halcyon days of the Republic in the 1960s before race riots tore the nation apart, I can be forgiven for adhering to a belief that free speech was enshrined in the Constitution and was sought after by all people of goodwill. In those days the Democrat party and the left could at least plausibly lay claim to a definition of "liberal" which retained its historic meaning which, at root, stood for freedom of expression.

In those days the siren of the ACLU seduced me for a time as exciting ideals of individual liberty and freedom of expression were being propounded by the Warren court. The frontiers of individual freedom were advancing! I was young, I was earnest, and, God knows, I was naïve.

I was naïve because, although I never wavered from conservative conviction, I believed the left when it said it was advancing freedom of expression out of regard for the Constitution. It did not occur to me to suspect them of duplicity, of exploiting the Constitution while they were out of power in the law courts, culturally and in the popular mind. Alas, they advanced the "liberal" arguments for freedom of expression quite cynically with no intention of observing those principles once they gained legal and cultural power.

Unlike Hillary, I had no idea who Saul Alinsky was nor was I informed about the Frankfurt School. Rather, it all sounded so noble. Perhaps I am still uninformed but I can think of no example in history in which the left, having gained power, has kept their end of the "liberal" bargain. Does freedom of expression thrive any place where the left dominates, in North Korea, China, Cuba, Venezuela…?

Having lost that bit of naïveté, or rather having it wrenched from me, I had to come to terms with the understanding that the left is wholly untroubled by conscience in this or any other regard. They do not operate out of a belief system which is in any way congruent with ours -or the belief system of any decent person. They proceed from a principle that all means are justified by their utopian ends.

Appeals to conscience leaves them unmoved because their computers function with a different operating system, their conscience is alien to us, using the same words they speak and hear a different language. In this Orwellian world it is pointless for us to try to restore the Enlightenment's definition of "liberal," because that is to take a knife to a gunfight.