When are lefties going to realise that they are now the baddies?

You can see where I'm heading with this, right?...

...I was watching the latest episode of the US series, Elementary, a few nights ago. It's the American equivalent of the BBC's Sherlock, i.e. a modern-day version of Sherlock Holmes. In the US version, he's played by skinny Englishman Johnny Lee Miller, Watson is a former female surgeon, played by Lucy Lieu, and it's set in New York. The two live in a cavernous terraced brownstone house owned by Holmes's evil international businessman father. As with almost every US crime series these days, the crimes pretty much always turn out to have been committed either by a government agency, a small businessman or, in the vast majority of cases, vile, rapacious, greedy, amoral Big Business creeps; none of the crimes turn out to have been perpetrated by, say, black criminals, white career criminals, or (naturally) Muslim terrorists. If a terrorist act tales place, it has never been committed by an actual terrorist, let alone - Heaven forfend! - an Islamic one, or any member of any ethnic community (unless, of course, they're rich businessmen). Non-heterosexuals never commit crimes (obvs) - unless they're in denial about their sexuality, in which case they deserve to burn in hell. 

This week's episode - which had something to do with advances in the production of artificial meat - gave Holmes a chance, upon hearing of some piece of business chicanery, to sneeringly utter the phrase "God Bless America!"  I'd love to know how many times over the years American TV scriptwriters have employed this device to signal their contempt for their own country, its capitalist system, and the redneck doofuses who are proud of it: hundreds, I suspect. It's the script line which signals that the character is one os the "good" guys.

I wonder if it ever strikes the slavering New Left conformists of the entertainment industry, or student demonstrators, or anti-Trump protesters, or anti-Austerity marchers, or anti-Israel activists, or eco-loon ranters, or Black Lives Matter supporters, or "safe space" snowflakes, or anti-Brexit whiners that they are now the ones wearing black hats with skulls on them? After all, they're the haters, the screamers, the rioters, the dividers, the disrupters, the anti-Christians, the anti-Semites, the anti-white racists, the class warriors, the irrational, pro-violence, anti-democracy enemies of free speech. Here's a clue: when you find yourself advocating the assassination of the American president like this Sunday Times writer - you're definitely not one of the good guys:

And if you think dressing up like this in front of your kids is justified because, you know, Trump!- you're definitely not on the side of the angels:

And if you can't see what's wrong - even in a fit of deranged inclusiveness-signalling -  with lumping in Muslims with Jews, gays, the disabled, and women "seeking to control" their "choices", given how fundamentalist Muslims tend to treat anyone belonging to any of these groups, you have utterly lost the moral plot (and made a complete fool of yourself at the same time):

As for standing next to a "Free Palestine" placard wearing a grin and a T-shirt with an image of Anne Frank on it - it's the act of a moral imbecile:

When you find yourself protesting alongside someone brandishing this sign, you need to urgently question your own values:

And to think that I've spent the whole of my life listening to the Labour Left call people like me "scum"!

Once I became conscious of my conservative political leanings in my mid-teens, I was troubled for many years by the ease with which left-wingers occupied the moral high ground. They seemed to belong there. Who, when they're young, wouldn't wish to be on the side of the disadvantaged, of immigrants, of underdeveloped countries being bullied by the West? Who wouldn't want to be on the side of those fighting for racial equality, of those militating for sexual minorities to be treated with respect, of those worried that nuclear weapons might destroy the planet, of those who feel that the rich should share more of their wealth with the poor? Added to which, there was the inescapable fact that many of the people who shared one's conservative views were distinctly unattractive, not to mention terminally uncool - they enjoyed crappy music and crappy films and routinely applied abusive epithets to anyone who wasn't exactly like them. I was a young, long-haired man who loved hippie music and counter-culture movies, had no interest whatsoever  in business, found religious piety off-putting, liked the few non-white immigrants I met (and adored black music), and had no desire to indulge in queer-bashing (or, come to that, any other form of bashing). 

Temptations to succumb and turn leftward were ubiquitous in the late '60s and early '70s, especially as I didn't yet have the evidence, experience or the arguments to counter the zeitgeist. I just faced the uncomfortable fact that I was doomed to be a bad man sporting a black cap with a skull insignia on it, and dug in until I'd amassed the evidence, experience and the arguments to counter the zeitgeist. I still considered myself a baddie, of course, but I felt I could at least justify my evil on grounds other than sheer intuition.

It's only in the last fifteen years or so that I've come fully to understand that the moral superiority claimed by many left-wingers on the basis of their beliefs is wholly unjustified: they tend not only to be just as selfish, emotionally incontinent, cowardly, conformist and intolerant as they evidently imagine the rest of us to be - in some ways they're worse, because they refuse to accept the undeniable evidence of what happens wherever and whenever their "utopian" principles are put into practice.  The reason they look so at home on the moral high ground is because it's so relaxing being able to be utterly horrible to other people while feeling really good about yourself. And, of course, stridently professing left-wing beliefs - no matter how stupid or unpleasant - doesn't entail the slightest risk to you, your career, or your family.

I have to stop now in order to try on my new white hat with an insignia consisting of a fluffy bunny and a white hand clasping a black hand against a rainbow background: it may take some getting used to.