This year’s Democratic National Convention was all abloom with signs proclaiming “Love trumps hate.” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said recently that the “most effective response to terror is compassion, unity, and love.” Jeb Bush, too, in all his flabby RINO splendor, believes that illegal immigration is “an act of love.”

No one wants a loveless world. No one that I know. But there are some questions that cannot be answered with certain responses. If you say “My house is on fire!” and someone responds “Just be happy” -- it is fair to say that their response lacks a certain desirable quality rational people call efficacy. What actionable policies devolve from the mere invocation of the word “love”? Reasonable people can argue about the merits of building a wall on the southern border, or putting an end to Muslim immigration, but you can’t argue that these proposals aren’t actionable or plausibly effective. On the other hand, how do we “love away” an enormous surplus of unskilled immigrant labor? How compassionate can we be toward someone’s desire to assure his place in paradise by gunning down a maximum number of Western infidels? The desire for a global Islamic Caliphate is a grand historical aspiration -- albeit an evil one. The people who want such a thing want it for their own reasons. It is not a passing whim -- the result of Western civilization’s collective lack of “love”.

Moreover, the “love” narrative drips with hypocrisy. Do people in the Black Lives Matter movement “love” anyone outside the circle of their own supporters? Ask George Zimmerman or officer Darren Wilson, both acquitted of any wrongdoing after the most extraordinary scrutiny, if they were ever “feeling the love” from the liberal press. Did Debbie Wasserman Schultz treat Bernie Sanders with “compassion, unity, and love”? Do the Social Justice Warriors who prowl American campuses in search of something to be offended by do so in a spirit of “love”? I hardly think so. We now live in an Orwellian world where the meanings of words are twisted and often actually reversed. “Free speech” is “hate speech”. “All Lives Matter” is “racism”. Should we be surprised that real hate is being rebranded as “love”? Nor is this kind of rebranding anything new. Ordinary Russians that the Soviet State wanted to imprison or kill were branded “enemies of the people” -- not because they really were enemies of the people but because they were the enemies du jour of the Soviet State. Such things continue to happen in the surviving communist countries to this day. There is nothing new here -- nothing particularly imaginative in this year’s crop of statist demagogues. They can no more create love than they can create fairness, justice, equality or any other high-sounding ideal they give lip service to. The one, unwavering goal of statism is and always will be the centralization of power. This is true by definition. In pursuit of this goal any idealistic language is merely a means.

If we are the “haters” then they must be the opposite – the guardians of the ideology of “love”. This depressingly simplistic dichotomy is merely what remains when people’s political thoughts are reduced to nothing but their feelings. When, in other words, the drumbeat of indoctrination deprives the discussion of the life-giving oxygen or reason. From the perspective of regressives, the present political divide is a simple choice between love and hate – and that is obviously no choice at all. It truth, however, the present political divide is a choice between practical efficacy and poetic irrationality. One doesn’t have to despise foreigners to understand that throwing open our borders to seven billion of them would amount to an erasure of our culture, our standard of living, and our civil society. Even liberals don’t leave the doors on their own houses unlocked. One doesn’t have to hate all – or even any – Muslims to understand that Islam is not, by any stretch of the imagination, “the religion of peace”. You cannot look at the history of Islam from any angle and see it as a peaceful religion. You can only see it as a peaceful religion by repudiating history altogether. Or by rewriting history to conform to your preconceived ideological assumptions. “Islam is the religion of peace” in exactly the same way that “‘all lives matter’ is racism”, “free speech is hate speech,” or “hate is love.”

What appears to be insanity is actually just the playing out of a deliberate strategy -- the undermining of cultural norms by making today’s feelings more important than yesterday’s reason or tomorrow’s safety. The left’s war on anything and everything that gets in its way. They will not and cannot talk about practical solutions to prevalent problems. Not when they have so much prior investment in boiling peoples’ blood. One wonders what percentage of leftist leaders are cynical manipulators of the public’s emotions (particularly the emotions of the underclass and the young) and what percentage have simply gotten drunk on their own monotonous poetry. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Functionally, there is no difference. Whether they are truly insane, or just pretending to be insane for certain short-term advantages, they wreak the same havoc now and leave the same predictable trail of wreckage in their wake. They are our enemies by their actions. Their intentions are irrelevant. We need not hate them to know they must be stopped. We need not be interested in what nonsense they call “love”.