The Intolerance of The Liberal Mindset

This fascinating topsy-turvy analysis came in from The Heritage Foundation today.

Jim DeMint wrote:

Today, I'd like to talk about liberal hypocrisy.

Liberals like to consider themselves open-minded and accepting, but in reality they are responsible for building a culture of intolerance.

If you don't want your daughter to have to share bathrooms with "gender fluid" boys, liberals will call you a bigot. If you believe in constitutional rights like religious freedom, gun rights, and freedom of speech, you are labeled ignorant.

Theirs is a dangerous approach, but an effective one. It's insulting to be called an ignorant bigot, and there's no way to counter ad hominem attacks like that. The liberals have capitalized on this for their own ends. More and more, we see the government using its power to restrict speech and intimidate private groups and businesses. College campuses are hostile to diverse viewpoints and students shout down public speakers in the name of “tolerance." Corporate leaders are forced to resign and pastors are fined for proclaiming church teaching.

These are just a few examples of liberalism’s legacy in America. Now at its zenith, progressive liberalism is turning on itself. It is becoming its opposite: closed-minded and intolerant to different points of views and interests.

My colleague Kim Holmes recently published a new book confronting this epidemic, The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left. In it he reveals how liberals in America have abandoned their traditions and become a force for denying people’s rights and freedoms.

The closing of the liberal mind threatens not only free speech and freedom of conscience, but constitutional rights that at one time had been among America’s greatest causes. It is upending the very constitutional order that once was the bastion of American freedom and equality, which is a grave threat to the country.

Holmes believes that it is still possible to “save [America] from the ravages of the postmodern left.” But, he counsels, it will require moderate liberals who still care about our freedoms to come together with conservatives at this pivotal time in history.

Please take a look at the stories below which also deal with how closed-off and backwards the liberal mindset has become. Then let me know what you think about all of this in the comments. I always love hearing what you have to say.

Thank you for all you do.

Jim DeMint

This phrase, "Now at its zenith," shows clearly that old Jim doesn't have a clue.

Jim never fails to amuse:

Jim DeMint wrote:

You know what will happen if conservatives don’t unite.

Liberals will continue to use intimidation tactics and their unyielding hold on the media to systematically dismantle the conservative movement.    

To[sic] many conservatives will be convinced that our movement is shrinking, and will stay home in November.

All of the conservative momentum from the last eight years of oppressive liberal policy will be wasted.

The pretzel logic of these co-joined statements is enough to give me whiplash.

I saw an entry on Facebook the other day where some ... person ... was talking about how the innate authoritarian tendency of liberalism was starting to reveal itself.

Authoritarian and fascist mindsets are on the rise, the nation is so divided that compromise has become a dirty word and neither "side" trusts the other to be guardians of the state.  

Last night Rachel Maddow had a guest, an actor who had performed in an anti-Goldwater ad in 1964 where he said that Goldwater was a new kind of politician, one who did not consider t he consequences of his rhetoric.  He said Goldwater was against a lot of things but he couldn't list anything Goldwater was for.

Rachel asked this guy, If he saw parallels to Trump this year.  

It was a powerful segment.

Here, I found it:

I followed the 1964 campaign, and I really wanted to vote against Goldwater. I was one year too young to vote, however. Even if I had been eligible, by the time November rolled around my situation made it impossible to vote.

I don't see that Trump and Goldwater share many similarities. Goldwater wasn't as insane as Trump is, with the exception that they both had no problem with dropping the big one. In case you haven't seen it, this tv spot did a lot of damage to Goldwater's campaign. The ad only ran once, but it got a lot of people's attention and is one of the most famous television campaign ads. Maybe the Democratic campaign should come up with something that would invoke the same emotions to get people out to vote.

And lest we forget, old Hillary was a Goldwater Girl in 1964.
She did see the light, however, and was a supporter of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972.

Fake.
http://www.snopes.com/goldwater-girl/

No shit, Sherlock. I don't think anyone would believe that was a picture of Clinton. It was just to illustrate the generic Goldwater Girl.

The statement that Hillary was a Goldwater Girl is not fake, and that's the crux of the post.

She was SIXTEEN.

Hell, when I was 16 I liked The Monkees.

So she was sixteen. So what?

So what she believed at 16 -- five years before she could even vote -- means exactly jack shit.

Remember, (as I'm sure you do...) at the time Johnson was WIDELY reviled for continuing and escalating the Viet Nam Conflict. I hated Johnson with a purple passion in 1964.

Even moreso later.

NoCoPilot wrote:

So what she believed at 16 -- five years before she could even vote -- means exactly jack shit.

I didn't attach any meaning to it; I just mentioned it. And it isn't necessarily true that there is no correlation between what one does at sixteen and what one does later in life.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Remember, (as I'm sure you do...) at the time Johnson was WIDELY reviled for continuing and escalating the Viet Nam Conflict.  I hated Johnson with a purple passion in 1964.

Johnson had been Pres for less than a year during the 1964 campaign. The massive escalation in Viet Nam was yet to come.

NoCoPilot wrote:

So what she believed at 16 -- five years before she could even vote -- means exactly jack shit.

Five years later - when she could vote, she was the president of the Young Republicans at Wellesley. Does Jack give a shit for that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_in_the_Vietnam_War

• Gulf of Tonkin incident, August 2, 1964
  
• NSAM 314, September 10, 1964
  
• Bien Hoa Airbase attack, November 1, 1964
  
• Johnson wins re-election, November 3, 1964
  
• "Two hundred and sixteen American soldiers were killed in the Vietnam War in 1964.[85] 23,310 U.S. military personnel were in South Vietnam at the end of the year[86] The South Vietnamese armed forces suffered 7,457 killed in action, about 30 percent more than the total killed in the previous year."

You're right, the major escalations were after 1964 but Johnson had campaigned on getting the U.S. out of SE Asia right after the election.

_Howard wrote:

NoCoPilot wrote:

So what she believed at 16 -- five years before she could even vote -- means exactly jack shit.

Five years later - when she could vote, she was the president of the Young Republicans at Wellesley. Does Jack give a shit for that?

Quote :

Clinton writes that she began to have doubts about Goldwater’s politics even before she left high school, when a teacher forced her to play President Johnson during a mock presidential debate in order to "learn about issues from the other side" (page 24). Later, as a junior at Wellesley College, she writes, "I had gone from being a Goldwater Girl to supporting the anti-war campaign of Eugene McCarthy," driving to New Hampshire on weekends to stuff envelopes and walk precincts (pages 32-33). Even so, she also worked as a Washington, D.C., intern for Gerald Ford, who was then the Republican leader of the House, and she attended the 1968 Republican convention to work for New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s unsuccessful effort to get the GOP presidential nomination (pages 34-35).

At Yale Law School, however, she completed her transformation from Goldwater Republican to liberal Democrat. At Yale, she met Marian Wright Edelman and helped in her investigations of the Nixon administration. She also met Bill Clinton, and in 1972 joined him in Austin, Texas, where they both worked for George McGovern’s campaign. There, she writes, "I quickly made some of the best friends I’ve ever had" (page 58).

Typical Clinton, working both sides of every issue.

Quote :

Johnson campaigned as an experienced man whose restraint and judgment in military matters could be relied upon. It seemed unremarkable in July when five hundred more troops—so-called advisers—were dispatched to Vietnam because Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had already been increasing gradually the American military presence there. And the general public seems not to have become exercised when, on 2 and 4 August, in murky circumstances, North Vietnamese torpedo boats allegedly attacked United States destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin near North Vietnam's coast. Johnson ordered massive air attacks on targets in North Vietnam in retaliation. Moreover, on 7 August he obtained a congressional resolution—ever since known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution—supporting the president in whatever action he deemed necessary "to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression" in Southeast Asia. It was not unlike the resolution that Congress had given Eisenhower in 1958 when he sent marines into Lebanon, and its passage was widely approved in the country at large.

He showed he was the peace candidate by saying of the conflict rapidly heating up in Vietnam, "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." Furthermore, where Republicans were saying of Goldwater, "In your heart, you know he's right," Democrats were responding, "In your heart, you know he might." Unlike his opponent, Johnson could be counted on, the country was assured, not to press the button that would start a nuclear war. The unabashed way in which Goldwater referred to the Soviet Union as "the enemy" also alarmed many voters, who concluded that Goldwater regarded open war with the Soviets as unavoidable.

Source

NoCoPilot wrote:

Two hundred and sixteen American soldiers were killed in the Vietnam War in 1964.[85] 23,310 U.S. military personnel were in South Vietnam at the end of the year[86] The South Vietnamese armed forces suffered 7,457 killed in action, about 30 percent more than the total killed in the previous year.

There were no American combat troops in Viet Nam in 1964. We were all "advisors" then. It wasn't until sometime early in 1965 that the first combat troops were deployed.

Didn't stop them from killing and being kilt.

Yeah, that seems familiar.