Imagine how Noah felt. He had to explain to his neighbors that there would soon be a world-ending flood. One sent by an invisible God to punish them for their sins. So he was building an ark. They might want to repent and do the same before … every one of them drowned. Imagine his conversations with passersby, as they watched him complete a massive wooden ship. And collect pairs of every kind of animal. Even the darkening clouds and lightning wouldn’t have convinced the comfortable, clueless “normies” all around him. No words of his could sway them to take the “red pill” (see The Matrix), and face the ugly truths behind life’s peaceful veneer.

Oh, Noah, You So Crazy …

It takes both courage and salesmanship to convey the enormity of evil. Even trying to talk about the darkest facts will get people branded as crackpots. And ordinary people are so attuned to fitting in and getting along, that’s the one thing they fear the most — getting cast out and branded an “oddball,” a “zealot” or a “hater.”

Nowadays, fake “hate” charges are enough to ruin someone’s life. So maybe the normies’ aversion to facing ugly facts is not irrational. Just … cowardly.

Most of us block our ears at outrageously sickening evils, maybe even scapegoat the messengers who try to tell us about them. Our guts say “That’s so awful, it cannot be true.” We remember how many false, crackpot conspiracy theories are floating around in the world. Then instead of considering seriously the information offered, we try to dismiss the person conveying it as a madman, an extremist, or a poor deluded soul. The more often this happens, the more people learn just not to bother passing along, or even believing, pieces of really ugly news. This becomes a vicious cycle.

And today’s left makes the absolute most of this timid human tendency. It does so in two distinct ways.

The Bait and Switch

The first is the most familiar. Leftists foist on the public “reforms” that on the surface appear pretty reasonable. They seem only intended to address real injustices and abuses. They hammer away at these hard cases to win support. We hear heart-rending (often falsified) stories of rape victims who will die if they don’t abort unborn babies so grotesquely handicapped they likely won’t survive childbirth. Or of discreet homosexual couples who got their door knocked down by police without a warrant enforcing archaic anti-sodomy laws. Of harmless black honor students accosted by thuggish police and beaten senseless.

If we won’t agree to whole rafts of reforms, and new legal principles and precedents, that the left demands? Then we’re on the side of the abusers. We “want women to die” in back-alley abortions. We hope to “burn gays at the stake.” Or we think that black lives don’t matter.

The Gadarene Lifeguards

Conservatives who dare to connect the dots will point out the vast, revolutionary implications of the reforms the left demands. Like Phyllis Schlafly, we show that the left wants to use a nuclear missile to kill a backyard coyote. We explain that the left’s demands will inexorably lead to outrageous, destructive changes:

• Abortion on demand, even for sex selection, through all nine months of pregnancy, even after.
• Sensitivity training in LGBT ideology for employees of Christian-owned companies, to avoid class-action discrimination suits.
• The crippling or dismantling of police forces, and more criminal chaos afflicting poor neighborhoods.

We think that if we paint these ugly, logically inevitable consequences in stark enough terms, we will wake people up and convince them. We dig into the past statements of the leftists pushing these new laws or policies, and find that they themselves have admitted these consequences. And they’re perfectly fine with them. They want abortion on demand, they hope to force churches to abandon biblical teaching, they want to defund the police.

Having dug up this all too real dirt, we present it to the public. But the media either ignores us, or dismisses us as “alarmists” using “scare tactics” to “demonize” good-hearted “reformers.” Those “reformers” wave off our statements, and in calm, reassuring language convince the voters to side with them, instead of with the “wild fear-mongerers” who want them to think about ugly truths and unavoidable outcomes. We’re the goggle-eyed crazies, pointing to the bottom of the slippery Gadarene slope. And the left are the mellow lifeguards, sipping margaritas and calmly telling people, “Dive in, the water’s fine!”

Of Course We Always Intended That

Once the new precedents and principles are firmly set in the place, the left enforces them ruthlessly, of course. Obviously letting polyamorous “genderqueer” throuples adopt kids from Christian agencies is implied by the laws they’d favored. Anyone reading the statute before it was passed could have realized that. And of course, we conservatives did, and loudly said so. But that just got us dismissed back then as alarmists. And now it gets us dismissed as “bigots” who want to “flout the law’s clear intent.”

Instead of the Big Lie, the Big Crime

There’s a second, even darker mode by which the left exploits people’s aversion to bad news, and preference for shooting the messenger. It doesn’t even involve sophisticated misdirection. In times of escalating evil like these, the left barely bothers to don the mauve camouflage of moderation. Instead, it just jumps right in and does things so appalling and outrageously evil that normal people won’t believe it. I mean they really … won’t believe it, even when you present them with rock-solid evidence. Instead they’ll make any excuse, starting with “You’re crazy!”

Some forms of misconduct are so brazen and repulsive, that if you report on them, you make yourself distasteful. Your audience doesn’t want to believe such things are possible. So they embrace denial, and project the revulsion and outrage that should be aimed at the evildoers — onto you, for reporting on it. Which is more comfy to believe, do you think, of these two propositions:

1. There is a massive, grotesque evil taking place right under our noses, with the collusion of popular, powerful celebrities, big time churchmen and “mainstream” political leaders. Or:
2. This right-wing Christian alarmist reporting on this “evil” is making stuff up, to goad you into taking uncomfortable action, so you should ignore him and get back to Netflix.

The Left’s Butcher Bill (A Partial List)

The question answers itself. And that’s why the left has gone unpunished, and mostly been rewarded, for each of the following evils (and my list isn’t comprehensive by a long shot):

• Planned Parenthood selling baby parts for profit.
• Black Lives Matter demanding the destruction of the nuclear family, so black kids get raised “by the community.”
• The Democrats in the White House and Congress, with their moles in the Deep State, inventing out of thin air the whole “Russia collusion” hoax, and ruining multiple innocents’ lives to advance it. They even roped in a known sex offender as a witness against the president. 
• The Democrats in the Senate, and most of our media, trumpeting fake rape charges against Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge. Then dismissing as baseless more substantive charges against Joe Biden.
• Antifa mobs taking over part of Seattle, and ruling it via armed warlords.
• The New York Times launching in public schools the conspiracy theory that America was founded to enable slavery.
• The Minneapolis City Council voting to disband the whole police force. Now BLM mobs are shooting into people’s cars in cities like Provo, Utah.
• Leftist mobs destroying statues not just of slave-owning U.S. founders, but Union generals, President Lincoln, and white abolitionists.
• The same Democratic party that relied on radical leftist Rev. Jim Jones to steal elections, and defended him even in Guyana, now empowers leftist thugs with the same ideology as Jones.
• The Democratic Party denouncing Mt. Rushmore’s very existence (and Trump’s proposed July 4 rally there) as “glorifying white supremacy.”

Blow Up Mt. Rushmore?

You thought I was making that last one up, didn’t you? The Democrats realized they overstepped on that one, and deleted the Tweet. Thank heaven for screenshots:

If you support America’s founding and our heroes throughout our history you’re now “glorifying white supremacy”?

This is insane, historically illiterate nonsense.

When will Joe Biden condemn his own party’s hatred of America? pic.twitter.com/NeK5iCIPAV

— Elizabeth Harrington (@LizRNC) June 30, 2020

Pretending these things never happened would make your life much easier and more peaceful, wouldn’t it? At least, in the short run. Then again, it made life easier for the security guard at Logan Airport to just wave through the 9/11 hijackers, boxcutters and all.

In the short run.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism.