The French mathematician and French philosopher Blaise Pascal noted, “The only shame is to have none.”
I am going to have to disagree. In today’s environment, the only shame is having it wrongly turned around and used against you.
An advantage of having Democrats/former Democrats (e.g., Tammy Bruce, Mickey Kaus) as independent activists is that we can share some of progressive’s favorite tricks to suppress conservative arguments.
One of them is that most hardworking, taxpaying Americans don’t want to offend someone, no matter the circumstance. The second is that most conservatives will try and respond to the initial premise offered in conversation, assuming that their opponent will respond to an intellectual argument intellectually. These two tactics are combined in the use of shame to deflect reason.
In a compelling verbal take-down of progressive self-righteousness, Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro challenged Piers Morgan on the CNN host’s attempted use of shame to deflect gun control support through the use Sandy Hook Elementary school victims.
BEN SHAPIRO, EDITOR BREITBART.COM: I think we can have a rational, political conversation about balancing rights and risks and rewards of all of these different policies, but I don’t think that what we need to do is demonize people on the other side as being unfeeling about what happened at Sandy Hook.MORGAN: How dare you accuse me of standing on the graves of the children that died there. How dare you.SHAPIRO: I’ve seen you do it repeatedly, Piers.
As Joel Pollack noted in his review of the turning-point appearance:
Ben put into practice something that Andrew Breitbart preached throughout his career of battling the mainstream media: Question the premise, whether it’s an assertion that you don’t care about the victims of Sandy Hook, or a faulty definition of Critical Race Theory, or that Barack Obama is a nice guy who only wants America to succeed.
Capitalism advocate and writer Aaron Clarey touches on the subject of shame in his post, The Shaming of John Galt.
Ultimately all the efforts and propaganda that goes into villainzing what is only human nature can fall under one single category or “weapon” of the left.Shame.The left uses shame and “shaming language” for one reason and one reason only – they are factually wrong, so they must “shame” what is “right” or what is real. Since the left lives in a world that is not based in reality or the reality principle, they have to “change reality” and the best way to do that is to convince or outright brainwash people into thinking the opposite of what is true and the opposite of what is in their best interests.
Clarey theorizes there may be more to this shame approach, beyond silencing conservatives. For example, environmental shame is used to promote “going green” and some of the true believers think they owe it to society to slave away for other people at “non-profits”.
Both pundits have new books: Shapiro’s is Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans, while Clarey’s is Enjoy the Decline. Both offer approaches on how to address the progressivism and redistributionism that are so pervasive in our society and government today. Both will also help fight leftist attempts to deflect their shame on you!
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY