“MAGA and Christian Nationalism: Bigger threat to America than Hamas could ever be” was the original headline on a vicious article published at the left-wing website Salon.com on Thursday.
The piece, written by Brian Karem, drew considerable attention on social media as many condemned the thesis and the tone of the piece.
Karem was Playboy’s former senior White House correspondent, and his byline has also appeared at TheBulwark.com. His childish scribblings include eye-rolling conclusions, such as the idea that the reason President Joe Biden is unpopular is “because of people like [House Speaker] Mike Johnson, who claim we don’t live in a democracy and that Gawd (sic) oversees our government.”
The former White House correspondent wrote that House Republicans offer “a discount version of the apocalyptic orgasm the holy rollers have dreamed of for years.”
He wrote that Johnson, the new House speaker, is “determined to convert the U.S. into a theocracy.” His ire wasn’t just directed at Republicans in Congress, however. It also was pointed at conservative Christians in general.
The piece itself reads like a poorly written screed of a teenage capital-“A” atheist who thinks that anyone who embraces or even respects and admires the 2,000-year-old Christian tradition that built the West is a moron.
Even the editors at Salon seem to have acknowledged how ridiculous and inflammatory Karem’s initial headline was. They later changed it to the slightly less caustic “Far-right MAGA theocrats: Most dangerous threat to America.”
This rancid kind of take from the former Playboy writer isn’t surprising. But the juvenile, straw man arguments are not what’s really noteworthy here.
Typically, it’s fine to just ignore the random rants published by Salon.
But the Karem piece deserves a little extra attention because it reveals something the Right needs to understand about the modern Left. Some conservatives on social media were shocked that Salon published Karem’s piece, but in a sense I’m glad they did.
Its mindset is becoming ubiquitous on the Left.
Do they really think that traditional Americans—who, for instance, still believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman—are worse than vicious terrorists who glorify in the torture and slaughter of innocent people (and who would happily do so to their LGBTQ “allies” if they could)?
In many cases, yes.
The Tea Party grandma down the street who goes to church and who voted for President Donald Trump is, even for many “mainstream” Democrats, a bigger threat to “our democracy” than Islamists or Communist China.
The Right is the real enemy that must be destroyed. All other threats—if they even see them as threats at all—are treated with a shrug or even an embrace.
The much-mocked “queer Jews for Palestine” phenomenon isn’t ignorance; it’s an alliance.
Right-leaning voices have been purged from increasingly monolithic left-wing college campuses. Yet, Ivy League schools—so willing to trample on free speech in the name of preventing “microaggressions”—have suddenly rediscovered their attachment to free speech now that openly antisemitic supporters of Hamas have erupted on campus.
When Republican-appointed Judge Kyle Duncan of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals appeared to speak to a small group at Stanford Law School in March, the campus Left melted down.
Here’s how The New York Times described the situation: “Students frequently interrupted him with heckling. One protester called for his daughters to be raped, Duncan said. When he asked Stanford administrators to calm the crowd, the associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion walked to the lectern and instead began her remarks by criticizing him. ‘For many people here, your work has caused harm,’ she told him.”
These weren’t just undergraduate students at a no-name school, they were law students at one of the most prestigious universities in the country.
It isn’t just the collegiate institutional Left that thinks this way.
There was a revealing moment way back during the Democratic presidential primaries in 2015. The presidential candidates were asked in a debate: “Which enemy are you most proud of?”
Almost all mentioned domestic opponents, such as the “National Rifle Association,” the “coal lobby,” and “Republicans.”
The notable exception was former Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., a veteran of the Vietnam War, who said, “I’d have to say the enemy soldier that threw the grenade that wounded me, but he’s not around right now to talk to.”
His answer was treated as bizarre and awkward. How strange to think of an enemy on a foreign battlefield as a greater enemy than your neighbor with differing political views.
In 2023, Webb’s thoughts about national reconciliation and learning the lessons from our Civil War fall on deaf ears in the Democratic Party.
What’s more common to hear is angry, threatening diatribes from Biden calling “MAGA” Republicans—by which he means any Republican who isn’t actively aiding the Left’s agenda—a threat to democracy.
So much for “normalcy.”
The Left’s mentality is “all enemies to the Right.”
When you combine that mentality with the fact that they control most of the West’s most powerful institutions, from academia and Hollywood to Big Business and Big Tech, you can see why our civilization is in such a crisis.
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