If you’ve spent any time at all on the rhetorical battlefield with the Left, you know from hard experience that sloppy, infantile thinking is a cornerstone of their worldview. It is their bread and butter.
You see, they can’t win in the arena of ideas. They never have been able to win. This is in no small part why they rely on the judiciary to inflict their misguided ideology on an unwilling populace when they fail over and over to craft legislation that will codify their perfidy into law.
Consider if you will the modern landscape of our current culture war. The Left has made a cottage industry in the last 30 years (plus) carving Americans up into various fringe categories based on grievance and then pitting the splinters against each other for the Left’s own gain. A big part of this entire approach is to socialize labels for the opposition and then condition the low-information populace at large to think and use those terms like Pavlov’s dogs salivated when the bell rang.
The academy has become the spawning ground for much of this Group Think. Institutions that used to be hallmarks of the canon of Western thought are now the breeding ground of identity/grievance politics. Genuinely weighty matters and terms have been trivialized to the point of infantilization to give a historically ignorant, virtue-signaling populace an ability to short-circuit their nascent critical thinking skills without the hard intellectual sweat of actually formulating a rationally thought-out position. It’s the mental equivalent of their very own self-licking ice cream cone.
Racist. Sexist. Homophobe. Nazi. Show me an issue with actual impact and historical gravitas and I’ll show you a concept that has been trivialized and overused to the point where it has little to no meaning by the Left in this country. And curiously, while the Left seeks to appropriate the victimhood that comes from Communist and Fascist oppression, they studiously avoid the ideals (most of which they historically share) of those who perpetrated the genocide.
There are a couple of problems the Left has with this approach though, dear reader. The first is that many people outside of the academy who live actual lives aren’t fooled by it. Standing in principled opposition to, for instance, campus speech codes; doesn’t put me in league with Adolph Hitler. Rational people, whose voices largely go unheard on campus and in media of all kinds, reject this sort of asinine assertion out of hand.
The second problem is one I mentioned before: The overuse and infantilization of these terms make them lose their impact over time. As they are tiredly trotted out, more and more people understand them for an unserious argument they are and simply ignore them. This is one reason the Left must continually manufacture new terms and new enemies.
All of which brings me neatly along to a wonderful column in The Federalist about the Left’s latest and greatest exercise in sloppy thinking: Labeling everyone a conspiracy theorist.
Remember when *the unspecified virus of unknown origin* rolled around and anyone at all questioned that narrative? Remember anyone who wondered about the origins of the virus and speculated it might have been not only manufactured but made more virulent by heretofore unknown labs was nothing more than one of those crazy people ranting on a street corner? Remember how this was continually reinforced by an unrelenting program of information suppression including from what were considered legitimate sources until they diverged from the established narrative?
And don’t even get me started on the vaccines.
Or how about that zany conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden’s laptop? Heck, that was nothing more than Russian disinformation and anyone who believed otherwise was obviously way off their rocker. Why in the world would the entire media suppress such an important story about the Democrat nominee’s son just prior to an election? No, surely not. Perish that thought friend. You’re seeing things that just aren’t there.
Take off that tin foil hat, pal. There is not really a group of unelected, power-hungry elitists who want to control every aspect of your daily life, from how you spend money to how your heat your home to what you are allowed to eat in order to usher in global utopia. Seriously, what’s wrong with you?
The peaceful transfer of political power is an institution in this country you insane right-winger. How dare you suggest that anyone used the “pandemic” as an excuse to rig the election laws and thereby cast aspersion on one of our country’s most sacred institutions? Sure, all those voting machine irregularities and lost ballots tilted the results in a very specific direction but that’s just how it goes.
The list could go on and on. You can find example after example right here on Right Wire Report. And it has gotten so bad that in many cases even the traditional garbage media as well as the garbage social media have had to acknowledge it. It certainly won’t stop them from using the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ when the next little tidbit of truth bubbles to the surface though.
But one thing you may reliably take away from this discussion is this: The louder they scream “conspiracy theorist” the more afraid they are. And the closer you are to the truth.
