Cultural Revolution

As the Left's near-hysterical commentary on the recent mass shooting in El Paso builds toward a crescendo (somehow, Dayton is less important), we are to believe that it's all Donald Trump's fault and that his followers are complicit in the death of 22 innocent people. The trained hamsters in the main stream media echo and amplify all of this, suggesting that Trump's rhetoric is to blame—after all, he's a "white supremacist" who just happened to escape opprobrium until he defeated the Democrats in the 2016 election.

David P. Goldman tries to get past the Left's festival of blame and examine the root causes of these heinous events:

Mass shootings are a special form of suicide. The shooter never expects to survive. But the shooter combines self-hatred with group hatred. Hate becomes so melded with the shooter's identity that he determines to take as many people as he can with him. They are of the same order as the pilot who crashed a Germanwings airliner into the Alps in 2015.

Emil Durkheim's 1897 diagnosis of "anomic suicide" describes the Columbine perpetrators as well as the 2016 San Bernardino attack by Muslim fanatics, the "right-wing" shooter in El Paso and the "left-wing" shooter in Dayton. They are individuals cut off from society, destabilized by change and despairing of their own place in the world. Such monsters always have been among us. But now we are cultivating such monsters by destroying the ties that bind us to each other, to our past and to our future.

In order to replace the existing culture with the Left's utopian vision for what they believe we MUST become, they indulge in dark fantasy. They allege that the current leadership of the existing culture is a vile and reprehensible white supremacist, they argue. His followers are just as bad—they are "deplorable," using their "white privilege" to "victimize" all others. Therefore, the existing culture must be replaced by something better — oh ... that just happens to be the culture/ideology they embrace.

But Goldman examines this dark fantasy and sees it a bit differently:

The ruling liberal dogma tells us that the past was an unrelieved pageant of oppression against people of color, women, and other victims. We [the present day Left] are the first "woke" generation, and everything that preceded us is to be abominated.

I honestly do believe that many on the Left do, in fact, think the fantasy is real. That dark and malevolent forces aren't limited to fringe extremists, but instead are embodied by existing political leaders, and in the extreme, almost half of the adult population. That despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, "hate" is what America is all about. This fever swamp of emotion is disconnected from evidence or logic or common sense. It is sad and dangerous at the same time. The dark fantasy is an attempt to depict our governance, our laws, and our culture as being irreparably broken. And that demands a response—a "cultural revolution" in which the Left leads.