Hayley Geftman-Gold, one of CBS’s top lawyers, went on Facebook and offered her honest assessment of the shooting:

 If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered [likely a reference to Sandy Hook] I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing, I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters.

Red-State America is repugnant (“Repugs”), a collection of “deplorables” as Hillary Clinton described them before the 2016 election, and deserve to be gunned down by a madman. Of course, the Ivy-educated lawyer and NYC resident quickly apologized once the heat was on, but can anyone doubt that her initial opinions represent that of a substantial number of people living in the “bubble”? Look at the first post right below her original one and see the affirmation from her bubble friends.

Or what about Associate Professor George Ciccariello-Maher of Drexel University? His response to the tragedy was to proclaim that “Trumpism” and “white victimization” motivated the shooter. He further opined that “white people and men” engage is this type of conduct “when they don’t get what they want.” Tenure and academic freedom have saved him from having to back peddle like Geftman-Gold. After all, this is the same guy who said that all he wanted for Christmas was a “white genocide.” Lovely. But this is the kind of nonsense that passes for academic scholarship today and is being poured into the minds of young people.

The shooting in Las Vegas was a terrible event. The ugly response of the Leftist mind should give us pause as we see how they view a large segment of fellow citizens.

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William J. Watkins, Jr. is a research fellow at the Independent Institute and the author of the book, Crossroads for Liberty: Recovering the Anti-Federalist Values of America’s First Constitution.

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The various interest groups and institutions linked with the espousal of political correctness—in short, Hillary’s base—had become more and more pervasive and intrusive for fifty years or so. No doubt the members of this ideological bloc took for granted that they could, and would, only march toward greater and greater power over the populace until that glorious day when the last remnants of the old, despised social order, including the belief systems that supported it, would be crushed once and for all beneath the wheel of history that they had insisted on giving a boost lest the inexorable “progress” be slowed or—perish the thought—halted.

Meanwhile, however, the scores of millions of Americans whose ideas and social actions did not comport with the progressive agenda grew more and more resentful, but the political process failed to cough up a champion who would, and could effectively, lead a counter-revolution by the “deplorables” against the detested cultural and political establishment.

Enter Trump, seemingly on a lark, because his manner of speaking and campaigning amounted to little more than thumbing his nose at political correctness and its adherents. Yet, no doubt to the surprise of the Clinton camp, he elicited an enthusiastic and growing response from millions of people united by little more than resentment and, in some cases, hatred of their self-anointed betters. This kind of popular rebellion was not supposed to happen; the deplorables were supposed to recognize that they were on the losing side of a long historical-cultural conflict and act in a way that validated their acceptance of defeat. But the make-America-great-again group was not buying it, and they leaped at the chance to embrace a political leader who would proudly endorse their burning desire to spit out political correctness like a rotten fish.

So the contest for the presidency boiled down not to a clash of alternative public-policy packages so much as to a battle between two groups that identified with glaringly different cultural assumptions and values. In effect, the election was above all a referendum on political correctness. People who had tired of being called every sort of insulting name—racist, sexist, ignorant, backward, religious, in short everything that the Clinton crowd fancied it was not—rose on their hind legs and began to buck vigorously. One suspects that Trump himself must have been surprised by the magnitude and enthusiasm of the following he attracted. After all, he is not a sociologist, a political scientist, or even an experienced politician. However one might label him, though, he had stumbled onto a cultural time-bomb waiting for a detonator. Thus, he was not so much the man of the hour as he was the right tool for the task a great many people yearned to see carried out.

(For a much longer, more academic discussion along similar lines, see the recent article by Angelo M. Codevilla.)

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