Who is Extreme?

The left has gotten away with this rhetoric for long enough

One of the most common tactics of today’s Democrats is to accuse you of what they are already doing. The left always projects. The recent brouhaha over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sending fifty illegal migrants to Martha’s Vineyard is a textbook example of this phenomenon. After ignoring the Biden regime’s midnight flights transporting thousands of migrants into conservative areas of the country, leftists are outraged that DeSantis sent a few dozen to one of the most posh vacation spots in America. “Human trafficking!” they cry. “You’re using immigrants for political purposes!” they shriek.

Nowhere is this effect more pronounced than in the way the left uses the word extreme. To them, we are all dangerous, unhinged, right-wing extremists. It has become so commonplace to label any Republican further right than Liz Cheney as an extremist that it might as well be in the AP stylebook. Yet like most leftist slurs - racist, Nazi, Fascist - is is nothing more than a pejorative with zero meaning behind it.

Too many Republicans take the left in good faith when they throw around these words, and attempt to deny the charge, or explain why they are mistaken. This is a fool’s errand, like mud wrestling with a pig: you only get dirty, while the pig enjoys it.

I present for you here a rational explanation of why the left is truly extreme, and why those who are often called extremists on the right are the true defenders of traditional American values. This is not an argument to the left, but edification for my fellow conservatives. (The left deserves nothing but mockery.)

What does extreme mean, anyway? It means the edge of something. There is a concept of political discourse called the Overton Window that refers to the bounds of acceptable discussion. You can picture a line moving from left to right, where the far edges on both sides are out of bounds while the center is where debate occurs. The problem is that progressives are always trying to push the window leftward, and as a result, last week’s leftist is yesterday’s centrist, and yesterday’s centrist is today’s far right extremist.

Elon Musk famously tweeted this cartoon by Colin Wright

Consider gay marriage. In 1990, the left wing position was that homosexuals should be allowed to serve in the military and there should be some form of state-sanctioned domestic partnership arrangement. The right opposed these things, but the majority adopted these positions. The left side of the Overton Window began pushing for full gay marriage, but as of 2008 even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton still claimed that marriage was between a man and a woman. After Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, the left (and a good portion of the right) rapidly shifted on this issue, and many Republicans now support codifying gay marriage at the federal level.

Today, the right wing position is gay marriage, which was too extreme even for the left thirty years ago, while the left wing position is child grooming and state-sponsored sex change surgeries.

Who is really extreme - those who hold the same position nearly all of Western Civilization for the past four thousand years, or those who have a novel vision of society that was out of bounds even for the left just a decade ago?

I like to use the example of the 1960 presidential election. Sixty-two years ago, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon drew stark contrasts. Kennedy wanted more social spending, Nixon less. Kennedy wanted to expand the New Deal, Nixon wanted to curtail it. Even so, JFK would be a radical right winger today. He believed in traditional morality, opposed socialism and communism, and most of all he believed that America was a force for good in a chaotic world. No Democrat outside of Tulsi Gabbard can possibly repeat such rhetoric today.

Both Democrats and Republicans at least claimed to oppose socialism and totalitarianism until the 1990s; thought they disagreed on the methods with which to fight it. The same was true regarding race relations. By the 1990s, both parties agreed that racism and discrimination had been problems in American society, but Republicans generally believed that equality of opportunity was the best way forward, while Democrats supported affirmative action. Today, most Republicans still believe in Martin Luther King Jr.’s rhetoric about not judging people by their skin color, while the Democrats have completely embraced racial identity politics, going beyond affirmative action to outright antiwhite bigotry and discrimination.

Who is really extreme - those who believe that all men are created equal, or those who believe that whiteness is a disease that must be eradicated from the world?

The left is always bringing back memories of World War II and the Holocaust. They have been saying for decades that conservatives are quasi-Fascists who are champing at the bit to establish a new Nazi regime and send their opponents into camps. Every action by a conservative Republican is compared to 1930s autocracy. Remember when President Donald Trump recovered from Covid and greeted well-wishers on the White House balcony? Leftist media compared him to Benito Mussolini. As usual, however, the left always projects.

The left is seemingly so concerned about the right wing Fascist state that is always lurking around the corner that they are in the process of turning America into an actual totalitarian police state to stop it. Just as the Party in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four kept the specter of Emmanuel Goldstein around to serve as an excuse for their authoritarian crackdowns, our government uses the supposedly looming threats of Fascism, insurrection, and white supremacy as constant excuses for their excesses.

The dark specter of totalitarianism is always lurking on the right, but appearing on the left. Just weeks after Joe Biden’s blood-red speech denouncing MAGA Republicans as enemies of the state and dangers to democracy, a man has admitted to murdering a teenager because he claimed the young man was a Republican extremist.

His blood is on the hands of Biden, our news media, and every single person who has used this rhetoric to ostracize and dehumanize conservative citizens.

This all raises the question: who is really extreme?

Who is extreme - those who support the mass chaos, vandalism, violence, and murder in the name of racial justice, or those who believe in law and order?

Who is extreme - those who groom our children in the name of the LGBTQ+ agenda, or those who want to protect childhood innocence?

Who is extreme - those who call for censorship of speech they disagree with, or those who still believe in the 1st Amendment?

Who is extreme - those who support abortion until the moment of birth - or even afterward - or those who believe we should protect unborn life?

The American left is extreme by its very nature. Progressives have always been trying to push the Overton Window further and further toward their imagined utopia. American leftists are the modern descendants of the French Jacobins, who sought to erase history and start anew, and in doing so spilled the blood of millions. They are the descendants of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, who executed the Tsar and his family in cold blood. They are the descendants of Hitler’s Brownshirts, Mao’s Red Guards, and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

Make no mistake: it is the left that is truly extreme. Do not let them gaslight you into thinking that your own conservative views are in any way radical or unprecedented. Do not let them make you feel ashamed of your ideals, or of the legacy of your ancestors. Do not let them call you Fascist because you hold to the traditional values of your grandfathers who fought Fascists, Nazis, and Communists alike.