Creating Right Wing Cranks From Leftists Normalizing Deviancy

I have been blogging for thirteen years more or less now.  During that time, I have reported or commented on everything from God and faith, politics, current events, history, comedy, travel, and people that have been important parts of my life.  I have made what I consider to be good friends on the interwebs along the way.  Some of these people (gasp!) were even left-leaning in their politics or held views on God that were radically different than my own.  Indeed, some of the most rewarding and informative discussions I have had have been with precisely such friends of differing opinions.  Unfortunately, some of the most unpleasant encounters I have had have also been with a few leftists whose seemingly only agenda was to burn the place down, just like the liberal cities after a mostly peaceful BLM riot.

As an example of atheist liberals with whom I formed friendships, I look with great fondness to the past repartee between John Myste and myself.  John had a wickedly sharp wit and a great sense of humor in trying to make his often erroneous points.  I miss his contributions as he has disappeared from the internet, it seems.  Another example is my leftist but God-fearing friend, Burr Deming.  Burr is an amazing writer and story-teller whom I consider to be a good man and a real friend.  That said, I have noticed a distinct shift with him and nearly all left-of-center bloggers as the Overton window has lurched leftward dramatically in the last few years of what is now acceptable as policy. 

When the “norm” is now even more left-leaning as a starting point in conversation, it only serves to make someone on the right who has held consistent in nearly all of their views over the last 13 years to appear as a “conservative crank”.  Evidently it doesn’t occur to the self-proclaimed party of science that it is their views that have become wildly outside of the norm and are actually what the average American now considers to be left-wing extremism.  (Or their adherents to be the “leftist cranks”)

I recall a time not too long ago when gay couples insisted that they only wanted the right to marry the person they loved and that would be the end of it.  Today, the LGBTQ lobby insists on sexualizing kids with age inappropriate drag queen story hours and shows.  They indoctrinate our youth to tell them that their gender is fluid and that there is nothing wrong with mutilating one’s body to conform with the gender that they identify with at a given moment.  This is nothing short of evil.

Liberals have decried racism and inappropriate actions of some law enforcement personnel.  All good people on the right concur with this.  Indeed, I don’t know of a single person on the right that condones the actions of the police against George Floyd and others who were murdered by law enforcement actions.  And yet, the left, instead of working with the right to root out the bad cops and punish those that deserve it would rather destroy our cities and defund the police in order to embolden criminals that have even less to fear now.

Let’s look at abortion next.  The left used to say that they wanted to keep abortion legal and rare.  Nowadays that has shifted to a position of abortion on demand and without apology.  Indeed, the Democrats in the house, nearly to a person, voted yet again the other day against a bill requiring medical attention to be given to the surviving baby of an attempted botched abortion.  In other words, these ghouls voted for infanticide.  Pro-life pregnancy centers and churches sustained 52 attacks in 46 days after the Supreme Court’s leaked Dobbs decision on May 2, while the FBI did nothing.  This is the extremism that is now present on the left. 

The left tells us that men can get pregnant, gas stoves are bad for people and the environment, spending trillions of dollars for special interest groups has nothing to do with inflation, outrageous energy prices that disproportionately affect the poor have nothing to do with Biden’s anti-fossil fuel policies, and men identifying as women should be allowed to compete in women’s swimming, track and other sports.  And these wildly radical ideas are merely the tip of the leftist iceberg.

Yes, when the left has shifted so far to the extreme end of the leftist spectrum as their norm, no wonder why those of us on the right must appear as conservative cranks to these misguided people.  It is an epithet I will embrace and proudly wear.

Barry Goldwater at the GOP convention in July of 1964 uttered perhaps his most famous quote, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”  One cannot help but wonder what the leftist equivalent to that would be today?  Extremism in the furtherance of leftist utopianism is a “moral” imperative?  I guess it would depend on what the left’s definition of “moral” is.  I guarantee it won’t be the same definition that our parents and grandparents understood it to be.  But what do I know?  I’m just cranking along here on the right.