Miranda Devine: The left’s ‘Dignity Index’ is a weak try and disarm Republicans – and disguise their very own hate
The latest effort to neuter conservatives and force Republicans to surrender comes from a deceptively titled device called “The Dignity Index.”
The ruse is fronted by Kennedy relative Tim Shriver, who appears on Fox News in the guise of a perfectly reasonable moderate Democrat, the type we all wish still existed.
His pitch is for politicians to treat your opponents with respect, lower the temperature of public debate and restore civility to public life.
Who could be against such laudable goals?
But who does the pitch not remind you of?
Donald Trump, of course, with his bare-knuckled, smash-mouth, macho belligerence.
Trump is the antithesis of the gentle tone Shriver is trying to elevate as the core virtue of leadership ahead of the midterms.
But the dignity blather is just a fancy way of damning Trump for mean tweets.
“The way in which we lead is as important as the outcomes we seek,” Shriver told Fox News’ Bret Baier Tuesday.
Hah!
There you have it.
No, tone is not more important than outcomes.
Who — other than a radical leftist — would say it’s more important for Trump to be polite than to prevail over the thugs in Iran, or close the southern border and deport illegal aliens, or stop taxpayer funding of transgender surgeries for children, or ban boys from girls’ sports, or end the “diversity and equity” cancer that undermined our military, or crack down on Medicaid and Medicare fraud, or punish violent crime, or ditch the climate hoax that sabotaged our economy, or cut taxes and ax waste to boost the economy, or patriotically embrace our flag and founding values.
Diversion tactic
These outcomes, supported by most Americans, are anathema to the left, so they have waged a full-scale war on Trump and his allies under the guise of restoring civility and defending norms.
For all its high moral preening, the Dignity Index’s goal is to frame Trump — and any conservative who rejects leftist subversion of our way of life — as the cause for the division and disharmony in the country. If only we would just talk nicely to each other.
What that really means is “shut up and stop complaining as we destroy the country.”
They want the genteel, pre-Trump Republican Party that played by the rules and was never so discourteous as to call out Democrat insanity like open borders and transgender surgery for minors.
Those Republicans just rolled over to cultural Marxism or made feeble attempts to manage it.
They were the controlled opposition, flattered by their crafty opponents as high-minded and virtuous just for being chumps, as Joe Biden liked to call the voters he swindled.
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Dems want to lull us into believing their radical activists, like Barack Obama and Abigail Spanberger, are dignified, old-school moderates who will usher in an era of civility we all crave.
Instead, they weaponize our desire for bipartisanship and comity into revolutionary destruction that will entrench their power forever.
Look at the deceptive gerrymandering tactic Spanberger pulled off this week.
One of the first moves of the recently elected “moderate” governor of Virginia — and ex-CIA spy — was to present a deceptively framed redistricting plan to voters, which narrowly passed Tuesday after the Democrat side outspent their opponents by 3 to 1.
The new electoral map disenfranchises conservative voters in central Virginia and will give Democrats four additional left-leaning House seats in Washington ahead of the midterms.
‘Virtuous’ power grab
Spanberger dressed up her naked power grab as a democratic virtue, saying the gerrymander was a necessary “check on this president,” and we need more Democrats in Congress to hold Trump “accountable.”
Fraudulently posing as paragons of virtue while destroying norms and breaking all ethical rules of behavior in pursuit of power is the Democrat playbook, and they’ve been very good at fooling a lot of people for a long time — until Trump came along.
Take the DOJ’s fraud indictments this week of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the most prestigious “civil rights” organization in the country, so influential that the FBI would cite its material in investigations.
A clue that the SPLC was a covert Democrat oppo shop was that so many of its targets were mainstream Christian conservatives.
For instance, Catholics who attend traditional Latin Mass were targeted by the FBI as potential violent domestic terrorists on the say-so of the SPLC’s “research.”
Similarly, Moms for Liberty and the Family Research Council were labeled “hate groups” by the SPLC, as bad as the Ku Klux Klan, white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations.
Charlie Kirk was singled out for defamation by the SPLC in the days before his assassination.
None of it passed the sniff test, but it incited crazies, justified partisan journalism, and gave the pretext of respectability to left-wing activists in the Biden FBI and DOJ so they could destroy the Democrats’ most powerful opposition.
Wholesome grassroots conservative groups were portrayed as violent far-right bigots.
Now the SPLC is charged with paying millions of dollars to the very hate groups, like the KKK and neo-Nazis, it was founded to combat.
“The SPLC was not dismantling the groups,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday.
“It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.
“It was doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing — not dismantling extremism but funding it.”
Yes, the SPLC has been race-baiting America, nurturing Nazis and fomenting hate to make millions of dollars in donations from useful idiots like George and Amal Clooney and Tim Cook, not to mention the ubiquitous Soros dark money.
The DOJ’s indictment against the SPLC alleges it bankrolled one of the leaders of the violent Charlottesville rally that Joe Biden claimed was his reason for running for president in 2020.
The rally was very effectively weaponized against Trump in his first term by selectively editing his “very fine people” comments to make it look as if he was praising neo-Nazis.
Biden’s White House reportedly met with SPLC officials at least 11 times.
The DOJ’s investigation of the SPLC began during the Biden administration but was mysteriously dropped, Blanche said.
Fancy that.
The SPLC was the most virtuous of the Democrat NGOs, held up as the arbiter of all that was morally pure.
But with its demise comes a more subtle version, the Dignity Index.
It’s a Trojan horse to disarm Republicans before the midterms.
Don’t be fooled again by the alluring siren song of normalcy and dignity coming from the Dems in various guises.
That was the promise of Joe Biden, and look how he worked out.