Watch When This Leftist Protester Realizes Her Sign Says the Wrong Thing, Left Speechless
Steven Crowder’s “Change My Mind” segments are brilliant performance art in so many ways, and not just because they’ve become meme-worthy expressions of conservative culture. It’s also not just the entertainment value, although it certainly provides some of that.
Instead, they’ve become a symbol of one crucial difference between the right and the left in this country: the desire to engage versus the desire toward outrage.
In the media, the American conservative has become the ultimate symbol of closed-mindedness. There’s no small amount of irony in this, inasmuch as conservatism has sought to reach out and discuss political and cultural issues like immigration, gender and gun rights.
The left wants no such colloquy; they’re assured in their opinions and they’re going to try and shout down or shut down anyone they disagree with. This includes their own, as Tom Brokaw has discovered of late.
The ultimate symbol of this is, very literally, one conservative guy going out on (usually) a college campus, amid a sea of activists, and putting up a card table with a placard on the front of it announcing one of his beliefs and inviting students to change his mind.
This has invited all manner of invective, even from officialdom, which only goes to prove the point. Sometimes, students can hold their own or better against Crowder. Most of the time, they’re not even willing to listen.
And nothing illustrated that better than a video posted Jan. 22 in which a protester had quite the ironic sign. The topic for this “Change My Mind” video was on building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. To counter Crowder, the young woman had a sign that said “Immigrants are welcome, change my mind.”
Except her mind wasn’t open to be changed.
When Crowder turned his attention to her and asked if he could try and change her mind, she said, “Nah, I’m good … I’m good just holding my sign.”
“OK, but I don’t understand — the whole purpose to it, the segment that we’ve started is to change my mind, is to invite dialogue,” Crowder said.
“You’re kind of — missing the whole point to it if you’re saying ‘change my mind’ and I’m saying, ‘let me try and change your mind,’ and you say, ‘I don’t want to talk,’ you probably shouldn’t be holding that sign.”
The person next to her volunteers that she had talked to people earlier in the day, but that “this is an intimidating situation for some people.” Crowder, meanwhile, though no stranger to confrontation himself, is the one surrounded by individuals, a goodly number of whom don’t seem to be entirely on board with his position or simply rubbernecking.
Crowder then asked the woman if she felt he was a racist.
“I said I wouldn’t debate racists and I don’t feel uncomfortable engaging with you right now,” she said.
“Because you think I’m a racist?” Crowder asked.
“Uh, because you’re crowding me and you’ve brought a crowd of people and multiple cameras, so I really don’t appreciate how you’re crowding me like this,” she responded.
Crowder, it’s worth noting, is a fair distance from her and she’s at the front of a crowd that she could have left at any time, sign and all.
There is a bit of back and forth from there (and a good joke from one of the liberal activists about him “Crowdering” her), but TL;DR, the woman who said she wanted Crowder to change her mind via a sign didn’t actually want her mind changed, instead preferring to remain speechless.
While she must have realized her sign said the wrong thing, her excuse seemed to be that Crowder was crowding her (when he wasn’t) and that she didn’t “engage with racists.” So basically, define anyone as a racist and you’re no longer under any obligation to consider their ideas — whether those ideas are racist or not.
You can file this in the “nothing new under the sun” folder; as William F. Buckley pointed out so many years ago, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”
We like to believe we live in the most contentious and polarized time in recent history. To a certain extent, social media has magnified that. But even back in the days of five television channels, when computers were mostly in use with universities, large corporations and airline reservation systems, Buckley hosted a show called “Firing Line,” where liberal guests were repeatedly brought on for intellectual debate. The new left, meanwhile, was busy telling everyone not to trust anyone over 30 (or, presumably, young Republicans).
This is a broad generalization, of course, but it’s a generalization that you can observe.
Two days before Steven Crowder posted this video, Hollywood screenwriter Michael Green wrote on Twitter about Covington Catholic student Nathan Sandmann: “A face like that never changes. This image will define his life. No one need ever forgive him.”
Sandmann is 16 and was mostly vindicated by the fuller video of the now-infamous Jan. 18 confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial, but the hat on his head and the beliefs he presumably held two years before he became an adult puts the mark of Cain upon him for the remainder of his days.
Green’s reaction may have been one of the more extreme ones, but not by much.
Engagement versus outrage. That’s where we are, that’s where we’ve been and that’s where we’ll remain until the left stops treating everyone who disagrees with them as prima facie bigots.
For the good of our polity, it’s time we started all engaging in a bit of “change my mind.”
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