Liberals pretend to champion tolerance and diversity, but theyâre increasingly intolerant of ideas with which they disagree.
thefederalist.com
When you tear out a manâs tongue, youâre not proving him a liar, youâre telling the world you fear what he might say.â Tyrion Lannister, âGame of Thronesâ
For decades, liberals, with the help of the mainstream media, have championed tolerance of people groups and ideas, specifically on race, sexuality, and social welfare programs. Much of their success has been due to their claimed love for tolerance and big-tent pretense.
Yet itâs becoming increasingly clear many liberals donât actually practice the very tolerance they advocate. They hold a double standard for one set of progressivesâthe elite media and politiciansâand another for the rest of society, which undermines the Leftâs credibility. That once-banner statement for liberalismââI disagree but will defend to the death your right to say what you thinkââis now dead, replaced with a naked, de-principled thirst for power. Those slogans were useful bait while they lasted. Now for the reality show.
Some Lives Matter
One of the most persuasive ways the Left has garnered votes is to repeatedly chide the Right for supposedly leaving minority groups out in the cold, insisting
they will pick up the slack and offer a helping hand to those ostracized. They claim that, whether through social programs, advocacy groups, or even Hollywood storytelling, they will help minorities through difficult times.
In his
speech last week at the memorial in Dallas for five police officers killed by a black man, President Barack Obama addressed himself African Americans in this spirit.
And so when African Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment; when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently, so that if youâre black youâre more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested, more likely to get longer sentences, more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime; when mothers and fathers raise their kids right and have âthe talkâ about how to respond if stopped by a police officer â âyes, sir,â âno, sirâ â but still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the doorâŚwe cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid. We canât simply dismiss it as a symptom of political correctness or reverse racism.â
Much of the mainstream media applauded Obamaâs speech as timely and on-point. But how does the media feel about another black man, who is a medical doctor, conservative, and former candidate for president? Then his race is not good enough to overcome the evils of his beliefs. Ben Carsonâs âminorityâ status becomes irrelevant, and
GQ doesnât hold back from attacking this âbad black person.â Itâs clear itâs not enough to be African American: one must be liberal, perhaps with a chip in your shoulder, to be heralded by a mainstream magazine.
So much for diversity. It appears the Left only wants to celebrate and tolerate different races when they can exploit them.
The recent racial strife between cops and minorities and the cop murders that have followed show such a bias against law enforcement itâs unbelievable. These same people will praise law enforcement if it behooves themâsay, at a televised ceremonyâor if said member of law enforcement is a minority, but in reality, mainstream media has little respect for the men and women who are police officers or members of our military, who daily put their lives on the line for our collective safety.
Zack Ford,
an editor at Think Progress, tweeted about the recent cop killings, âGiven how police havenât been held accountable for murdering black people, itâs no surprise some are taking justice into their own hands.â (The
original tweet has since been deleted.) Jesse Benn, a writer at Huffington Post,
recently wrote about the same killings:
After Pat Smith, the mother of one of the men killed in the Benghazi attack, spoke at the Republican National Convention,
GQ writer Bethlehem Shoals
tweeted, âI donât care how many children Pat Smith lost I would like to beat her to death.â After being called out for inciting violence against a grieving mother, Shoals has since deleted and apologized for the tweet.
Liberals often view families of blacks, veterans, or cops with disdain and zero tolerance if they are conservative, a stark contrast from the messaging from any liberal political candidate or mainstream media outlet. This undermines their credibility, especially on the campaign trail. Their relationship is selectively beneficial based on political gain or media hits. As a friend of mine,
Nick Short, said on Twitter, âThey practice marcuse repressive tolerance: intolerance against movements from right and tolerance of movements from the left.â
Progressives, especially during elections, advertise they welcome all minorities, that they support law enforcement and our military, yet in reality they do nothing of the sort. Those are empty words to garner votes. If liberals really cared about free speech, diversity, or tolerance, they would speak out against illiberal behavior like this, and against bigger expressions of it such as government efforts to silence churches and small businesses based on ideas about sexuality.
Twitter Bans Milo
Similarly, Twitter, a platform that claims to encourage free expression and exchange of ideas, is increasingly proving it will tolerate ideas coming from the Left, but not tolerate ideas coming from the Right side of the political aisle.
Last Tuesday, Twitter banned Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart tech editor and outspoken gay libertarian whose tweets are a mix of politics, photos of himself, and jokes about liberals, feminists, or anyone else with whom he disagrees. A self-proclaimed friend to the âalt-rightâ movement, Yiannopoulosâ narcissism and provocateur attitude can be egregious and annoying. Still, heâs outspoken against the dangers of feminism, the Leftâs hypocritical stance on gays, and âsocial justice warriors.â Although his behavior is over the top, heâs never outright threatened a person online.
After engaging in several
contentious tweets with Ghostbuster actress Leslie Jones, Twitter deemed Yiannopoulosâs comments harassment and banned him from the site. A company spokesman told
Buzzfeed News, âPeople should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter. But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.â However, upon reading the tweet that put Yiannopoulos over the edge, itâs unclear how it constitutes harassment, much less anything worse than the string of examples on Twitter that include death threats, race-baiting, and misogyny.
And compare it to Leslieâs tweets:
Here are just a few examples of truly offensive and outrageous tweets whose users seem to remain unbanned and active: