‘American Sniper’: Intolerance Burns Inside the Left Like a Poison

In a Weekly Standard piece titled, “The ‘American Sniper’ Freakout: Why the Left Can’t Tolerate This Movie,” Mark Hemingway does a fine job of breaking down exactly why the Left either hates “American Sniper” or is dishonestly claiming it is a left-wing movie. It’s a thorough, must-read that perfectly lays out the case. Outside the context of the film itself, there is an additional reason the Left can’t tolerate Eastwood’s masterpiece: every act of apostasy, even one, must be punished.

The Left cannot tolerate dissent. If just one thing sneaks through the institutions the Left is desperate to hold a monopoly on, it is immediately crushed, defamed, mocked, and Frankenstein-villaged until the end of time.

Just try to read this from Vox without seeing the vein throbbing in the author’s forehead:

Faced with a choice between altering its narrative to account for that gray versus altering the facts of history, the film chose the latter. It adopted an “honesty shmonesty” approach to the war: in its retelling, Iraq was a fight of Good Americans against Bad Terrorists, led by Chris Kyle, the Good-est American of them all.

Translation: “Harumph! Harumph! Harumph!”

Here’s Rolling Stone’s troll-king Matt Taibbi:

This is the same Hollywood culture that turned the horror and divisiveness of the Vietnam War era into a movie about a platitude-spewing doofus with leg braces who in the face of terrible moral choices eats chocolates and plays Ping-Pong. The message of Forrest Gump was that if you think about the hard stuff too much, you’ll either get AIDS or lose your legs. Meanwhile, the hero is the idiot who just shrugs and says “Whatever!” whenever his country asks him to do something crazy.

Translation: “It was on a summer morning when I first discovered I was incapable of feeling or expressing joy…”

Exactly 10 years ago, we saw this happen to “The Passion of the Christ.” The attacks from the Left were relentless and dishonest, and they continue to this day. Like “Sniper,” there was no way for the Left to kill “The Passion’s” box office success. Nevertheless, the defamation campaign rolled on. The idea behind these attacks are meant as warnings to other filmmakers that there will be a heavy price to pay by anyone who dares attempt another act of entertainment apostasy.

This is exactly how the modern-day blacklist in Hollywood works. Even if the film is a hit, if you stray from Hollywood’s Liberal Plantation, you will pay a price. It’s not just film. Look at the dishonest campaign waged (primarily by CNN) against the reality show “Duck Dynasty.”

And it’s not just entertainment. It’s everything. Fox News is but a small ship in a literal ocean of left-leaning news media. Nonetheless, the Left has poured millions into institutions created for the sole purpose of marginalizing and destroying Fox News.

The Left’s hold on America’s higher-education system is extraordinary. Still, Liberty University must be toxified and destroyed.

The Left’s hold on the public school system has been impenetrable for decades. Still, charter schools, home schooling, and proven ideas like school choice that might give poor, inner-city schoolchildren a chance at a future are relentlessly demonized.

The Left also demands a monopoly on the way particular groups of human beings think. Therefore, conservative women, Hispanics, gays, and blacks — apostates all — are regularly subjected to media campaigns of personal destruction that make Joseph McCarthy look like Captain Kangaroo.

The Left is mortified by the very idea of conservative and Christian and patriotic ideas seeping through its cultural grasp. The fact that almost all of what does get through proves itself to be a rousing success, only makes the Left angrier, more bitter, and more determined.

Threatened, insecure and intolerant to their very core, in order to strangle in the crib the prospect of a successful piece of conservative anything being repeated, the Left’s well-trained and financed (often with taxpayer money) Goon Squads never fail to viciously launch a campaign of whack-a-mole.

Although they produced more than two dozen films that claimed the opposite, the Left cannot psychologically handle just ONE Iraq War film that portrays the mission as righteous. Like a poison, their own intolerance is burning away at their insides.

Witnessing this happen over a single film is both revealing and highly entertaining.

 

John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC