In the classic 80s comedy, The Young Ones, Rik is a cartoonish mockery of a radical student leftist. Middle-class, ignorant and always looking for something to be offended about, Rik’s defining trait is his almost Tourette’s-like passion for calling people “fascists” and “Nazis”. Bank tellers, doormen, postmen, everyone who even mildly irks the painfully woke radical are immediately denounced and screeched at.
What was so funny about Rik’s parody of the left was that he was so ridiculously over-the-top. By the standards of today’s left, though, Rik was a model of restraint.
Everyone today is a Nazi, a fascist, a literal Hitler, the instant they impinge on the dim consciousness of pea-brained modern leftists. But, just as Rik was willfully blind to the fact that his own background and tastes were completely and utterly “bleeding boarjoysey”, the modern left happily ignore that their own golden idols are far closer to fascism than their Great Satan, Trump.
Under the Obama administration, hundreds of migrants died every year at the Mexican-US border. Thousands were detained in camps. Children were detained in those camps, too. The average daily population of these detention centres was between 30,000 and 40,000. Children were often the first to be cast out of the country – as one report put it, the border authorities moved unaccompanied children to ‘the head of the line’ for deportation. More undocumented migrants were deported by the Obama administration than by any previous administration. One critic called Obama ‘the most stringent enforcer of immigration laws in American history’.
So, was Barack Obama Hitler? Was that fascism?
The left shriek and gibber that President Trump is a “fascist”, “torturing children” in “Nazi-style” concentration camps.
And yet Obama did all these things too. Where were those people back then? They were on their comfortable college campuses or in their swanky New York or London bars, and the 47,000 minors apprehended by the US authorities as they crossed the border in the US in the first eight months of 2014 alone – some of whom were as young as three – never crossed their minds.
…where were your tears when Obama did this?
Once upon a time, politicians were infamous for using babies for photo ops. Nowadays, leftists only use dead babies for their props.
A horrible photo of a man and his daughter who drowned while crossing the Rio Grande between Mexico and the US has been widely published today. It’s on the front page of the London Evening Standard, which refers to the image as ‘The picture that shames America’. It is held up as proof of Trump’s wickedness. But again that question rises up – why are you more horrified by this death than you were by the thousands of migrant deaths under Obama?
More to the point, why aren’t you horrified that illegal immigrants are risking their childrens’ lives in a cynical bid to get around the law? Why aren’t you ashamed that the very processes the left put in place are encouraging it? Leftists demand that illegal immigrants with children are hustled through border detention without proper checks or delay – and then wring their hands and weep fake tears when illegals and people-smugglers exploit those very loopholes.
But, as I wrote recently, almost without exception, so-called “compassionate” politicians are driven, not by genuine concern for others, but deep-rooted narcissism. The modern left, as Jim Goad has said, are thoroughly drunk on the notion of their own moral superiority.
The current discussion isn’t really driven by a concern for migrants…Instead, everything is reduced to a shallow Culture War game of moralistic oneupmanship. This is where those AOC photos become important. The way in which, today, this has been turned into a story about her, and about how virtuous she is, is actually grotesque. The narcissism is staggering.
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None of this is new, of course. Even in the 1930s, Orwell mocked “the foaming denouncers…and all that dreary tribe of ‘high-minded’ women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come nocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat”. All that’s changed is that, instead of just a trumpet to blow, they’ve suddenly been given an instant global platform – social media – with which to announce their self-proclaimed virtue to the world.
