Author and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis once wrote: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own consciences.”
We are witnessing the consequences of this insufferable and pernicious ideology, primarily on the political and cultural left. The American right and left have often disagreed about societal objectives, or the best method by which to achieve those objectives, but they at least shared a commitment to certain principles: the sanctity of life and of the nuclear family, the protection of children, the primacy of truth, the importance of the rule of law and due process, the punishment of criminals, freedom of speech, religion and other civil liberties, the dignity of work, and a free press charged with the responsibility for holding the powerful accountable.
Over time, however, the Left has become so certain of its moral superiority that those previously sacrosanct principles have been sacrificed, one by one, on the altar of whatever utopic visions Leftists have for perfecting society. The hills Leftists have decided to die on now include abortion and infanticide, pornography and gender confusion in schools, exploiting children in dangerous and irreversible medical experimentation, homeless encampments and drug use in our cities, incentivized theft and other unpunished crime, open borders and unlimited illegal immigration, lack of election integrity, censorship of medical professionals, scientists and journalists who dare to question the prevailing government narrative, the politicization of law enforcement, and political persecution.
An overly powerful government is eventually populated with arrogant, greedy and unprincipled people who will stop at nothing to get what they want. The Founders understood this, which is why they drafted the Constitution to leave most power within the state governments (and thus more accountable to the people), and to further diffuse federal power by dividing it between three more or less co-equal branches.
The moral busybodies on the Left, to their chagrin, are not omnipotent; they resent that their objectives for a perfected society are continually thwarted by the limitations imposed by the Constitution; therefore they seek to undermine the Constitution wherever possible: by eliminating the Electoral College, changing the composition of the United States Senate, “packing” the U.S. Supreme Court, federalizing elections and removing laws that protect election integrity, permitting illegal immigrants to vote, bypassing Congress and having a president issue countless executive orders.
The country’s descent into destruction and depravity is being facilitated by leftists in media who defend the crooks and malfeasors, even as they grab power and engage in oppressive and unlawful practices without fear of legal sanction or citizen pushback. Millions of law-abiding Americans who oppose the Left’s takeover nevertheless do not realize the risks of our current trajectory; ordinary people never think things will get that bad — until they do.
In fact, American media has a long history of cheering for leftist movements and ignoring or justifying their grievous human rights abuses. They supported Lenin and then Stalin in the former Soviet Union, covering for their political purges, mass imprisonment and murder, the starvation of their own people. (Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Walter Duranty infamously defended Stalin’s actions, saying, “To put it brutally — you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”) They cheered for Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution in China that cost tens of millions of Chinese people their lives. They celebrated Fidel Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba. They praised the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia — at least until that army of university-educated malcontents and barely post-pubescent adolescents armed with Kalashnikovs drove millions of their countrymen into rice paddies and Phnom Penh prisons, where they were starved, tortured and shot to death, their bodies left to rot in piles in the “killing fields.” They praise Venezuelan dictators Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, despite their socialist policies having driven the country into abject poverty.
So we should be suspicious when today’s Left — including and especially the media — demands support for movements dressed up in lofty language and pithy phrases like “antiracist,” “Black Lives Matter,” “diversity, equity and inclusion” and the big kahuna, “climate change.” These ideologies share a number of disturbing traits with their Marxist predecessors:
No. 1: Their adherents insist that implementation of these policies requires the dismantling of our constitutional order, including the elimination of freedom, individual liberties, private property and the rule of law.
No. 2: Their leaders do not live by the standards they demand of everyone else; instead, they grow rich on guilt-driven donations, corporate sponsorships, and book deals; they purchase expensive real estate, travel around the world on private jets and enjoy first-class accommodations.
No. 3: Argument, disagreement and proof of the failure of the proffered policies is never permitted; the theories are treated as religious dogma, and the authors are viewed as prophets.
C. S. Lewis was right — the moral busybodies never sleep. They already have too much power; history shows us what can take place if they acquire more.
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