Bookended between Fidel Castro’s recent passing and fake news is a very interesting lesson about how the left thinks, lives, and breathes. Not just interesting – unprecedented.
The Left Loved Castro
The left adores Castros Fidel and Raul. There is no amount of backtracking, half-stepping, or wordsmithing that can change that fact. Volumes of their adoration exists in print, film, video, music, art, prose, poetry, and that vast expanse otherwise known as social media.
Yet, the left shrieks to high heaven over Trump’s alleged connections with Putin. Never mind of course that there are no connections between Trump and Putin. Progressives are so upset about it Joy Behar recently whined before her Kardashian worshipping audience on The View about America being poised to hoist up a hammer and sickle in place of Old Glory.
But weren’t people like Behar all about the Soviet Union until it collapsed? Weren’t they all about Hugo Chavez when he was turning Venezuela into a fiscal rat hole only Vladimir Lenin could admire? And didn’t they tell us over and over and over again that Castro’s Cuba was a paradise? Even Michael Moore said so.
So why do they view Castro one way and Putin another? They don’t.
Power
Liberals love the idea of Castro because in him they see what they want to see themselves able to do. They want to be viewed as revolutionaries. But not just any revolutionaries. Intellectual ones that can, with the wave of a technocratic wand, solve all problems free from dissent or any challenge to their authority. Check media reporting – especially media outlets like CNN and MSNBC that were favorable to Obama – and note how they admired Obama’s attempts early in his administration towards bridge building with Vladimir Putin.
Disagree?
Go to any college campus today in America and take a look at the self-styled revolutionaries. They think they are the pinnacle of intellectualism. Nobody is smarter than they are. In concert with like-minded smarter-than-thou faculty they’ve waved their technocrat wands and established safe zones and all the rest within which they can hatch their social justice schemes which they can render perfect within the confines of a college campus. The left had hoped to push safe zone boundaries beyond the campus and into real America were it not for Trump’s election.
That’s Where Fake News Comes In
Until Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, fake news wasn’t a thing. It only emerged because – in the same way the left likes to wish away the ills of Castro and Chavez – the left would prefer to dismiss the fact that they and they alone lost the election in 2016. It’s easier to do what Castro did and create bogeymen to blame every failure upon and then promptly purge in some way, shape, or form.
Hillary as a candidate was horrible. She never set foot in some states. Even when she was on the campaign trail – weird Scooby van or none – she was barely there and she wasn’t pushing an agenda most people cared about. Hence she fancied herself smart to travel to West Virginia and promise an audience full of coal miners she’d make sure they spent the rest of their lives on welfare instead of working and earning a living. (Rare if ever will I praise Bill Clinton but I’ll give the old Blythe boy props for having enough sense not to tell coal miners he’d put them on gubmint cheese for the rest of their lives). Liberals you see prefer people to be dependent rather than independent and West Virginian coal miners aren’t the sort to accept dependency. Hillary’s minions were little better.
Really, rioting in the streets? Black Lives Matter? HB2? 57 pronouns that ain’t enough? Fight for $15? Syrian refugees by the tens of thousands while demilitarizing the police as events like Orlando and San Bernardino took place? Vladimir Putin didn’t need to influence the election for Trump to defeat the Hilldabeast. Hillary supporters, though, don’t see it that way. What’s to be expected from people addicted to fake news?
Wasn’t it the left that got their news from Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and Colbert? When they weren’t doing that, weren’t they reading Salon and Vox articles? Those outlets are at the epicenter of fake news. There is no news out there – less The Onion – more fake than Stewart, Maher, Colbert, Salon, and Vox. They were and are as fake as that web ad that pops up sometimes when you view these articles showing the same gaggle of people over the caption reading “Drivers in _____ are stunned over this new rule”. (If you travel you’ll notice how the location changes but the image doesn’t).
The left invented fake news the same way they invented the birthers but for a different reason. They needed fake news in the same way they try and create their own reality on college campuses where their power is unchallenged. Think about it. On a university campus the left can establish a safe zone and with Castro-like powers determine its content. In the real world, it’s a different story. So they turned to fake news when real news didn’t adequately tell them what they wanted to hear in hopes that one-percenter infotainers could sell their agenda where they couldn’t no matter how many safe zones and riots they created.
At The Root of It All
For the right, ideas inform ideology. And that produces a vibrant and dynamic system of beliefs capable of adapting to real-world conditions.
For the left, ideology informs ideas. That produces the static speeches and dull ideas expressed by Hillary Clinton during her 2016 campaign. Indeed, compare any given Clinton speech circa 2016 with a Lyndon Baines Johnson speech from the 1960s and note the similarities. No amount of fake news can change that. Unless a Castro-like regime is adopted in which only one point of view is conveyed relentlessly over all others.
Sound familiar?
photo credit: Juan Francisco Beltrán Fidel Castro La Habana 1994 JFBR via photopin (license)
