For Liberalism, It's Always About "The Narrative"

After members of the Fellowship of Ferguson Fabricators, also known as the Congressional Black Caucus, gathered on the floor of the U.S. House on Monday to showcase the St. Louis Rams’ new touchdown signal, otherwise known as the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gesture, Thomas Sowell likened the display to Nazi propaganda.

I don’t usually like allusions to Nazism tossed around in our political debates—it’s too often used simply as hyperbole—but liberals today certainly are following the messaging strategy famously articulated by Joseph Goebbels: repeat a lie often enough and loud enough and people will believe it.

Defending the actions of his congressional cohorts to Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, Democrat representative Al Green brashly argued that, “It’s not enough for things to be right, they must also look right.” The Houston congressman (Is there any surprise that the place where pastors’ sermons are subpoenaed—because they contradict the current liberal narrative on marriage and sexuality—would elect the likes of Congressman Green?) also accused Kelly of telling only “one side of the story.”

In a stunning display of hypocrisy, the looters and rioters in Ferguson, Missouri accused CNN of promoting a “certain narrative.” In other words, while shining a bit of light into darkness (It seems that even CNN can sometimes stumble onto the truth, even when it doesn’t mean to!), CNN was doing damage to the liberal narrative in Ferguson. And for liberalism, “the narrative,” not truth, is essential.

As has been demonstrated for decades now, liberalism is quite adept at creating “narratives,” i.e. making its own “truth,” which can easily change as soon as it’s advantageous. Such skill and flexibility is very necessary when one needs political power to make sure the preferred notion of “truth” rules the day.

This skill has been keenly tested with the events in Ferguson. The liberal apologists at Time Magazine went so far as to pen a “Defense of Rioting.” Sounding like the puppet of President Obama and the ally of the immoral that she is, Time’s Darlena Cunha instructs us that, “When a police officer shoots a young, unarmed black man in the streets, then does not face indictment, anger in the community is inevitable.”

Seemingly desperate to show off her liberal cred, Ms. Cunha evokes Darwin and adds, “Riots are a necessary part of the evolution of society.” Such an ignorant statement must be born of desperation; otherwise we must conclude that Time is in the habit of employing ignoramuses. She painfully continues, “Unfortunately, we do not live in a universal utopia where people have the basic human rights they deserve simply for existing, and until we get there, the legitimate frustration, sorrow and pain of the marginalized voices will boil over, spilling out into our streets.”

Ahh, the ever elusive liberal utopia. It seems hopelessly lost on Cunha and her ilk that the decades of pursuit of such nonsense by liberalism is ultimately what has yielded Ferguson and other such dystopic nightmares. To distract from the nightmares, and even to excuse them, the narratives continue. Instead of actually dealing with what is wrong in Ferguson, liberals give us vague lectures about “justice,” “structural inequality,” a “culture of oppression,” and, of course, “racism.”

The khaki-creased “conservative” at The New York Times, David Brooks, demonstrates that his intellectual palate prefers modern liberal narratives to the notion of absolute truth when he spoke on Ferguson. He said, “This is not a question of good versus evil, right versus wrong. Racial inequality has become entangled in all sorts of domestic problems…”

Brooks’ editorial colleague at the “newspaper of record,” Nicholas Kristof, devoted a five-part series recently to explain why “Whites Just Don’t Get It.” Democrat Representative Eleanor Holmes said that the facts in Ferguson don’t matter to her. And on and on it went and continues.

Just prior to the second dose of Ferguson riots, in order to help sell abortion and sexual promiscuity, and in a spectacularly failed attempt to elect Democrats, liberals all across the U.S. saturated the media with the “war on women” narrative. So violently is this narrative protected and sold, the unborn are dehumanized to the point that no limits on the age of the mother or the unborn child are tolerated.

Demonstrating their continued penchant for calling evil good and good evil, and in a sad attempt to take the moral high ground on abortion, Katha Pollitt, author of Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, writes, “Terminating a pregnancy is always a woman’s right and often a deeply moral decision. It is not evil, even a necessary evil.”

Late this past summer, in the Washington Post, pro-abortionist Janet Harris said that abortion should never be considered “difficult” or “immoral.” In order to de-humanize the baby, and thus make us feel better about killing it, Harris declares, “To say that deciding to have an abortion is a ‘hard choice’ implies a debate about whether the fetus should live, thereby endowing it with a status of being. It puts the focus on the fetus rather than the woman.”

That’s right Ms. Harris, because it’s all supposed to be about you. In order to promote big government, liberals deftly lecture us about how they care about those in need, and about how, if we would only give them the power, they would make a better world for all of us. Ms. Harris’s above conclusion reveals what liberalism is really all about: a “Dictatorship of Pride.” In other words, under liberalism each of us is “free” to do “what is right in our own eyes.”

“Pride leads to every other vice,” the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis reveals. “It was through pride that the devil became the devil…it is the complete anti-God state of mind.” This is why I find liberalism so repulsive. In almost every moral issue of our time, liberals stand opposed to the truth.

The narrative that says that an unborn child is not a life worth protecting is one of the most enduring lies of liberalism. In order to sell this lie, we now must suffer the “heart-warming” tales of women who’ve decided to kill their unborn children. And of course, the mainstream media is only all too eager to help. In October of this year, the pro-abortion media was beside itself celebrating the “beautiful,” “brave,” “powerful,” and “heartwarming” letter written by an anonymous Reddit user that revealed her plans to abort her unborn child.

The abortion narrative has its roots in the sexual narrative preached during the sexual revolution of the 1960s: that we all have the right to do whatever we wish in the sexual realm, which has also “given birth” to the unconditional acceptance of homosexuality. To promote this perversion, and distract from the truths of homosexuality, liberals again employ those heart-warming tales that are supposed to distract us from the darker side of whatever it is they are promoting.

Liberals have been recently put to the test on this narrative as well. Terry Bean, the co-founder of the largest pro-homosexual advocacy organization in America, the Human Rights Campaign, was recently arrested and indicted on two felony counts of third-degree sodomy and one count of third-degree sexual abuse after allegedly having sex with a 15-year-old boy he met online last year.

Bean is also co-founder of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund and is a major donor to the National Democratic Committee and a major financial supporter of Democrats across the U.S., including Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. Bean has made multiple trips to the White House and has even been on Air Force One. In other words, on issues related to homosexuality, Bean has the ear of virtually every leader in the Democrat Party.

In this case liberals are forced to protect their narrative. This too is a common approach taken by liberals when “inconvenient truths” come to light. Very little is being written or spoken when it comes to Mr. Bean. Of course, it’s not as if liberals are incapable of reporting when it comes to homosexuals and crime. How many Americans are still under the illusion that Matthew Shepard was the victim of a “homophobic” hate-crime?

In order to push the homosexual agenda, for nearly two decades liberals have continued to promote this lie. Author Stephen Jimenez, himself a homosexual, has been instrumental in helping to reveal the truth in this matter. In 2013 Jimenez published The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard. Shepard’s life, it turns out, is a sad tale of drug addiction, drug trafficking, child molestation, and rampant sexual promiscuity. Shepard’s murderer, Aaron McKinney, was his drug partner/rival as well as his homosexual lover. Both Shepard and McKinney were heavy meth users as well as dealers.

Though Shepard was killed in 1998, for over 10 years his narrative thrived to the point that Democrats passed major legislation in his name. The Congressional Democrats passed, and President Obama signed the Shepard-Byrd Hate Crime Prevention Act in 2009. A few brave souls attempted to point out the lie that is the Shepard narrative. On the floor of the U.S. House, North Carolina Representative Virginia Foxx attempted to point out the Shepard hoax.

The left went nuts. The nuts at MSNBC went even nuttier. Keith Olbermann named Foxx his “World’s Worst” and called her “criminally misinformed.” In his typical angry-anchorman speak, Olbermann continued to spread the Shepard myth by telling his audience that Shepard’s killers lured him away by “pretending to be gay.”

After Jimenez’s book came out just over a year ago, the pro-gay publication The Advocate finally asked, “Have We Gotten Matthew Shepard All Wrong?” No matter though. As the piece puts it, “There are valuable reasons for telling certain stories in a certain way at pivotal times, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to them once they’ve outlived their usefulness.” And there you have it: it’s okay to lie; it’s okay to promote “the narrative,” as long as the end justifies the means.

Of course, the most recent offspring of the sexual narrative that came out of the sexual revolution is the lie that is same-sex “marriage.” So swiftly has this narrative taken off that what just barely a decade ago would have caused even the most ardent liberal politician to squirm to defend, is now openly celebrated and promoted. Though there is nothing in the 200-plus years under our Constitution to suggest any idea that our Founders would have been anything but repulsed by the mere mention of two men or two women marrying, judges across the U.S. are rushing to declare same-sex marriage “constitutional.”

Although polling data shows an increase in the acceptance of same-sex “marriage,” when put before voters, the vast majority of states have overwhelmingly rejected same-sex marriage. Rogue judges deceived by the liberal narrative on marriage and sexuality are overturning the will of the U.S. electorate.

One issue that, again, at least according to most polls, the liberal narrative has yet to sway many Americans on is global warming—I mean climate change. The left is undeterred, however, and as is almost always the case, the narrative continues.

The narrative here is so powerful that many liberals have made their devotion to the climate into a religion. Ian Plimer, a geologist, author, professor of earth sciences and mining geology, as well as an ardent atheist and Darwinian evolutionist—which, normally would make him a darling of the political left—calls global warming “the new religion of First World urban elites.”

Plimer adds, “Environmentalism has many of the hallmarks of failed European socialism and [failed] Western Christianity. It has a holy book which few have read [IPCC reports], has prophets [Al Gore, et al] who cannot be challenged, relies on dogma, ignores contrary evidence, has armies of wide-eyed missionaries...; imposes guilt, has a catastrophist view of the planet, and seeks indulgences.” Leave it to an atheist to recognize a religion when he sees one.

Whether polar bears and the always “disappearing” arctic ice (that continues to set records for volume), or blizzards, cold-snaps, droughts, heat-waves, hurricanes, tornadoes, wild-fires, etc. that always have useful human (and animal) victims, and dramatic television footage, the left again employs sympathetic stories to sell the narrative. It’s also quite useful when virtually any weather disaster can be written into the climate change narrative.

Again, like with virtually every issue discussed here, liberals are using the climate change narrative to push significant legislation and official government policy. Because, for liberals, the solution almost always lies with government and political power.

In this case, such legislation and policy is usually aimed at fossil fuels. Operating under the myth that man-caused carbon emissions are warming the planet, liberals are waging war on oil, coal, and natural gas. President Obama, yet unable to win over American voters with his lofty climate rhetoric, has made it a mission to use his executive power to foist the left’s climate agenda upon the world. As with the federal judges and same-sex “marriage,” (and for that matter abortion as well), the oligarchs of the left know best, and as long as they have the power, it will be used.

For a man who is supposedly one of the smartest, if not the smartest, men ever to be president of the United States, Obama’s climate agenda has painted him into a political corner from which there is no escape. Oil prices are currently just below $70 a barrel, down over $40 per barrel since June of this year, and it continues to fall. The price is less than half of what it was just prior to Obama taking office.

The drop is due to major growth in U.S. production, which is due to American innovations such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling, which the left hates. In 2012, to help further the pro-climate change, anti-fossil fuel narrative, Warmist Matt Damon even made a movie about the “horrors” of fracking. In a bit of twisted irony, Damon’s anti-fracking film was funded in part by foreign oil wealth.

The drop in oil prices has led to a significant drop in the price of gasoline across the U.S. The price is well below $3 a gallon and, like oil, is expected to continue to drop. Such a drop in energy costs for Americans is helping to invigorate the U.S. economy, but because of their war on fossil fuels, liberals can’t take credit even if they wanted to. Instead, we are warned about “The Trouble With Cheap Oil.”

“We are awash in cheap oil” laments the uber-liberals at the New Yorker. Liberals love higher oil and gasoline prices because, “High oil prices would force governments, corporations, and consumers to find another way to power the world.” Did you see that? We need to be “forced” to find another way to power the world. Most liberals are far too comfortable “forcing” their agenda upon America. “Force” is at the heart of liberalism, and that is why so often false narratives can be justified, and why so often a big government agenda is pursued. After all, what better instrument to force an agenda than big government?

And thus we see, whether climate change, same-sex marriage, homosexuality, abortion, racism—and for that matter, immigration, gun control, education, and so on—liberalism is not concerned with the truth, but with whatever narrative will put liberals in power.

Copyright 2014, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com