This is a chunk of Chapter 1 of Tammy Bruce's new book, "The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values"
As quoted by Tammy Bruce: "The Left Elite has worked for years to brainwash us into a sort of values lobotomy. We are not to judge those who kill, if the guilty are people of color or women; we are to excuse those who destroy lives as victims of a racist, sexist, and homophobic world, or now, on the global scale, the unfair and oppressive “multinational corporate” world; we are to blame the innocent and lionize the guilty.
And if you dare to say you don’t believe injustice to be justice, then, as I demonstrated in The New Thought Police, you will be dismissed as sexist, racist, or homophobic. We have been led behind the Looking Glass, where everything is the opposite of what it should be.
How does the Left Elite indoctrinate decent, thoughtful people into accepting, as an example, that some killers are victims and deserve to be set free? Keep in mind, I speak of the Elite not necessarily as a cabal, but as a group of people who share certain basic assumptions, a certain world view. One now-accomplished goal is the brainwashing of society into believing that because of the color of their skin, or their gender, or their sexual preference, some in our “multicultural society” can never be understood by others, making judgment and punishment inappropriate. The corollaries are that traditional concepts of personal responsibility are outdated, and that expecting others to behave with dignity, and expecting society to recognize the concepts of right and wrong, is contrary to the ideal of liberty. Every idea, every act, has the same value--none is more worthy than another. Of course, this effort has to start with convincing you that the standards by which you were raised were wrong. Your ideas about religion, family, and sex are wrong, perhaps even harmful…
How best to change Americans’ fundamental values? How best to indoctrinate you into a culture that grows sicker and more corrupt by the minute? As I will discuss in more detail in the chapters that follow, the Left Elite uses every medium at its disposal--television, film, music, and art; politics and the justice system; higher education and the news media. One of its most important tools is constant special-interest-group rhetoric.
Keep in mind, the leftism I’m describing has nothing to do with the classical liberalism on which our country was founded--the political philosophy based on individual freedom. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The Left has had to restrict individual freedom of thought and deed in order to destroy the concept of judgment and undermine notions of right and wrong that have been held nearly universally for millennia. This is the result of the wrong people getting control of our culture at a time when we were vulnerable. It’s that simple and that scary. It also can be reversed without having to diminish the benefits of liberty that flow naturally from our system and our hearts.
The Legacy of the Left
I’m an odd bird on today’s Left--I actually believe that we can embrace individual liberty while also applying some standard of dignity to the way we lead our lives. As a gay woman, I live a life made possible by the tolerance of the average American.
The efforts of activists in the 1960s to bring about an environment that would be safer for homosexual adults, and generally freer for all those who are minorities in our society, have been generally recognized as a good thing. Now, on the contrary, I see the Left demonizing the very idea of decency in their determination to lobotomize Americans into a foggy silence about anything cultural. In truth, being gay and living with decency and dignity are not exclusive concepts. But the Left has dirtied those words to such a degree that when I’ve used them in conversation they have elicited the same reaction as if I had suddenly uttered the word ◊◊◊◊◊◊. Friends have urged me not even to use the word morality because it was too “loaded.” All the more reason to dust it off!
You don’t, after all, need to be steeped in religious fundamentalism to realize things have gone terribly wrong. I personally refuse to be silent when a movement I’ve worked for, believing it was meant to expand tolerance and increase liberty, devolves into an effort to eliminate all value-based concepts.
For example, as a gay woman, I expect tolerance. But I understand that tolerance is not “acceptance” or “buy-in.” I don’t expect other women to run out and become lesbians just because they tolerate me, or even if they like me or admire the stands I have taken. A fundamentalist Christian may think my lifestyle is wrong, but it’s not by fundamentalist Christians that I have been attacked and demonized over the last seven years.
A good example of the difference between today’s Right and today’s Left can be seen in their reaction to murder. People on the Right, no matter how strongly opposed to abortion they are, nearly all recognize that anti-abortion activists who kill doctors are wrong. Contrast that with the Left’s lionization of black men who kill whites, and especially white police officers.
The noble effort in the 1960s to encourage individuality apparently had no braking mechanism. It continued to a point where self-gratification became the goal, at the expense of values that could co-exist with and even enhance our new-found sense of our individuality and sexual self-awareness. Faith, family, fidelity, truth, and honor all became casualties of America’s Cultural Elite. Tolerance, once a genuine American ideal, has become a code word for moral relativism and all its side-effects. Once it was realized that the American people were willing to accept diversity and even some challenge to the status quo, the Left’s goal changed from extending the boundaries of what was considered right, to having no boundaries at all. Moral relativism became the order of the day--a view that moral standards are entirely grounded in social custom, varying from culture to culture, moment to moment, circumstance to circumstance...
The death of right and wrong …may be more easily seen by taking a look at the core of our culture--the art world. The disintegration of our culture, and the conditioning of people into accepting it in silence, begins with legitimizing the depraved. This requires a trip to San Francisco…."--endquote.
Wow, that is powerful stuff, and almost sounds like the observations that I make about the radical left. I am pleased that I am not the only one who sees what is going wrong inside our country and beyond.
Jedi Knight
. I was one even before the painful Vietnam days. Some people refer to that time as our second civil war.
