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A squirrel in the political world is a story that is easily discernable as frivolous, a distraction from the things that matter. Examples abound and have for years. Every tweetstorm about a prom dress or a ten-year-old joke is a squirrel. Wringing our hands over President Obama’s body language when pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey or ordering a burger with Dijon mustard are squirrels. More recently, there was the two-day pearl clutching over President Trump’s ordering of roughly a bazillion hamburgers to feed a bunch of football players. All squirrels. Squirrels that many people in talk radio or cable news spend an inordinate amount of time talking about.
So why defend them?
Because sometimes, a squirrel really isn’t a squirrel. Sometimes, something that people call a squirrel is a warning sign, an alarm that lets us know our culture is about to slip a little further down the slope. Two recent examples are the dustup over the Covington Catholic boys and just in the last few days, the blow up over Governor Northam’s yearbook photo apparently showing him in black face. Both reveal much about just where the culture is at and where we are headed.
In the Covington situation, we were treated first to a brief video of a few kids in MAGA hats harassing a Native American. People piled on, myself included. The reasons people piled on were revealing from the start. Most seemed to do so out of genuine disgust over the apparent racism. Others, because they were wearing MAGA hats. Others still because they were Catholic. More interesting though is what happened next.
After more video came out showing that the kids did nothing wrong, many retracted their statements and some even apologized. Others though, doubled down and started looking for any reason to smear the kids and the whole school as racists. Numerous attempts followed, each one shot down by the simple application of common sense. Yet, some are still holding onto the idea that many of these boys from Kentucky represent the worst of America. Alternatively, they just don’t care. Anything that can be used to smear anyone right of center will do, regardless if it is true or not. In either case, whether motivated by an inability or stubborn refusal to see it, the truth lost.
It’s also worth noting that this incident took place mere hours after the March for Life and the day before the Women’s March. The left has a vested interest in distracting people from both these events. The former especially because they want to avoid any discussion of abortion, something they normally accomplish by simply ignoring the March. It was more difficult to do that this year though thanks to rising conservative pundit Ben Shapiro who did his daily podcast from the pre-March rally. With a reach of over a million listeners, the March was harder to cover up and ignore. For the first time, it was reaching beyond the audience of EWTN and other religious networks. The fake Covington story provided not only an excuse to not talk about the March for Life but to paint the participants as Trump-obsessed racists. As a bonus it also meant the media could get away with not talking about how attendance for the Women’s March has dropped due in part to its entanglement with anti-Semites.
Governor Northam and his (at a minimum) racially insensitive yearbook photograph seem particularly easy to dismiss as squirrels. In fact, in a way, the picture is a squirrel, designed to distract us from the fact that a mere day before it came out he was casually talking about killing babies that had already been born. After the doctors and the mother had a long heart to heart about it of course. There is absolutely no way that timing is an accident.
However, in deploying this particular squirrel, far more has been revealed than was intended. Not only do we see yet again how the left tends to project its own problems with race onto the right – Northam supporters ran that horrible add about a Gillespie supporter trying run down minority children – but the double standards of the media as well. Not only did this photo of Northam in black face not surface until it was politically convenient, the media were often sympathetic in their coverage. Rather than looking for anyone who would be willing to hint that he secretly attended KKK rallies, reporters asked him if he could still moonwalk (referencing his admission of wearing black face on another occasion to dress as Michael Jackson). Contrast this with the treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, who on the basis of no substantial evidence was accused of gang rape.
Even better, this particular squirrel has exposed the rottenness of the whole bag of nuts that is the Democrat party in Virginia. Since the photo in question was released, it’s been revealed that Lt. Gov. Fairfax had been accused of rape, an accusation with far more evidence behind it that anything brought against Justice Kavanaugh, yet pursued with far less interest by the Washington Post. More recently still, the AG, Mark Herring has admitted to wearing black face himself in the past.
Are the Covington Catholic and Governor Northam stories directly related to policy? No. Will they affect our lives? The stories themselves do not. Yet, they reveal much about how our lives are being affected every day by the corruption that is eating away at our nation’s foundations. In short, these squirrels have exposed for all to see the double standards of the media, the hypocrisy of Democrats, and the lengths the left will go to avoid an honest discussion about abortion.
There will be many more squirrels before the 2020 elections. And many will be just that, distractions, nothing more than click bait. Even so, pay attention before dismissing them. You never know when a squirrel will actually lead you down to where the termites are eating away at the foundations of society. And maybe if we are lucky, we’ll be able to repair those foundations before they crumble for good.
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