Found at Powerline: under the heading, “Who is actually tolerant?” Comes with this remarkable chart.

And even this is an underestimate of the real divide since no lefty ever thinks to modify their views when in the company of someone on the right, while people on the right almost invariably do. Many on the left therefore really have no idea what people on the right think since most of them never allow anything to be said in their presence that will offend their political sensibilities. They therefore are less aware to the point of obliviousness whether or not they would shut people on the right out of their lives. Of course they would, pathetic numbskulls that they are.

But for a change of pace, this really made me laugh.

This is by Caroline Glick: Trump, Israel and the Democratic Crack-Up. It is directed at the extent to which Democrats have become anti-Israel, but begins with more general observations that need to be pondered.

Until 2000, the peaceful transition of power in the wake of elections was a feature of American democracy that everyone took for granted. In 2000, the Democrats shifted. They refused to accept the election results in Florida that gave Bush his victory in the state, and through it, in the electoral college, until the Supreme Court ruled that the results were legitimate. Even afterwards, many Democrats considered Bush’s victory and his presidency illegitimate.

In retrospect, the Democrats’ refusal to accept the legitimacy of the 2000 election results marked the beginning of the party’s radicalization.

Since Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, the speed and depth of the party’s radical transformation has gone into overdrive.

The day after the election, Democrats coined a new term in American politics, “resistance.” Until then, the side that lost a presidential election was the “opposition.” But the Democrats don’t simply “oppose” Trump, they “resist” him.

The distinction is profound. An opponent recognizes the basic legitimacy of the person he opposes. A resister does not. The purpose of the anti-Trump resistance is not to offer an alternative path for governing. It is to nullify Trump’s presidency by among other things delegitimizing and dehumanizing Trump his family, associates and supporters. The resistance seeks to paralyze Trump’s presidency to prevent him from wielding the power of office and oust him from that office as quickly as possible.

To this end, for instance, the Democratic minority in the Senate has used procedural rules to slow-roll Trump’s appointments to senior positions in the executive branch and impede his ability to govern.

The resistance is not limited to the partisan arena. During the 2016 elections, and to an even greater degree in their aftermath, Democrats in the US media and in the federal government – particularly in the intelligence, law enforcement and diplomatic arms of government — joined Democratic politicians in their efforts to nullify the Trump candidacy and later presidency. Like the politicians, they have used the power of their positions to undermine and subvert Trump’s presidency to foment his departure from office.

We saw extra-political resistance in action with the attempt by senior FBI, CIA and Justice Department officials to criminalize Trump as a Russian agent through the use of the Clinton campaign’s fraudulent “Steele dossier.” The senior federal officials used the dossier, compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele for the Clinton campaign as a means to open an investigation against Trump’s campaign and against Trump himself and then cause the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate their partisan-financed, false allegations.

As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in his book Ball of Collusion which examines the Russia collusion investigation, the liberal establishment in Washington, “exploited its control of law-enforcement and intelligence to help Clinton and undermine Trump. This is a scandalous abuse of power.”…

Despite the self-evident absurdity of the basis for their impeachment drive, the Democrats are conducting hearings and taking testimony from federal employees in secret rooms, and barring their Republican colleagues from attending.

The media aren’t merely supporting this farce. They are taking a leading role in propounding it. Last week, the investigative journalism organization Project Veritas released recorded footage of CNN President Jeff Zucker instructing his top news executives to push the impeachment story in their programming.

A transcript of a meeting in August between New York Times editor Dean Banquet and the paper’s editorial staff revealed a similar obsession at the Times with advancing the anti-Trump resistance.

Where does this go? There has been nothing, absolutely nothing that has been done by Donald Trump that has been anything other than what those who voted for him expected him to do. This is not an attack on Trump. It is an attack on the democratic process itself.

There was a bit of comment on this article by Gary Saul Morson when it was released upon publication but I waited until my copy of The New Criterion arrived in the post before I read it. This article is a sensation that will make many things clear but also spook you about the kinds of people we are dealing with. It has the simple title, Leninthink which gives you no sense of what it’s about. It’s about what modern socialists really think and how they really operate. Their beliefs, whatever they are, represent an absolute moral standard. No argument, no discussion, no compromise. Mixed in with arbitrary random terror. This is some of it, but you need to read it all to get the sense of the mentality of the socialist absolute mind.

Lenin constantly recommended that people be shot “without pity” or “exterminated mercilessly” (Leszek Kołakowski wondered wryly what it would mean to exterminate people mercifully). “Exterminate” is a term used for vermin, and, long before the Nazis described Jews as Ungeziefer (vermin), Lenin routinely called for “the cleansing of Russia’s soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrels, fleas, bedbugs—the rich, and so on.”

Lenin worked by a principle of anti-empathy, and this approach was to define Soviet ethics. I know of no other society, except those modeled on the one Lenin created, where schoolchildren were taught that mercy, kindness, and pity are vices. After all, these feelings might lead one to hesitate shooting a class enemy or denouncing one’s parents. The word “conscience” went out of use, replaced by “consciousness” (in the sense of Marxist-Leninist ideological consciousness). During Stalin’s great purges a culture of denunciation reigned, but it was Lenin who taught “A good communist is also a good Chekist.”

This too helps to make sense of it.

When Mensheviks objected to Lenin’s personal attacks, he replied frankly that his purpose was not to convince but to destroy his opponent. In work after work, Lenin does not offer arguments refuting other Social Democrats but brands them as “renegades” from Marxism. Marxists who disagreed with his naïve epistemology were “philosophic scum.” Object to his brutality and your arguments are “moralizing vomit.” …

Compulsive underlining, name calling, and personal invective hardly exhaust the ways in which Lenin’s prose assaults the reader. He does not just advance a claim, he insists that it is absolutely certain and, for good measure, says the same thing again in other words. It is absolutely certain, beyond any possible doubt, perfectly clear to anyone not dull-witted. Any alliance with the democratic bourgeoisie can only be short-lived, he explains: “This is beyond doubt. Hence the absolute necessity of a separate . . . strictly class party of Social Democrats. . . . All this is beyond the slightest possible doubt.” Nothing is true unless it is absolutely, indubitably so; if a position is wrong, it is entirely and irredeemably so; if something must be done, it must be done “immediately, without delay”; Party representatives are to make “no concessions whatsoever.” Under Lenin’s direction the Party demanded “the dissolution of all groups without exception formed on the basis of one platform or another” (italics mine). It was not enough just to shoot kulaks summarily, they had “to be shot on the spot without trial,” a phrase that in one brief decree he managed to use in each of its six numbered commands before concluding: “This order is to be carried out strictly, mercilessly.” You’d think that was clear enough already.

No concessions, compromises, exceptions, or acts of leniency; everything must be totally uniform, absolutely the same, unqualifiedly unqualified. At one point he claims that the views of Marx and Engels are “completely identical,” as if they might have been incompletely identical.

They are cute in their base ignorance and stupidity and inane in their objectives, as with Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, but that is only because their power is limited. Like Morson, I grew up in a red diaper family and have learned to fear these people as the totaliarian mass murderers each of them potentially is. As he writes:

These and other disastrous Leninist ideas derived from a specific Leninist way of thinking, and that is what this essay focuses on. I know this way of thinking in my bones. I am myself a pink diaper baby and I remember being taught this way of thinking, taken for granted by all right-thinking people. Memoirs of many ex-Communists, from David Horowitz to Richard Wright, confirm that, more than doctrines, it was the Leninist style of thought that defined the difference between an insider and an outsider. And that way of thought is very much with us.

That last sentence in black is why this article is so important. I will end with his final para which again emphasises the point:

When I detect Leninist ways of thinking today, people respond: surely you don’t think all those social justice warriors are Leninists! Of course not. The whole point of Leninism is that only a few people must understand what is going on. That was the key insight of his tract What Is to Be Done? When Leninism is significant, there will always be a spectrum going from those who really understand, to those who just practice the appropriate responses, to those who are entirely innocent. The real questions are: Is there such a spectrum now, and how do we locate people on it? And if there is such a spectrum, what do we do about it?

There is no space to address such questions here. My point is that they need to be asked.