Know nothing leftists

Bookworm writes,

The professional Left cares nothing about antisemitism, seeing it only as a tool in the arsenal when it can be used against Republicans and conservatives. And why does this tool work?

These tools work because all those Progressives, the ones who read The New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post; who listen to NPR; and who watch the Progressive gamut of TV from MSNBC to ESPN are know nothings. I mean, they really know nothing.

I had an interesting conversation today with a very nice neighbor who is a solid Progressive, who is Ivy League educated, and who knows I’m conservative — and who very nicely (really very nicely) asked me my opinion about all the bad things he’d learned about Trump as well as expressing his bewilderment that anyone could support Trump. I wish more people were like this neighbor who, being genuinely curious instead of actively hostile, allowed me to bestow upon him a wealth of new information: ...Question: “Doesn’t Trump want to register all Muslims?”

Answer: No, Trump simply wants to reinstate a law that was put in place after 9/11, and then without much fanfare. It requires that people coming into the US from known terror-sponsoring or terror-infested countries register so that they can be located if there is a terrorism scare as well as tracked to ensure that they don’t overstay their visas (as the 9/11 terrorists did). In fact, if you look at Trump’s agenda, the vast majority of his promises boil down to laws placed on the books in the last twenty or thirty years that the current administration stopped enforcing.

Question: “Doesn’t Trump hate women?”

Answer: No, Trump is from our parents’ generation. He likes women a lot, but he’s a boor (no dressing that up). Having made that point, I also got my neighbor to agree that, when you’re as rich as Trump, there are a lot of women that, as Trump said, are happy to have the billionaire grab their bits and pieces and, indeed, encourage that behavior. If you’re a crude billionaire, you might take advantage of these offers . . . but it’s neither sexual assault nor rape.

Question: “But doesn’t his conduct encourage rape and sexual assault?” (Further questioning elicited that he was thinking about campus rape.)

Answer: Absolutely not. What’s going on at America’s colleges is a travesty of justice that the Obama administration mandated, instructing colleges to abandon due process (which includes referring genuine rape claims to the criminal justice system) and, instead, to have kangaroo courts that deprive young men of all rights.

Question: “Yeah, I’ve heard about that. I know that there are a lot of false claims, but the Stanford rape . . . that was real, wasn’t it?”

Answer: No, it wasn’t. I gave my neighbor variations of this post and this post. He was unfamiliar with the facts, most specifically the fact that both parties to whatever happened at Stanford were so drunk that neither could remember the night’s events. What that means is that there was no way to determine a central element of a rape claim, which is lack of consent. The woman’s regret the next day that she got blind drunk and blacked out does not equal lack of consent the evening before.

Question: “But won’t Trump destroy the environment?”

Answer: No. I’m a little older than the neighbor, so I told him that I remember a filthy America, with air and water that had the look of modern China or India. The original laws environmental protection laws and regulations cleaned up America. The current laws and regulations are simply impositions on business without adding anything to what was already done.

Question: “But isn’t it great that we give incentives for buying electric cars?”

Answer: No, it’s utterly unprincipled that we use taxes from working class people to inveigle people like us into buying cars that we can afford but that those helping to subsidize them cannot afford — and, in the process, we leave those people with even less money than before, thanks to the taxman, and push them further away from buying new, clean energy cars. Nor is it relevant that working class people pay a fraction of the tax money that the rich pay. (That is, because I’m in a higher tax bracket, more of my money goes to the subsidies than comes from a working class family.) They shouldn’t have to subsidize us in any way.

I used this as an opportunity to say that all people should pay taxes in order to avoid a situation in which non-payers vote for parties and policies that strip wealth from the rich and hard working, to say that there’s no reason why hard working innovative people should be forced to turn their wealth over to the government, and to point out that the US has the highest corporate tax rate in the free world, driving capital out of the country. These were new ideas for him.

Question: “But Trump and his followers are racist?”

Answer: No, they’re not. But the important thing is the free market. As Milton Friedman said, the free market is color blind. In a competitive market, without a monopoly, people who want to profit will make their business available to anyone. And those who put principles, good or bad, over profit, will have to accept that they won’t do as well in the market. I reminded him that Jim Crow was so effective because it was government action that barred the free market from working and allowing those who weren’t racist to show that it was good business to deal with blacks.

The conversation ended there. Had we talked longer, I suspect that I would have given my neighbor data he didn’t know about guns, abortion, race relations, the economy, the huge constitutional problems with the Supreme Court’s gay marriage bodice ripper romance (er, I mean opinion), transgender rights, etc. Some of what I said was definitely opinion. All of what I said was supported by verifiable facts that were completely unfamiliar to my neighbor thanks to the information ghetto in which he lives.

Again, this conversation was possible because you couldn’t ask for a nicer man, one who sought to learn, not to insult. If more Progressives were like him, I can imagine a future in which there is an inevitable drift to the right. I say this because, contrary to the imaginary world the Progressives inhabit, actual facts are intrinsically conservative:

Read more here.