I’m kind of tired of being told how naïve and dangerous a moderate left ideology is compared to extreme right ideology. If I vote anything other than Trump Republican, I’m often accused by holier than thou conservatives that I’m voting for crime and weakness. There is this idea on the right that if I’m not for an expensive border wall and the elimination of birthright citizenship and asylum seeking, that I’m totally in favor of being invaded by another country. That’s not to say that the left doesn’t have their own problem with imposing straw man arguments on Republicans. No side is without their own respective bogeymen, but it’s the Republican Bogeymen that actually seem to be the ones running things on their side. I just feel like I’m not necessarily the one that needs to take a step back and actually listening to what the people I’m voting for are actually saying. Take Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). He supports dismantling federal programs for education and interstate highways, and things unless those are removed, the Left will start a Civil War. This isn’t me reading into vague comments or twisting context. He actually said those things at a Lawyer’s convention. You can watch the speech. And yet I’m the one who’s unreasonable because I want background checks on guns and thinks we should help desperate people from other countries?
Jason Spencer is a Georgia State Representative in the Georgia House of Representatives. A highly conservative Republican, he has a bit of a history in saying some provocative things. No doubt knowing that Spencer had some pretty deplorable views, Sacha Baron Cohen, the man responsible for getting famous celebrities and political figures to expose their most base views as characters like Borat, Ali G, and Bruno, brought him onto his newest show to hopefully provoke an intense reaction out of Spencer. In the bit, thinking he was involved in a training video by an Israeli soldier, Spencer gleefully exposed his rump while shouting racial and homophobic epithets. Now, Spencer is claiming he was stricken by fear due to a previous exposure to terrorism and felt uncomfortable shouting those words…but if you watch the segment, that look of unadulterated joy at saying disgusting and bigoted phrases in a space he thought was going to be an echo chamber is hard to miss. Now, obviously he wasn’t the only person taken in by Cohen and his act. And indeed, many of the more conservative people Cohen has featured while in character, have loudly proclaimed that he tricked them into saying such unsavory and terrible things.
But the fact is that if your gut reaction to someone encouraging you to say something racist or homophobic is anything other than something along the lines of “No, I would not feel comfortable with that,” than you kind of lose your right to complain about someone showing the world your willingness to do such things.
Mind the Exit 