Turns out that the whole Democratic Party lost hugely on Election Day. In addition to losing the presidency, Republicans retained control of the Senate despite far more Republican Senate seats being on the ballot; they held their already substantial majority in the House of Representatives; and now 33 of the nation’s 50 governors are Republican.
That’s two Republican governors for every Democrat.
One of the newly elected governors is Eric Greitens of Missouri. He is a former Navy SEAL and Rhodes scholar — and a committed Jew. Will he, too, be labeled a Republican racist, misogynist, xenophobe, homophobe, Islamophobe, bigot and the latest — transphobe?
That’s what the left has done for a half-century: libel and label conservatives.
This past week was a prime example. Within hours of the Republican defeat of Democrats on the local, state and congressional levels, in addition to the loss of the White House, the left doubled down on its usual outpouring of calumnies at Republican voters as deplorable human beings.
Please continue. It is clearly working on conservatives’ behalf. More and more Americans — and I predict more and more Black and female Americans — will see these smears for what they are: a cover for an inability to intellectually counter conservative arguments.
It seems universally believed on the left that conservative opposition to Hillary Clinton was due to her being a woman. See Peter Beinart’s piece in The Atlantic titled “Fear of a Female President,” which says, “Hillary Clinton’s candidacy has provoked a wave of misogyny — one that may roil American life for years to come.”
See the open letter written by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank to his distraught 12-year-old daughter: “To my daughter: You are going to be okay.”
This is how his column begins:
“As I watched the returns at Donald Trump’s celebration here Tuesday night, the hardest part was trying to reassure my seventh-grade daughter at home, via phone and text, that she would be okay. She had expected to be celebrating the election of the first female president, but instead, this man she had been reading and hearing horrible things about had won, and she feared her own world could come apart.”
As a loving father, he might want to reflect on whether his own overwrought views contributed to his daughter’s fearing that “her own world would come apart” if a woman weren’t elected president.
Milbank made sure to inform his readers that he was a Jew by reassuring his daughter that she will feel better when she receives all of her family’s love at her upcoming bat mitzvah.
Of course, the reduction of Republican votes to misogyny, racism, xenophobia, etc., was hardly unique to Jewish leftists. In The Washington Post on the day after the election, Jill Filipovic, a young feminist writer, explained Hillary Clinton’s loss this way:
“[It was] a clear statement of what so many of my countrymen (and the people who put Trump in power are mostly men) value: white male supremacy above all.”
And in The New York Times, Susan Chira, a senior correspondent and editor on gender issues, made up a rule: “We do know that voters disproportionately punish women who are seen as dishonest.”
For eight years, many on the left have described criticism of Barack Obama as racist. Similarly, leftists explain opposition to Hillary Clinton as an expression of misogyny and sexism. For the left, it is not possible that conservative opposition to either has been rooted in public policy and moral differences that have nothing to do with race or gender.
Then there is another hysterical charge on the Jewish left, that a President Trump will make anti-Semitism respectable. This, too, is old news. In 1980, Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr., said, “I am scared that if Ronald Reagan gets into office, we are going to see more of the Ku Klux Klan and a resurgence of the Nazi Party.”
But the scare tactics apparently aren’t working as well as they once did. More and more Americans are catching on to the left’s crying wolf regarding racism, misogyny, sexism and all the other terms of opprobrium hurled at conservatives.
But leftists won’t stop, for two reasons: That’s all they have. And because they really do believe their libels about conservatives. Why wouldn’t they? It’s all they’ve ever read, heard or studied.
Incredibly, many Jews symbolically sat shivah at their synagogues last week. But for all the harm the left has done to universities, to Judaism, Jews, Israel, America and to Western civilization, they should have done teshuvah instead.
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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