In a recent live stream, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez managed once again to inflame an already volatile political issue with her trademark brash assertiveness. America is running concentration camps on the southern border. Then AOC doubled down on her earlier assertion that the detention centers were in fact concentration camps by comparing them to the use of "extraordinary rendition" to describe waterboarding when we should have just called it torture. Not wanting to back down, AOC demanded that she was on the side of truth and would not mince words about the death camps that America is now operating. How should one respond to these claims?
The danger in our current situation is not cynicism nor callousness to problems of the world, be they the immigration crisis on the southern border or war in Yemen, though those temptations are real and present, but a blinding self-righteousness that can only see our opponents as irredeemably cruel and wicked. It is the inability to be personally guilty or at fault because the other side is so wicked that almost any metaphor or tactic is justifiable as a means of opposition. It's not a scorched earth policy of the conflicted but the slaying of the wicked by those of angelic purity.
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