In Asheville, North Carolina, a leftist woman saw a bear on her front porch that had been tagged with a data-collecting collar.  An unknown someone had then put a Trump sticker on the collar.  Normal people would find that amusing, especially because it can be spun either as a pro-Trump gag (even bears love Trump) or an anti-Trump gag (only animals would vote for Trump).

The woman, however, was distraught.  It was bad enough that someone put the bear to sleep long enough to tag it and collar it, but to put a Trump sticker on the bear!  That was evil:

These bears are already suffering enough with the heavy collars and metal ear mutilations. But to put a political sticker on the collar? No words can describe my anger and sadness.

The Help Asheville Bears-HAB organization took up the baton.  It is now offering a $5,000 reward to identify that sticker miscreant.  According to the people at HAB, "Whoever put these political stickers on these bears is cruel and heartless."

This bear story is fundamentally stupid.  It's worth paying attention to it, though, because it reminds us why conservatives have ceded so much ground to the left over the past several decades.  Leftists get upset about everything.  Nothing slides.  Nothing is too little for a big fuss.  There is an animal kingdom analogy for this behavior.

Almost thirty years ago, I read Pierre Berton's delightful Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896–1899.  What I remember most vividly is the way he described the mosquitoes the prospectors found in the Yukon.  They were so aggressive, he wrote, that they could kill a horse.  The mosquitoes either swarmed up its nostrils, suffocating it, or (allegedly) attacked the horses in such numbers that they literally drained all their blood.

Without in any way calling leftists insects, because I would never dehumanize anybody in that way, it did occur to me that mosquitoes and leftists have similar tactics: in small numbers, they're irritating, and in large numbers, they can overwhelm whatever it is that they're attacking.  If you don't brush them off constantly, you're a goner.

For years now, every single day, we read stories about leftist outrage.  Using the wrong words, wearing the wrong clothes, buying the wrong product, having the wrong product logo, wearing the wrong earrings, making the wrong stupid joke, putting a sticker on a bear that probably can't read the sticker and definitely isn't registered to vote — it's all a ten on the leftist outrage meter.  (Speaking of bears, now even jokes about the humble roundworm are racist, sexist, and generally oppressive.)

Every microaggression is treated like a macroaggression.  To the leftists, there is no difference between a teenager in a beautiful Chinese-style dress (as happened in 2018) and a KKK Kleagle (or is it beagle?) lynching a teenage boy.

Normal people, being, well, normal, try to ignore this red-hot background noise.  They assume that those people angrily buzzing about will wear themselves out and go away.  But they don't.  Every time we ignore them, we hand them a victory.

That's how they go in four years from attacking an innocuous white kid for wearing dreadlocks (as happened in 2016) to tearing down America's history and assaulting America's infrastructure.  The fact is that, for years, we let the leftists get away with their buzzing and biting, and it emboldened them.

We can't keep letting these perpetually outraged people drain the lifeblood from America.  This has to stop.  People need to speak up.  No more apologizing when the cancel culture mob comes.  No more conceding to any of their demands.  After all, no matter how foolish or banal those demands seem, they're still another little bite, another little bit of blood sucked from American society.

We all know that leftists are not bugs; they are humans, and it's important to remember that.  But to the extent they've adopted tactics reminiscent of mosquito tactics, we need to fight back the same way we would mosquitoes that land on us intending to bite: stop them every single time, lest they drain us dry.

Image: Wikipedia, modified.