The left's maniacal war on common sense Exclusive: David Kupelian highlights startling pattern of perversity, insanity, destructiveness Published: 20 hours ago
A major crime wave is ravaging your neighborhood – not only frequent break-ins and burglaries, but armed robberies, assaults and even murders. What do you do? Do you arm yourself and make sure your doors are locked at night and add a security system?
Or … do you intentionally leave your doors unlocked and post a large, brightly lit sign saying, “Welcome criminals and psychopaths. There’s a lot of money in here, women too. The doors are unlocked and we are unarmed”?
In today’s America, one of the two major political parties favors the latter option.
Case in point: High-profile Democrat Rahm Emanuel is currently mayor of Chicago, where more than 4,000 people were shot last year, 762 of them murdered. The former Obama White House chief of staff is proud Chicago has some of the nation’s most stringent gun-control laws, even though decades of research proves more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens reliably results in less crime. Worse, the mayor defiantly boasts of his determination to keep Chicago a “sanctuary city” – meaning the city’s police are prohibited from cooperating with federal law enforcement in getting criminal illegal aliens off the city’s streets by deporting them. Indeed, the “sanctuary city” designation serves as a “Welcome” sign to violent criminal illegals, assuring them that Chicago, like hundreds of other sanctuary cities, is their “safe space.”
Likewise, in San Francisco, the famed BART rapid transit system is currently plagued by “swarming attacks,” in which a dozen or more teens board a train car and assault and rob passengers. On April 22, for example, 40 to 60 teens boarded a train at the Coliseum station, robbed seven passengers and beat up two. Normally, of course, surveillance footage of such crimes would be immediately released to the media so the public could help identify the perpetrators. But not in San Francisco, where BART officials steadfastly refuse to release video footage of such crimes to the media. Why would they do that? Because, you see, letting the public see the video would encourage racism, they claim.
This is the same thinking that recently led a Seattle city councilman to object to hosing human feces and urine off public sidewalks in an area with homeless shelters because it would be racially insensitive. Power-washing the sidewalks, he claims, might evoke “images of the use of hoses against civil-rights activists,” and thus traumatize observers.
Unfortunately, it’s not just with regard to crime and public safety that the left piously champions policies that utterly defy common sense. It’s the same in almost every area of life:
Responding to relentless LGBT pressure, virtually the entire sports world, including the Olympics, is now allowing powerful male athletes who “self-identify” as female to compete against actual women, often winning the women’s competitions and – in some cases – seriously injuring their less-powerful female competitors.
With Obama-era taxes and regulations squeezing millions of people out of the labor market, keeping money and jobs offshore and smothering the U.S. economy, President Trump promises to implement the obvious common-sense fix: seriously reduce taxes and eliminate ill-conceived business-crushing regulations. But the left’s antagonism to the sensible is evident even here. Their envy toward “the rich” blinds them to the necessity of allowing businesses to be profitable and thereby expand and employ more Americans. And after Trump’s June rally in Iowa, when the president explained how he had wanted to put a rich successful person, not a poor unsuccessful one, in charge of the U.S. economy, Democrats and the “mainstream media” attacked him as a hater of the poor.
Countries the world over are suffering from terrorism. Since the vast majority of these terror attacks today are committed by Muslims in the name of Islam, one obvious common-sense response for concerned nations would be to limit Muslim immigration, especially from known terror hotbeds. Yet the left – including the Democratic Party, “mainstream” media, most university populations, progressive judges and Hollywood – seems intent on doing the opposite, bringing as many Muslims as possible into Europe, the U.K. and America. For the United Kingdom and Europe – already reeling from major Islamic terror attacks, an epidemic of sexual assaults and other immigrant crimes, widespread non-assimilation and “no-go zones,” and the steady encroachment of Shariah law, female genital mutilation, “honor killings” and other anti-Western aspects of Islamic culture – it may be too late to reverse course. Not so in America – yet.President Donald Trump in February said his administration was committed to a “common sense” approach to immigration and national security, promising to do everything in his power to stop terror attacks within the U.S.”We are getting such praise for our stance, and it’s a stance of common sense – maybe a certain toughness, but it’s really more than toughness,” Trump said during his Feb. 13 press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “It’s a stance of common sense, and we are going to pursue it vigorously. And we don’t want to have our country have the kinds of problems that you’re witnessing taking place not only here, but all over the world.”
Nowhere is common sense under greater attack by the left than in higher education. Americans were repeatedly told by pollsters last year that college-educated folk tended to favor Hillary Clinton, while those with only a high-school diploma favored Donald Trump. Did that mean Hillary Clinton voters were somehow smarter, wiser, more perceptive, more mature and better informed than Trump voters? Obviously not.In reality, not only are those attending college today subjected to the distorted, left-wing, politically correct, anti-American indoctrination ubiquitous in the modern academy, but there is also mounting evidence that campus life is actually causing mental illness! An influential 2015 report in the Atlantic, titled “The Coddling of the American Mind,” cited evidence that colleges today literally promote pathological thinking:
Zitat But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.
Ideology and emotion trump reality
All this raises a disturbing question: Does the left even care – at all – about evidence, facts, history, proven principles? Or is everything, including reality itself, subservient to their coveted agenda, however delusional and destructive? In my book “The Snapping of the American Mind,” I cite a mountain of peer-reviewed research documenting, beyond any reasonable doubt, the sad fact that early abuse, especially sexual abuse, often causes the abused person to later self-identify as homosexual. Yet after citing study after study after study after study after study after study providing overwhelming proof, I make the following observation:
However clear, compelling, and heartbreaking the evidence, none of this apparently matters. Fewer and fewer people seem to care anymore about actual causes and effects, about the true nature of things. Instead, too many of us care only about what we want to believe, what we wish to be true. We want homosexuality to be a healthy lifestyle, even though, as the Wall Street Journal has documented, “Projections have shown that if current trends continue, half of all gay and bisexual men will be HIV-positive by age 50.” We want transgenderism to be normal, even though reason, experience, and biology all shout otherwise.
In other words, the left is so mesmerized by its utopian ideology and its pet “narratives” (euphemism for delusions) that it simply believes and acts – and aggressively strives to indoctrinate others – in accord with its alternate reality. To hardcore leftists, reason, common sense, the laws of economics and the lessons of history are all inexplicably irrelevant.
Before concluding, let’s pause, take a deep breath and ask: What exactly is this thing we call “common sense”?
Although philosophers and intellectuals since Aristotle have theorized about it, in reality common sense is simply the internal guidance system God gives man, transcending ideology, education and economic status. It is the mysterious essence of logic, clear thinking and right acting, the twin brother of conscience and the heartbeat of a competent, successful life. As such, it is a priceless gift from the Creator.
However, it is precisely because common sense represents an inner perception of what is right and sensible – which implies an obedience to a higher good – that it interferes with the designs of the perpetually angry and discontented left, which aspires to impose an entirely unworkable utopian fantasy-world on the rest of us.
Consider that although the Ten Commandments constitute the moral foundation of Western civilization, its precepts are uniquely congruent with conscience and common sense. That shouldn’t seem odd, in light of God’s biblical promises to put His laws “into [our] hearts.”
“I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.” – Jeremiah 31:33
“This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them.” – Hebrews 10:16
Common sense tells us stealing is wrong; if you’re a little child and another kid steals your stuff, you know it’s wrong without anyone telling you and without ever having heard of the Ten Commandments. It’s God’s law written in your heart – “self-evident” truth, as Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence. In the same way, we know murder is wrong without anyone telling us; same with adultery and lying (“bearing false witness against our neighbor”). It’s a reality-based sense of truth common to us all. Or at least to all who have not yet been seduced or traumatized away from their original God-given moral sense.
What we cryptically call “the left” is at war with all that America once most cherished – liberty, genuine Christian faith and morality, equality under the law, personal responsibility, limited government and unlimited opportunity. And the primary battle in that war is the left’s ongoing frontal assault on common sense. For common sense is truly the gateway to the rest of our blessings, including our safety, prosperity, happiness and sanity itself – and to our future as a free people.