The progressive thread weaving evil together

There's a common thread weaving together all the terrorist incidents in Europe, all the murders of police officers in the USA, and all the political protest from the sometimes fringe, often violent left-wing and progressive groups in this country.  It's a fundamental determination to tear down and demolish the status quo in society by whatever means are necessary.  It's a declaration of war against the standards that have hitherto defined civilization.

Think I'm exaggerating?  Let's look at a few facts.

The mass exodus of refugees from the Middle East to Europe has been applauded and funded by left-wing individuals and sympathizers.  Witness George Soros' support for and active involvement in the crisis.  He's far from the only player.  I believe that at least some of the blood spilled by fundamentalist Islamic terrorists in Europe is on his hands, because he's done and is still doing everything in his power to bring more of them there.

Witness the deliberate equating of police with street gangs.  For example, here's Ta-Nehisi Coates on the subject:

In the black community, it’s the force they deploy, and not any higher American ideal, that gives police their power ... if the law represents nothing but the greatest force, then it really is indistinguishable from any other street gang. And if the law is nothing but a gang, then it is certain that someone will resort to the kind of justice typically meted out to all other powers in the street.

However, the law - not the police, the law - most certainly does represent something more than "the greatest force".  It's the basis of our social contract.  Defiance of the law means that social contract is breaking down.  To target police is to target those who uphold that social contract.  Thugs kill other thugs as a matter of routine.  To treat police in the same way is to treat them as thugs.  Some of them - the bad apples - may, indeed, be thugs;  and the criminal justice system should and must treat them as such.  However, the vast majority of them are not thugs.  They're decent men and women trying as hard as they can to preserve the social contract.  As George Orwell put it:

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

That's as true today as it's ever been.  Only when those 'rough men' are constrained by and act within the social contract can we have any security.  When those doing violence are not constrained by anything . . . it's thug rule.

The attack on the police in the USA is being orchestrated by movements such as Black Lives Matter, whose name is demonstrably a lie.  BLM will protest against police brutality from dawn to dusk and all night long, but will they say - much less do - anything about the black lives lost to violent criminals, usually themselves black?  I've never heard them do so.  Theirs is a peculiarly one-sided, selective focus.  The criminal murders of blacks vastly outnumber those committed by police, by a factor of at least a hundred to one and probably far higher than that:  but you never hear BLM mention that reality.  They're trying to undermine the social order, the social contract.  Their agitation against the police is merely a means to that end.

BLM is just one example of a flock of social activist organizations geared to challenge the social contract on every level.  They're all funded and organized by shadowy, behind-the-scenes figures, and all work towards the same end from different directions.  For example, the Washington Times recently reported:

Billionaire George Soros has funded liberal organizations intent on bringing confusion, disarray and trouble to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next week.

And they’ve already had some victories.

Civil rights group Color of Change — which Mr. Soros gave $500,000 to in his Foundation’s latest tax return — collected more than 100,000 signatures on a petition to demand Coca-Cola and other companies withdraw their support from the convention. The petition that featured a Coke bottle with the label, “Share a Coke with the KKK.”

Color of Change was joined by UltraViolet, another Soros-backed women’s rights organization, in the petition, an effort to amplify their collective voice against the GOP.

And it worked.

. . .

To demonstrate how extreme Color of Change’s political ideology is, it’s latest campaign is to defund America’s police forces that “don’t defend black lives.” Its social media feeds give no reference to the five men in uniform who lost their lives in Dallas.

. . .

Brave New Films, which received $250,000 from Mr. Soros‘ foundation, tried to make waves for Republicans by creating misinformation about their convention through social media.

Brave New Films is a social media “quick-strike capability” company that uses media, films, volunteers and internet video campaigns to “challenge mainstream media with the truth, and motivates people to take action on social issues nationwide,” according to its website.

In a Facebook posting, Brave New Films bragged about driving a fake internet campaign — a petition to allow for open carry at the convention — into the mainstream media. The petition was reported on as if Republicans wanted it, however, it was simply created by a liberal, Soros troll.

. . .

MoveOn.org is also planning activity. They proudly took responsibility for shutting down Mr. Trump’s rally in Chicago in March, and fundraised off their success.

MoveOn is organizing a “National Doorstep Convention” that runs parallel to the GOP’s convention where members plan on going door-to-door in Ohio and other states to urge voters to “reject the politics of hate sown by Donald Trump and the GOP.”

The group’s been quiet about their plans for actual protests at the convention, but we can bet they’ll be involved. On Wednesday MoveOn urged its members in an email to sign the “Movement for Black Lives Pledge,” being circulated by Black Lives Matter activists, calling Mr. Trump a “hatemonger.”

. . .

Last weekend, the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), a progressive organization that was given $900,000 by Mr. Soros’s Foundation, held a People’s Convention in Pittsburgh, to organize social justice movements ahead of the political conventions both in Cleveland and Philadelphia.

The conference included Black Lives Matter organizers, those campaigning for immigration reform, the Fight for $15, LGBTQ rights, and environmental justice activists. It’s purpose was to give them the tools to communicate and engage with one-another’s campaigns to amplify their collective voice.

“We are beginning to launch a real national organizing framework — that’s something that really hadn’t been seen since ACORN went under,” Jonathan Westin, executive director of New York Communities for Change told the American Prospect of the conference.

That’s right, Mr. Soros is actively working to build another ACORN.

There's more at the link.  Funny how Mr. Soros' name keeps cropping up, isn't it?  However, he's not the only one behind these organizations.  For example, look at who's funding Black Lives Matter.

Jonathan Haidt recently pointed out a root cause of this agitation.

We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They forswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.

... this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized.

. . .

The key idea is that the new moral culture of victimhood fosters “moral dependence” and an atrophying of the ability to handle small interpersonal matters on one’s own. At the same time that it weakens individuals, it creates a society of constant and intense moral conflict as people compete for status as victims or as defenders of victims.

Again, more at the link.

Mr. Haidt's research is in the area of so-called microaggressions;  but I believe it's directly relevant to this discussion.  You see, each of the organizations we've discussed above is trying to exploit the concept and culture of victimhood.  They claim to identify (and identify with) various classes of victims, and seek to mobilize them (and their sympathizers) to agitate against the system that has allegedly made them victims.  If there were no culture of victimhood - if, instead, the focus was on individual responsibility - these organizations would collapse.  Only by denying individual responsibility, focusing instead on groups and the social contract that has until now governed their interaction, can they establish their own reason for being.

This is startlingly reminiscent of the criminal mindset.  I wrote about this in my memoir of prison chaplaincy.  In it, I pointed out a number of characteristics of the criminal's outlook on life, including the following:

3.  Refusal to accept responsibility. The criminal avoids or evades any acceptance or admission of guilt or responsibility. Even when he displays contrition about his actions, it’s usually an outward show. In reality his only genuine regret is that he was discovered. He’ll blame anything and everything, anyone and everyone except himself for the negative consequences of his crimes. Of course, this means that he’ll eagerly agree with those blaming factors in his background for his crimes — it allows him to slide out of accepting any personal responsibility for his actions. It’s always someone else’s fault.

. . .

6.  A need for excitement. The criminal ‘gets a kick’ out of what he does. Even getting caught has its own thrill. Dealing with the arresting officers (perhaps including an exciting car chase that gets him on TV), establishing his place in the hierarchy in the jail, dealing with the courts, trying to ‘beat the rap’: all have their own emotional intensity. The same applies to life in prison. A really hardened convict may spend more time in the Hole than in general population, aggravate and infuriate staff, annoy other inmates… but he doesn’t care. He’s getting a kick out of his ‘power’ to make others react to him.

. . .

10.  A refusal to accept reality. Reality is defined by the criminal on his terms, not by the victim of his crime or by society. A criminal convicted of check fraud will adamantly deny that he’s a thief — he ‘never took anything’. One who stole from a bank didn’t steal from an individual, only an institution, and that’s not theft by his lights. A rapist didn’t do any harm to his victim — ‘she enjoyed it’. A child abuser wasn’t abusing the child at all: he was ‘showing his love’ for his victim. An armed robber who killed his victim when he resisted wasn’t guilty of murder. If his victim had complied with his demands he wouldn’t have died. He ‘asked for it’ by resisting, therefore his death wasn’t the robber’s fault. Most criminals will argue that they weren’t convicted because of what they did, but rather because ‘the system’ or ‘the judge’ or ‘the prosecutor’ was against them. It was personal bias that put them behind bars, not the weight of evidence. I could go on forever in this vein, but I’m sure you get the picture.

More at the link.

Do you see any common ground between these characteristics, and the attitude and conduct of so many progressive pressure groups such as Black Lives Matter, Moveon.org, Common Dreams, Color of Change, and so many others?  I certainly do.  Almost uniformly these groups deny (or don't even mention) the need for individuals to accept personal responsibility for their lives and actions.  They'll blame anything and anyone else.  It's "the system".  It's "the police".  It's "racism".  It's never the individual's fault, never the fault of the group complaining about oppression.  It's always someone else.

They also appear to demonstrate a real need for excitement, to make "the Man" respond to what they're doing.  They're social gadflies.  They never achieve anything themselves - at least, I've never seen anything they've managed to build.  They merely cause trouble for those they oppose.  They tear down what others have built, but offer nothing concrete with which to replace it.

Finally, they certainly appear to refuse to accept reality.  Black Lives Matter is a particularly evil offender in this regard.  They have not one word to say about the hundreds - sometimes thousands - of black lives shattered by criminal violence every single weekend in this country.  Go add up the accounts of shootings, stabbings, etc. in every major city in the USA for any weekend this year.  See how many of the victims were black.  See how many of the perpetrators were black.  Do you hear one single word out of BLM about them?  Like hell you do!  Instead, BLM chunters on and pontificates about the violence of the police . . . when the latter accounts for far, far less than 1% of the violence offered to blacks (usually by blacks) on a routine, everyday basis.  Clearly, to BLM,  black lives don't matter.  That's the only possible explanation of this reality.

All these progressive organizations have this common thread running through their activities.  Individuals don't matter.  The social contract doesn't matter.  All that matters is pursuing their own progressive, liberal agenda . . . and damn the cost to everyone else.

That's just plain evil.  There's no other way to describe it.

Of course, when you try to point that out, the mainstream media and the lickspittle servants of political correctness are going to do their best to silence you.  Witness what a CNN presenter did yesterday to Sheriff David Clarke of Wisconsin when he laid the truth on the line.

For the record, Sheriff Clarke is right.  This is a hate group ideology.  It's nothing less and nothing more - and we need to treat it as such.

Peter