“In an America where the Democrat and liberal constituency has drifted so far to the left that politicians and liberal media have no choice but to swim with the tide and ignore their own glaring flaws, they’ve doused themselves in gasoline and struck a match politically.”
It all started back in February with a gay Brit guided by a refusal to play by the rules of the identity politics handbook. For some time, I thought the left’s complete hysteria over Milo could be attributed to the way he attacked their increasingly crazed ideology the way a vaccine attacks smallpox. It made sense to me that social justice warriors were going collectively bonkers for no other reason than that their hive mind can’t help but short-circuit like a gag reflex when faced with an enemy that looks, talks, acts, and speaks in ways that they only deem possible for non-conservatives. Enter an algorithm for an emphatically gay male who is against mass illegal immigration and defensive of attacks against white males but is a legal immigrant himself and prefers black males sexually and the SJW operating system does not compute. Using this information technology analogy, I looked at it like this. System overload and mass hard drive failure equal complete breakdown in political discourse and violent riots in the human world. The premise made sense to me until Antifa, Black Bloc, and a group called By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) continued to use violence or threats to have David Horowitz banned from speaking at Berkeley earlier this month. These radical leftist groups are not simply short-circuiting over a virus in the software—the software is flawed by design.
When I expounded on the Berkeley saga in UC Berkeley: The Place Where Free Speech Ends and Violence Begins two weeks ago, I covered the events unfolding as the California college town was rocked by violence in which 20 people were arrested during a clash between Antifa allies and their nemesis, Liberty Alliance Revival. As LAR physically ran off opposing forces, young conservatives marked the event as a turning of the tables in the cultural war. Eager to step up and ride the wave of momentum, conservative firebrand author Ann Coulter accepted an invitation to speak extended by the Berkeley College Republicans and a student conservative group called Young America’s Foundation. Not long after, UC Berkeley bigwigs Scott Biddy and Stephen Sutton advised the group that the university would be canceling the event due to an inability to ensure the safety of students in attendance. Coulter, along with Young America’s Foundation President Spencer Brown, refused to back down when they put out a statement declaring that Coulter would be speaking somewhere in the city on April 27th regardless of whether it would take place on campus or not. Amid backlash from both sides, UC Berkeley budged, although not without some controversy. The university pushed back the event from its scheduled date and time to May 2nd at an earlier time of day—a chess move that would allow them to say they were not violating free speech but could ensure that few people were around to attend. The conservatives responded with a lawsuit on behalf of Coulter, and the author remained committed to speaking on the originally scheduled date and time.
Many young conservatives lauded Coulter and Co.’s decision to stick to their guns, and they rallied around the “show must go on” ethos. Thus, it seemed that the two sides were poised for another showdown on the streets of Berkeley—until Tuesday afternoon, when the Young America’s Foundation and Berkeley College Republicans flinched. The official statement from YAF read as follows.
“As of 4 p.m. today, Young America’s Foundation will not be moving forward with an event at Berkeley on April 27 due to the lack of assurances for protections from foreseeable violence from unrestrained leftist agitators…Berkeley should be ashamed for creating this hostile atmosphere.”
As of Wednesday, April 26th, without the backing of the groups sponsoring her speech on illegal immigration, Ann Coulter officially bowed out—and her initial response has been what I hoped it wouldn’t be. In a statement to the New York Times, Coulter had this to say:
“Everyone who should believe in free speech fought against it or ran away.”
Coulter wants to defeat Berkeley by being heard, and her sponsors want to defeat Berkeley later down the road with a lawsuit. Yes, it appears that mommy and daddy are now fighting each other over how to discipline their disorderly child, but I want to break down why Ann Coulter and these two Berkeley student organizations need to be sticking together instead of going to war with one another following the tag team in Berkeley that fell through.
Conservatives are naturally more diverse in their politics than liberals. In the Republican Party, you have staunch constitutionalists in the Freedom Caucus. Their constituency is the tea party crowd and is represented by the Sean Hannitys and Ann Coulters of the media world. Then you have the “RINO” Republicans who represent the establishment within the party. These guys include John McCain, the Bush family, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, etc. and are represented by most of the pundits seen of Fox News or guys like Bill Crystal in the media. Then there are the Libertarians, who are fiscally conservative and very pro-states’ rights but are largely liberal when it comes to social issues. Ron Paul comes to mind, but the YouTube wave of Stephan Molyneux, Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, Paul Joseph Watson, Mike Cernovich, and “Sargon of Akkad,” among others, have all but completed a takeover.
I am seeing that most of the young conservatives of today are classically liberal socially but believe in a common-sense approach to preserving traditional American culture by defending gun rights and cracking down on out-of-control illegal immigration. I could be wrong in this statement and not seeing the forest for the trees within my own bubble, but it is what it is. The fact is, Republican and Independent conservatives are naturally fractured by diverse philosophies.
Liberals, diverse as they are demographically, are largely homogenous in ideology. They worship at the altar of identity politics and political correctness. Hillary Clinton ran a campaign so far to the left that she had no choice but to take an anti-police stance that was largely supported by the former president and pushed radical feminazi doctrine like pancakes at an IHOP to keep from being cannibalized by her own. After losing the election, Democrats drifted further into outer space by selecting anti-American radicals Keith Ellison and Tom Perez to lead. In an America where the Democrat and liberal constituency has drifted so far to the left that politicians and liberal media have no choice but to swim with the tide and ignore their own glaring flaws, they’ve doused themselves in gasoline and struck a match politically. Hoping to cash in on the grievance industry is virtually their only way to get elected as they desperately try too hard to be the hip grandparents in a club of young know-nothings—and they’re all moving in lock-step. It is for this reason that Blue Dog Democrats like Jim Webb have no voice within the party and are the most endangered species of American politicians in 2017.
Prior to the election, it appeared as if conservatism was in its death throes. Yet today, conservatives control the House, Senate, and presidency. They are even swinging the Supreme Court in their favor. Conservatives cannot allow their natural diversity of thought to drag them into self-destructive infighting that can only weaken their cause. My advice to Ann Coulter and the Berkeley College conservative student groups is to remember what you both stand for. You have a legal battle ahead of you that just might have legs. Let the liberals have the cannibalism while conservatives continue to win battles in the American cultural war.
