When it comes to appreciating other opinions, I also have favorites such as Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Sowell (retired) and David Kupelian, editor of World Net Daily’s Whistleblower Magazine.
They each offer rationality over nonsense while prompting me to examine how and why I believe as I do.
With that in mind, I agree with a recent Kupelian piece headlined, “The left’s maniacal war on common sense.”
We’ve all seen those calculated “riots” by bused-in protesters and the drumbeat of grossly overblown and self-serving political scandals hyped by many in an intensely liberal and arrogant mainstream media as well as the radical leftist political agendas and their social engineering have steadily eroded the widespread common sense once reflected by our Greatest Generation.
I believe radical social and moral reforms devoid of common sense have become primary objectives among so many in the far-left segment, including Hollywood and academe. Women in men’s bathrooms, the military using tax dollars for gender-change operations, dictatorial laws replacing freedoms of choice (Obamacare penalties) and flooding our nation with illegals all the while knowing in this age of slaughtering innocents that they can’t be properly vetted.
Adults who prefer common sense to a childish, increasingly perverse and overreactive approach to America’s historic values often wind up smeared and demonized by the same “progressive” media because they believe in personal responsibility, individual freedoms and common sense.
I recognize not a shred of progressiveness in dictatorial, Third World ideology that obstructs free speech and violates common sense.
Kupelian supports his argument with numerous examples of how officials in communities controlled by the left lack simple common sense.
He cites the more than 4,000 people shot and 762 murdered last year in Chicago, a city with intensely restrictive gun laws. Mayor and former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, he writes, doesn’t understand that “decades of research proves more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens reliably results in less crime.”
Even worse, Kupelian continues, the mayor boasts of his determination to keep Chicago a “sanctuary city.” That means police can refuse to cooperate with federal officers in removing criminal illegals off the streets through deportation. Flying in the face of common sense, Chicago’s sanctuary city designation, along with the others who use that designation, offers a “welcome” sign and “safe space” to violent criminals here illegally.
Kupelian also refers to the Seattle councilman who objected to hosing human waste off city sidewalks around homeless centers near City Hall because it could be considered racially insensitive and possibly traumatize those watching who might associate power-washing with using fire hoses against “civil rights activists.” Say what?
He talks of passengers being swarmed by teen “swarming attacks” on San Francisco’s BART mass transit system. Ordinarily, transit police publicly release surveillance videos so those dozens of criminals might be identified. Yet BART officials wouldn’t provide this footage to the media. Their nonsensical rationale? “Letting the public see the video would encourage racism,” Kupelian writes.
Then we have the outlandish push to make men into women. “Responding to relentless LGBT pressure, virtually the entire sports world, including the Olympics, is now allowing powerful male athletes who ‘self-identify’ as female to compete against actual women, often winning the women’s competitions and—in some cases—seriously injuring their less-powerful female competitors,” Kupelian writes.
“Countries … are suffering from terrorism,” he continues. “Since the vast majority of these terror attacks today are committed by Muslims in the name of Islam, one obvious common-sense response for concerned nations would be to limit Muslim immigration, especially from known terror hotbeds. Yet the left—including the Democratic Party, ‘mainstream’ media, most university populations, progressive judges and Hollywood—seems intent on doing the opposite, bringing as many Muslims as possible into Europe, the U.K. and America.”
He says it may be too late to reverse course for the United Kingdom and Europe, “already reeling from major Islamic terror attacks, an epidemic of sexual assaults and other immigrant crimes, widespread non-assimilation and ‘no-go zones,’ and the steady encroachment of Shariah law, female genital mutilation, ‘honor killings’ and other anti-Western aspects of Islamic culture.”
But in America “President Donald Trump in February said his administration was committed to a ‘common sense’ approach to immigration and national security, promising to do everything in his power to stop terror attacks within the U.S … ‘it’s a stance of common sense—maybe a certain toughness, but it’s really more than toughness,’ Trump said … . ‘… we are going to pursue it vigorously. And we don’t want to have our country have the kinds of problems that you’re witnessing taking place not only here, but all over the world.’”
In his considerable list of examples, Kupelian contends common sense is under greatest attack in higher education. “Americans were repeatedly told by pollsters last year that college-educated folk tended to favor Hillary Clinton, while those with only a high-school diploma favored Donald Trump. Did that mean Hillary Clinton voters were somehow smarter, wiser, more perceptive, more mature and better informed than Trump voters? Obviously not.”
“… An influential 2015 report in the Atlantic, titled ‘The Coddling of the American Mind,’ cited evidence that colleges literally promote pathological thinking: ‘But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. … A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.’”
Mike Masterson is a longtime Arkansas journalist. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.