Jack Cashill observes that, over the course of his lifetime, the Left has politicized more and more of everything, at the same time marginalizing dissenters like himself.
As recently as 1980, for instance, almost no one in the media openly disrespected people like me. As a young Reagan fan, I had come to that enthusiasm almost entirely through the mainstream media. There was no conservative talk radio to speak of, no Fox News, no Internet, and I caught up with National Review only occasionally at the public library. I watched the evening news and the Sunday morning shows without feeling aggrieved or abused, and I listened to NPR all day long.
Fresh out of graduate school, I worked as Director of Management at the Kansas City Housing Authority. NPR helped me keep my sanity. I was one of only a handful of conservatives working at this place, but no one mistreated me because of it.
Being a witness to the left’s stealthy corruption of the black community, I wrote several articles on what I saw. My African-American boss advised me to use a pseudonym but otherwise had no objection. The Kansas City Star, then still a nonpartisan enterprise, welcomed my insider perspective. Up until about ten years ago, the Star even reviewed my books.
At the time, I served on the board of a local professional theater, had a play of mine produced, and wrote and directed a couple of fundraising mystery spectacles for the theater. Today, like the editors of the Star, the theater’s decision makers will not even read what I submit.
Throughout the 1990s, I produced a series of historical documentaries for the local PBS station. In that the audiences supported my work, I kept getting asked back. For years, I appeared periodically on the station’s weekly news program. That has dwindled away to nothing. The Star reporters will not be on the show if I am. The station needs the Star more than it needs me. Nor have I been on the area’s NPR station in a decade. Like its mothership, the station no longer even feigns an interest in the sixty percent of its red state market that voted for Donald Trump.
In that my wife is a university professor, so were many of our friends. Although they knew my politics, they did not hesitate to welcome us into their world. Although my politics have not changed, we have not been invited to an academic dinner party in at least a decade. Nor have we gone to see a speaker or see a play at the university three blocks from our house in twenty or so years. Chelsea Clinton? Angela Davis? The Vagina Monologues? No, thanks.
GoneWithTheWInd
The left has changed since the 90’s. The left has always been “infiltrated” by communists and was welcoming to socialists and Marxists, but it kind of kept it under wraps. Today it is common knowledge that the Democrat machine and all of the far left activists groups are blatantly supported, funded and advised by communist organizations. There was a sea change on the left and they seem to feel a quickening of their agenda and are no longer afraid of their sleazy associations. At the same time their actions, their attacks have become more personal and violent. They have entered a new phase in their attack on the right and the undecided. In most large cities today if you walk around with a MAGA hat you will be assaulted. It is reminiscent of the stories we heard in the 50’s where Russians applauding Khrushchev were afraid to stop applauding because the KGB was watching and who ever stopped applauding first would be punished. Our neo-left have become full fledged fascist.
Lee
I remember writing a paper with the word “politicization” in it, and at that point in time, it was pretty much a neologism. No dictionary actually had it in it. (Back when you had to go to the reference section of the library to pull them off the shelf.)
Spurt Reynolds
The tolerant preachers are only tolerant if you agree with their ideas.
The tide has changed and they are losing.
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