According to some left-wing pseudo-elites, math is racist. Enforcing grammar rules is racist. Offering a foreigner a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is racist. But donning an ape mask and attacking the man trying to become California’s first black governor?
That’s just a “hostile confrontation” — according to the Los Angeles Times, anyway.
The incident occurred Wednesday morning while Elder — a Republican, longtime social commentator, and polling leader in the race to recall and replace embattled governor Gavin Newsom — was touring one of the Golden State’s many homeless encampments, in Venice. It was there that he was confronted by an angry “group of homeless people and advocates,” relates the Times.
(Unmentioned is that this is most likely astroturfing; the vagrants probably didn’t know much about Elder and were likely just catalyzed into a mob by the “advocates.”)
“Elder — who had arrived in his new ‘Recall Express’ campaign bus shortly after casting his ballot at a voting center across town — spent roughly 12 minutes in the neighborhood, with his departure hastened by what appeared to be an egg thrown in the candidate’s direction and a physical assault on his staff,” the paper continued.
“‘It kind of glanced his head,’ an Elder campaign staffer said of the object.”
“A woman in a gorilla mask riding a bicycle threw the small white object past Elder’s head, as seen in a video [below] posted on Twitter by Spectrum News reporter Kate Cagle,” the Times further tells us. The woman also took a swing at a member of Elder’s security detail; in addition, his team was hit with a gun pellet and other objects, according to Elder.
Technically, of course, the Elder episode was a hostile confrontation. The issue is that the mainstream media are exhibiting a double standard. As commentator Monica Showalter puts it, “Would they write the same kind of blasé headline were the candidate, say, Stacey Abrams? The question answers itself.”
Reporter Ryan Saavedra was also struck by the hypocrisy, tweeting:
The Times did ever so mildly reference the incident’s apparent racial aspect in one line. To wit: “The woman appeared to be white, Elder is Black, and ape characterizations have been used as a racist trope for centuries.”
Note the selective know-nothing “objectivity.” The woman only “appeared to be white” (she was white! She could have been Hispanic or Arab, but these are ethnicities, not races). Moreover, the paper presents the matter in only a correlative manner: The woman just happens to appear white, Elder just happens to be black, and ape characterizations just happen to have been used as a racist trope for centuries. All these elements were present in the same incident, perhaps by accident.
This is possible, too, to be fair. Perhaps the woman just wished to hide her face, à la Antifa, and a pink-haired ape mask was all she had (perhaps). Or maybe her face-covering was Fauci-approved for COVID protection.
The problem is that mainstream media are never so “even-handed” when the alleged racist is a conservative (although it’s rare witnessing this behavior from conservatives, which is why the Left was reduced to claiming MAGA hats were “racist”). In this case, the incident would be magnified or even completely distorted and used to typify all of conservatism, which is how the January 6 trespassing incident became an “insurrection” and Nick Sandmann’s staring contest with activist/agitator Nathan Phillips became anti-Indian bigotry.
This reality caused the aforementioned Showalter to ask rhetorically, is the Elder attacker’s type of behavior “O.K. so long as a Democrat is doing it?”
The answer is yes.
In the minds of leftists.
We’ve seen this before, too. After 70 percent of black voters (vs. 51 percent of whites ones) supported California’s 2008 marriage-protection measure, Proposition 8, left-wing, sexual-devolutionary activists targeted blacks with racial comments, including the n-word.
The Left also once railed against segregation and racial discrimination but now has reintroduced them under the pretense of “equity,” which is contrary to the “equality” liberals once called an imperative.
It goes beyond race, though. Consider how we were told for 20 years that the Taliban were almost the Devil incarnate; they were medieval, barbaric oppressors of women and it was unacceptable that they should govern anywhere. Now the Biden administration believes it can work with the Taliban.
The Left also touted the First Amendment and the ACLU would defend even Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois. Now liberals talk about how free speech is dangerous. But ‘twas ever thus: One of the first leftists, French Revolution author Maximilien Robespierre, was an ardent death-penalty opponent. That is, until he gained power.
Then he helped author the Reign of Terror and used the guillotine like Ron Popeil with a mandoline.
Of course, it’s often hard to be consistent, given man’s fallen nature. Yet leftists, and too many moderns in general, don’t have principles. They have preferences — which change with their emotions.
Principles, when worthy of the term, are rules we live by not just because they “feel right” but because they are right, eternally, as in having a basis in Truth (absolute by definition). Since leftists are to a man moral relativists, however, and since relativists don’t recognize Truth, they as a rule don’t have principles.
It’s the difference between displaying virtue and just so-called virtue-signaling, a lamentable term (because it stigmatizes virtue by association) which actually just describes “value”-signaling.
As for the California recall campaign and election, all would do well to remember an age-old principle: Always respect your Elders.
