Our Foul-Mouthed and Politically Correct Politics

By now you’ve probably seen the video of two cute young Latino children cussing Donald Trump with all the vulgarity of a late-night cable television comedian. It’s “gone viral,” as they say in the internet biz, and has no doubt generated a lot of t-shirt sales for the “Deport Racism 2016” group that came up with the idea. We don’t expect it will adversely affect Trump’s popularity, however, as the average viewer will probably be more inclined to support him so that he might deport the foul-mouthed urchins at the first opportunity. What we find most interesting about the video is the left’s continuing fondness for obscenity.

Drop in on any left-leaning web site or “alternative” newspaper and you’ll notice a proliferation of profanity, of course the movies and television shows that the vast west wing of Hollywood produces are full of foul language, a similar vulgarity seems to pervade the conversations of most of our liberal friends, even the Vice President of the United States felt compelled drop an “F-bomb” to commemorate the passage of Obamacare, and this isn’t the first time that children have been dragged into it. The left regards cussing as authentically proletarian, even though the authentic proletariate is still saying grace before a meal and washing its kids’ mouths out with soap for such outbursts, and it fancies itself bravely defying the stultifying conventions of bourgeois society, even though it’s been a long time since the martyrdom of Lenny Bruce and by now what’s left of bourgeois society is no longer capable of stultifying even the most obnoxious behaviors.

Our newly-won freedom to spew curse words might be considered a small and insignificant expansion of liberty, but it’s hardly ample compensation for all the restrictions that the left wants to impose. Everything from %&*# to *+$@ is now allowed in the public square, but all sorts of formerly useful and respectable terms are now forbidden in polite company. “He” is an offensive word if used in reference to men who consider themselves women, “merit” and “hard work” are considered racist code in the more refined quarters of academia, of course “illegal immigrant” is not allowed to describe an immigrant who has entered the country illegally, and in the Democratic presidential race presumptive candidate Hillary Clinton is accusing pesky challenger and self-described socialist — which was formerly a dirty word — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders of being racist for using the word “urban” in their ongoing gun control debate. Try injecting any honest acknowledgment of the higher rate of criminal activity in certain communities into that debate or the related arguments over the “Black Lives Matter” movement and the police, and you’ll find that the certain points of view are now out of bounds no matter how profanely phrased. Anything having to do with sex, of course, is similarly constrained by the new rules of polite discourse.

Sooner or later, we fervently hope, the public will grow weary of it. Those foul-mouthed kids are getting a lot more “dislikes” than “likes” on their “viral video” on YouTube, although the number of “dislikes” seems to grow suspiciously smaller each time we check, and still the comments are mostly negative and many of them are coming from self-described Latinos who are insisting that it is more representative of liberals than Latinos. We’re no fans of the buffoonish and insulting Trump, and would have preferred that someone had championed the border-enforcement cause with equally forceful but more carefully phrased arguments, as regular readers of this publication know, but we had to sympathize with the many commentators who said the video seemed to prove his arguments for even the most bluntly explained crackdown on illegal immigration. The arrogance and ignorance of the child stars will not persuade anyone that America should abandon its borders, the objective fact that some parts of town are more dangerous than others will not go unnoticed, and all the rest of that nonsense about gender-neutral pronouns and the hidden racism in everyday idioms will eventually become too much of a hassle for busy moms and dads. It’s a bunch of %&*# and *+$@, as far as we’re concerned, but at least we’re free to put it that way.

— Bud Norman