Bad news: Aspiring presidential candidate thinks opposing viewpoints “terrorize” people
POSTED AT 9:21 PM ON JUNE 18, 2014 BY MARY KATHARINE HAM
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/18/bad-news-aspiring-presidential-candidate-thinks-opposing-viewpoints-terrorize-people/This is a disturbing statement from a woman who’d like to head the federal government. Noah mentioned this quote in his commentary on the room to Hillary’s left. Gun control is one of few issues where she sent a signal to the party’s liberal base that she might be more boldly liberal than Obama. But this isn’t just an appeal to the Left on policy. It’s an appeal to the Left’s routine and increasing tendency to equate political speech they don’t like with physical violence. See, bothersome political speech with which you disagree is prized and protected. But violence against one’s fellow citizens is not. Convince the quite polite American public that certain forms of political speech are tantamount to physical violence, and chances are you can be rid of many of the voices you dislike.
Cue Hillary, who describes the opinions of those who oppose her thusly:We cannot let a minority of people, and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people, hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people,” Clinton said during a live CNN town hall.
“We,” said the aspiring head of the federal government,
“cannot let”—As in,
“allow.” What remedy, pray tell, does she have in mind for this outrageous epidemic in free thought?
“a minority of people”—The minority, the protection of whose rights Thomas Jefferson called a
“sacred principle” in his First Inaugural Address and whose endangerment at the hands of a tyrannical majority James Madison called the Republic’s
“great danger?”“and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people”— Regardless of the truth of this dubious assertion, she seems to repeat it to justify her advocacy for the prohibition of the minority’s dissent, which makes it sound like someone never glanced at a Founding document.
“Screw ‘em, majority rules,” the working draft of the Constitution proclaimed.
“hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority.”— Let me see if I can rephrase the idea of a “viewpoint that terrorizes the majority” in such a way that a longtime Democratic politician might understand it. There’s an old adage originally used to describe journalism and oft repeated by the activist Left to give itself airs—
“comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”Hillary Clinton and liberal activists are the comfortable. They require a “safe place” where the presence of others who deign to disagree cannot “trigger” them. Your mere opposition to an asinine limit on mag capacity, which was a demonstrable disaster in incompetent governance in her home state of New York, rises to the level of “terrorizing” for a woman who famously couldn’t figure out if that term applied to anyone involved in Benghazi. But for you, law-abiding citizen, not a problem.
Much of the Left desires that criticisms of gun control policies be banished from the public square. Espousing them is abetting child murder, in their eyes, no matter how much evidence or what arguments Second Amendment activists marshal. Hearing this argument from fellow citizens who call themselves liberal is disappointing.
Hearing it from a potential presidential candidate is creepy. Especially one who’d be taking the reins from an administration that flagrantly uses the power of the federal government to get people it doesn’t like to stop saying things of which it does not approve.
