CNN’s townhall (2/21/2018) on guns was staged in Broward County, the scene of the shooting, and also a Democrat bastion in a state trending Republican. Remember, Al Gore tried to cherry pick friendly counties like Broward County for never-ending recounts for manufacturing votes to reverse his loss of Florida in the 2000 election, only to be stopped by the Supreme Court.
On 2/21, CNN conducted a theatrical display of ritual humiliation reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards during the weighty days of the Cultural Revolution. Go view CNN’s tape of their event and compare it to this 7-minute exhibit of rage, youthful exuberance, and inhumanity from Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Today’s young firebrands, in their bullying antics towards Southern statues and the NRA/guns, has striking similarities to Red Guard attacks on bourgeois decadence and, of course, statues.
We don’t have to look far into the pages of history for evidence of adolescent cruelty. Movements built around coercive utopias have frequently found a receptive audience among the young. Italy’s Fascist Party youth, the National Socialist Hitler Youth, Stalin’s Young Pioneers, Mao’s Red Guards, Bela Kun’s Lenin’s Boys (Hungarian Soviet Republlic, 1919) show the capacity for enthusiastic intolerance among the young. The spectacle of orchestrated hate depicted on CNN is true to form.
We must understand these things for what they are. They are not forums for calm deliberation, but devolve into kangaroo courts for compulsory humiliation. Let’s stop the pretense of calling it a “townhall”.
RogerG