There are moments when I see something on the TeeVee that make me wonder if DC pundits are aware of what is going on around them.

Here is a great example:

No, Joe, these are not "issues." These are Republican tropes intended to take over the media agenda. Judging by this, it's working. pic.twitter.com/kByjznA2FG

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) April 11, 2022

These are all, as Jarvis points out, conservative tropes. They have figured out decades ago that they can carry out vocal campaigns and create moral panics based on questionable, or even flat-out false, premises. It gives them cover to attack minorities, women, and our very democracy by allowing them to set the debate.

They are, as this shows, pulling it off once again. It works because enough people who are not really paying attention and have a kneejerk negative response to anything (anything!) that sounds progressive.

The first bullet point in the Morning Joe tirade is absurd on its face because of a little problem, and that little problem is conservative speech is increasingly equated with hate speech. They know what they are doing. They have become quite adept at using our freedoms against us, including the idea of freedom of speech.

I say “idea of freedom of speech” because if Twitter bans you for saying that all brown people from the Middle East should be shot, that is a private company expelling you because you violated the rules of the forum set by the private company. The First Amendment does not come into play here because, once more for the people in the back, Twitter is not a government agency. But at some point, the Lauren Boeberts of the world figured out they can say whatever comes to mind, no matter how terrible, and even if you merely say “hey Lauren, that’s not nice,” people like Andrew Sullivan will cry out “CANCELED CANCELED CANCELED I SAY!”.

And by the way, this “First Amendment” argument often comes from the same people who are all for police beating up protestors, and since the police are government agents, that is much more a First Amendment issue. But I digress.

The second point, “college campuses have become liberal echo chambers” is a 35-year-old attack now. The PC OUT OF CONTROL OMG nonsense started with college campus incidents.

This is part of the heavily-funded, well-organized war on education that includes Critical Race Theory nonsense, with a final goal of destroying public education. And I work in higher education – the idea that colleges are bastions of far-left thought is HILARIOUS to me.

The third point, on political correctness, is retro, and sort of hilarious given that was the OG moral panic. Kudos for the throwback acknowledgment, and here’s a good listen as to why the PC Out of Control moral panic in the 1990s was built on disingenuous thinking.

Indeed, the more things change the more they stay the same.

On “canceling” historical figures…some of this is people being upset at historians and activists talking about how many of our political heroes were complicated figures. That should be okay! There is nothing wrong with the truth, and knowing that certain people (see Thomas Jefferson) were flawed figures. It is a rather childish view of history to think that our historical figures were gods and goddesses.

I think these are certainly issues for Democrats, but not in the way Morning Joe’s crew thinks they should be. Democrats can talk about what the Republicans are really up to, talk about how it goes against American values, etc. Instead of allowing them to, once again, set the debate and enable a lot of minorities and marginalized people in this country to be harmed (not to mention our democracy).

If one side is about racism, autocratic rule, and damaging valuable American institutions like public education, then appeasing them is not going to work because they are not going to stop there. They don’t want appeasement. They want to dominate.

The last word goes to those woke troublemakers, The Buffalo Springfield.