I see that the need to have non-supporters of Trump come groveling and apologizing is a fairly common thing with them. That's really interesting.
They better not hold their breath waiting for me.
@CatherineofAragon I can remember when a fair crowd of them demanded likewise of those wishing to return from previous purges.
Funny how they, too, now rant their heads off against "conservative purity" when
they are demanding (as they
did in the prior purges) a kind of purity themselves. It puts me in mind of an ancient commentary that could well
apply to TOS as well as to the book that was its particular target:
Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind
which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes
raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before
it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message
cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly
fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only
be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself
enjoins them. From almost any page . . . a voice can be heard, from painful necessity,
commanding: “To a gas chamber–go!” . . . At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses,
that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in
time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive.
Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some
exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A
tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.
That, by the way, came from the meat of Whittaker Chambers's review of
Atlas Shrugged, a novel the paradox
of whose authoritarian tone on behalf of one kind of libertarian eye (it still boggles even now that there remain those
of libertarian disposition who would yet consider
Atlas Shrugged their
Book of Mormon---you know, another
testament of the freedom philosophy---oblivious to the authoritarian strains Chambers isolated so jarringly) can be
gleaned from too many TOS pages, if not from too many supporters (there and elsewhere) of the new administration
who are, likewise, oblivious to its authoritarian strain, when not celebrating it as a necessity for cleaning up the house
they often seem to prefer smashing up.
