Progressives think of themselves as people who are making the world better. So I thought it would be helpful to review just a few things progressives have done and said just this past summer. My hope is that open-minded individuals on the left can begin to understand why some people do not see the left in quite the same way they see themselves.
In May, the New York City Council voted to de-criminalize urinating in public.
Last week, the Italian Supreme Court voted to legalize public masturbation.
According to a new poll from Ipsos Public Affairs, “Americans increasingly don't care if people swear in public . . . . ‘The acceptability of it in the American public has just kind of skyrocketed,’ Kaitlyn McAuliffe, a senior research manager at Ipsos, explained . . . . Of those survey respondents who said they used the F-word one or more times a day, Bernie Sanders was their top presidential candidate.” (Italics added.)
In August, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote that he will tell his daughter’s teachers that they should bring politics into the classroom and talk to their students against Donald Trump.
At least Milbank is honest about his desire to see schools indoctrinate rather than educate. Few progressives admit that that is what is happening in most American high schools and colleges.
In July, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC told an interviewer: “Over the past year I've been reading a lot about what it was like when Hitler first became chancellor. . . . because I think that's possibly where we are.”
Vice President Joe Biden, with Hillary Clinton on stage behind him, said to an audience of supporters twice on Aug. 15 that Donald Trump “would have loved Stalin.”
Stalin murdered about 30 million people and set up the genocidal Communist regimes of China and North Korea. Biden’s comments were barely reported – but imagine if Donald Trump or Mike Pence had said Hillary Clinton “would have loved Stalin”?
On NPR, Travis Rieder, a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, advocated that Americans be penalized if they have more than one child — because Americans emit too much carbon dioxide. This is only the latest call of environmentalists since the 1960s asking people not to reproduce.
The Ford foundation just announced that it is committed to raising $100 million for Black Lives Matter. The liberals at the Ford Foundation are raising an astronomical sum of money for an America-hating, Israel-hating, and, of course, police-hating organization.
Black actor Jesse Williams, in accepting BET’s Humanitarian Award, described America as, “a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us [black Americans],” and concluded his speech saying: “We’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil – black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.”
Aside from the America-hatred, I have no idea what this last sentence means. But Williams received a prolonged standing ovation, and the media hailed his speech as a masterpiece.
Five days after Islamist terrorists cut off the head of a French Catholic priest while the priest was saying Mass, a reporter with a French Catholic news agency asked Pope Francis, “Holy Father, when you speak of these violent acts, why do you always speak of terrorists but not of Islam?. . . What concrete initiative can you launch or perhaps suggest in order to combat Islamic violence?”
The Pope responded:
“I don’t like to speak of Islamic violence because every day when I open the newspapers I see acts of violence, here in Italy: someone kills his girlfriend, someone else his mother-in-law. . . and these violent people are baptized Catholics! They are violent Catholics. . . . If I spoke about Islamic violence, I would also have to speak about Catholic violence.”
The pope responds that there is also Catholic terror, that a man who was baptized Catholic and “kills his girlfriend” is the moral and religious equivalent of Muslims who engage in mass murder in the name of Islam.
The pope added that the great terrorism of our time is “The god of money.”
Pope Francis, like so many other Catholic priests (especially from Latin America), Protestant ministers, and rabbis, is an example of one of the most important truths of our time: Leftism has influenced Judaism and Christianity far more than Judaism and Christianity have influenced anything.
Dennis Prager’s nationally syndicated radio talk show is heard in Los Angeles on KRLA (AM 870) 9 a.m. to noon. His latest project is the Internet-based Prager University (prageru.com).
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