TRUMP IS WINNING THE WAR ON POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
The Washington Post gets a key to Trump’s success.
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Donald Trump has declared war on political correctness. And suddenly theWashington Post realizes Trump is winning the war.
This is a war that could not be won soon enough. To borrow from one of history’s terms for World War II, the war on political correctness is “the good war.” Here’s an excerpt from the Post story the other day, starting with the headline:
Why Trump may be winning the war on ‘political correctness’
Cathy Cuthbertson once worked at what might be thought of as a command post of political correctness — the campus of a prestigious liberal arts college in Ohio.
“You know, I couldn’t say ‘Merry Christmas.’ And when we wrote things, we couldn’t even say ‘he’ or ‘she,’ because we had transgender. People of color. I mean, we had to watch every word that came out of our mouth, because we were afraid of offending someone, but nobody’s afraid of offending me,” the former administrator said.
All of which helps explain why the 63-year-old grandmother showed up at a recent Donald Trump rally in Hilton Head Island, S.C., where she moved when she retired a year ago.
The Republican front-runner is “saying what a lot of Americans are thinking but are afraid to say because they don’t think that it’s politically correct,” she said. “But we’re tired of just standing back and letting everyone else dictate what we’re supposed to think and do.”
The article goes on to note that polls show the fury at political correctness goes across the political spectrum and is resented by large numbers of both whites and blacks. It continues:
Trump has brought the question from the university quad to the political arena in a way that no leading candidate has in the past.
… Trump sounded the anti-PC clarion call at the first Republican debate in August, when moderator Megyn Kelly of Fox News challenged him on comments that he had made disparaging women.
“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” he said. “I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either. This country is in big trouble. We don’t win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody.”
This is, by now, a recognizable Trump pattern. He takes a subject that has about it “elephant in the room” qualities — something that’s right there but no one wants to address because its too sensitive. Breaking all the PC rules, he turns the spotlight on the elephant — and everyone gasps in disbelief. What follows next is endless conversation about the elephant — with Trump leading the way. And winning support as a direct result.
This time he has put political correctness right out there as an issue effecting not just everyday political dialogue but national security. When a clearly appalled ABC reporter Tom Llamas barked at Trump for using the term “anchor babies” in discussing immigration, saying “Are you aware that the term anchor baby, that’s an offensive term. People find that hurtful?” Trump stood fast, saying quickly: “You mean it's not politically correct and yet everybody uses it?” He followed this with a defiant pledge to keep using the term, which he has. Shortly thereafter Trump’s poll numbers continued to rise.
One has only to look at the Ft. Hood shootings and the murderous rampage of the pro-Islamic radical Major Nidal Hassan to see just how widespread — and dangerous — the PC virus has become. As Fox News reported in the aftermath of the shootings — which took the lives of thirteen people (twelve of them U.S. soldiers) and wounded twenty-nine:
The warning signs were all there: the justification of homicide bombings; the spewing of anti-American hatred; the efforts to reach Al Qaeda…
But the U.S. military treated Major Nidal Malik Hasan with kid gloves, even after giving him a poor performance review. And though he was on the radar screen of at least one U.S. intelligence agency, no action was taken that might have prevented the Army psychiatrist from allegedly gunning down 13 people and wounding 29 others in the Fort Hood massacre last week.
“There were definitely clear indications that Hasan's loyalties were not with America,” Lt. Col. Val Finnell, Hasan’s classmate at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., told FoxNews.com in an exclusive interview. He and Hasan were students in the school’s public health master's degree program from 2007-2008.
“There were all sorts of ... comments made throughout the year that made me question his loyalty to the United States, but nothing was done,” said Finnell, who recalled one class during which Hasan gave a presentation justifying homicide bombings.
“The issue here is that there’s a political correctness climate in the military. They don’t want to say anything because it would be considered questioning somebody's religious belief, or they’re afraid of an equal opportunity lawsuit.”
And as a result of this particular episode of political correctness, mass murder ensued — on a U.S. Army base in the middle of Texas at that.
James Kalb, writing in Chronicles magazine, notes that part of Trump’s success is that his fans love his flat refusal to be politically correct, adding:
[P]olitical correctness is a genuine threat to any tolerable way of life.… In other words, p.c. is Totalitarianism 2.0: a bureaucratic system, seemingly gentle, that possesses unlimited power…. Domination of public life by p.c. elites has thus made it impossible for ordinary people to assert their complaints publicly in an acceptable way, so their objections can be shrugged off as the outbursts of ignorant bigots who will, in any event, soon become demographically irrelevant.
In hammering away at political correctness — and in attacking various seemingly unrelated issues as political correctness — Trump has hit the proverbial political jackpot.
Think of the beginning of that Washington Post article again:
Cathy Cuthbertson once worked at what might be thought of as a command post of political correctness — the campus of a prestigious liberal arts college in Ohio.
“You know, I couldn’t say ‘Merry Christmas.’ And when we wrote things, we couldn’t even say ‘he’ or ‘she,’ because we had transgender. People of color. I mean, we had to watch every word that came out of our mouth, because we were afraid of offending someone, but nobody’s afraid of offending me,” the former administrator said.
What Mrs. Cuthbertson is describing is not some far distant problem that has no impact on her life. What she is describing is Kalb’s “totalitarianism 2.0” that has descended on all manner of “ordinary” Americans. like herself. They can see it every day in their own lives — and they don’t like it. In fact they detest it. They read the story of Major Nidal Hassan and understand instantly how all those American soldiers on American soil wound up mass murdered — because of political correctness.
They don’t like it. In fact, with Trump leading the way, they are now in open rebellion against it. Which goes exactly to the Washington Post’s amazed realization of just “Why Trump may be winning the war on ‘political correctness’ “
He is winning. It’s a war that cannot be won soon enough.
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