Well, last week we learned there is another question that makes the progressive left and the establishment of the Democrat party every bit as outraged as the "have you ever been" question, and, believe it or not, the dreaded question is "Are you a US citizen?" In context, the Administration has announced that the question would be included on the 2020 US Census form. Although it was dropped from the standard form in 1950, it has been included on the "long form" and even the Obama Administration asked it. We don’t think that any question of this nature has provoked such emphatic opposition for 70 years or so. The Trump administration may not be succeeding in everything it does, but one task it performs with ease: "triggering" the progressive/Democrat/establishment with just about every move it makes, and the Administration's decision to ask the "dreaded" citizenship question has triggered an avalanche of negative reactions.
Why, one wonders, could anyone object to a US Census that asks its respondents to declare if they are citizens? It is probable that every other nation in the world that takes a census asks the respondent if he or she is a citizen. In fact, the United Nations (hardly a seething repository of pro-Trumpist sentiment) recommends that census forms ask about citizenship. The left (you know, the same folks who want to remove the Second Amendment) says the question is "unconstitutional" because it is not mandated by the Constitution - but, they fail to note that neither are questions of sex, age, etc. Could it be that there are a lot of people out there who are not citizens? Could it be that at least some of them are enjoying the benefits of citizenship - perhaps even including voting? We long have thought that the reason some of us are so insistent on a photo ID for voting is because we believe there are perhaps millions of non-citizens who are voting, or citizens who are “floating” between states and districts to cast votes where they are the most needed. We also have long thought that the reason others are equally insistent against a photo ID is that they believe the same thing. The party support for or opposition to the “citizenship” question breaks down on pretty much the same fault lines, we suspect.
And then we have David Hogg, who apparently has put his high school education on pause to become a permanent opponent of the right to keep and bear arms. Mr. Hogg, for reasons best known only to him, announced to the world that despite his 4.1 GPA, his applications had been rejected from four prestigious American universities. Fox News host Laura Ingraham reported on Mr. Hogg's experience with academic rejection, and used the word "whining." Well, given the anger of his reaction, one would have thought she had asked Mr. Hogg if he was a US citizen. He was so upset at being termed "whiny" that he mounted a boycott of Ms. Ingraham's advertisers, and within 36 hours at least three had pulled their ads from her program and since then several more have done so. Given Mr. Hogg’s campaign against Ms. Ingraham’s right to free speech, apparently his regard for the First Amendment is about the same as it is for the Second Amendment.
Now, it certainly is a free country, at least for progressives, but it does strike us as odd that the same folks who perpetually object to the Hollywood "blacklist" of the 1950s now support the boycott of advertisers of a conservative host for calling someone "whiny." Naturally, they also support campaigns to deny discounts to members of the National Rifle Association (and even reject $4,793 donations from the NRA to the high school in Stroudsburg, PA). Come to think of it, many of them have said that Trump voters are not welcomed as customers of their businesses. Imagine what would happen if Obama voters or Hillary voters were equally proscribed?
It gets worse - the left is seeking to have banks, investment firms, and retailers to stop dealing with members of the National Rifle Association. If someone tried to have people stop dealing with illegal aliens, or Communists, or eco-voters or Muslims the "voices of conscience" would deal with them all the more and also would file suit against those who tried to boycott them. Yet it is OK to ostracize, exile, banish, ban, proscribe, disinvest and run out of business the NRA and all who deal with it. And so far we have heard no one - we repeat - no one, who is even half as angry against the shooter as against the NRA.
When Delta Airlines and Enterprise and Hertz rent-a-car and others announced they no longer would extend discounts to NRA members, this thought entered our mind: those companies would never deny service to the family of the Parkland shooter (nor, we immediately comment, should they do so), but they see no problem with denying service to members of an organization that the shooter himself did not belong to. We repeat, the Parkland shooter was NOT a member of the National Rifle Association; we hasten to add, even if he had been, it would be no fairer to punish other members of that group than it would be to punish Muslims for terrorism - something that is clearly not acceptable - yet, perfectly acceptable is discrimination against NRA members or businesses that do business with them, or with opinion journalists who term someone as "whiny." Let's reflect on that before the next outraged reaction from the left.