Worth remembering: Democrats, their supporters and their media cheerleaders called Trump a fascist for years for building a border wall. AOC took staged photos in which she fake-cried. Celebrities launched into screaming virtue-signalling lectures while they awarded each other gold statues. Kamala Harris called him ‘un-American’ for it and compared ICE to the KKK.

Now Harris is the Democratic nominee, however, she’s attempting to revive an immigration policy that would fund that wall, and is promising to crack down on illegal border crossings.

Harris said ‘an undocumented migrant is not a criminal’, but now she wants borders strictly policed. She parroted the ‘defund the police’ line (which resulted in a dramatic and entirely predictable uptick in (disproportionately black) deaths) and now she vows to get ‘tough on crime’.

Will she be labelled as ‘bigoted’ or ‘intolerant’ or ‘a disgrace’ or ‘white supremacist’ etc for any of this? Will her blatant lack of consistency be properly scrutinised? On the whole, not really.

People who were whipped up into fits of cultish outrage when Trump pursued these policies will now happily cheer her on as a ‘queen’, talk about her ‘vibes’ and the rest despite the fact that in certain key areas she’s proposing very similar policies to the ones she herself (and they) swore were horrifying aberrations only a few years back.

My point here isn’t that she should be vilified for changing her positions or for these policy choices - many of them are entirely rational (though I do not think she has any principled commitment to them - she’s essentially an empty vessel for metropolitan groupthink). Rather it’s that selective outrage is absolutely central to our politics. All sides engage in it, but this liberal variety has dominated our culture and has a form of institutional backing that others do not at present. I think it’s one of the defining characteristics of contemporary discourse. Oh, and we’ll be swimming in it until November (and beyond).

END NOTE: I write articles and essays exploring political dogma, Islamism, and groupthink. Subscribe to keep up to date with what I’m putting out. If you’d like to support my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription - they’re a big help. Thanks!