Trigger Warnings for Trump

Determined to reach ever higher levels of parody, liberals at MSNBC have decided that — in a world in which terror attacks are a regular occurrence and Planned Parenthood traffics in the parts of aborted fetuses — anti-Hillary Clinton swag is so shockingly offensive that their poor, delicate audience needs a trigger warning before seeing it.

“You may find it uncomfortable,” host Rachel Maddow warned her viewers during live coverage of the Republican National Convention. “And so, you may not want to look at this stuff. But these are some of the pins that are being sold at the venue,” she said, prior to cutting to an image of a variety of anti-Clinton buttons.

As far as Maddow is concerned, anti-Clinton paraphernalia is apparently an emotional experience akin to witnessing videos of ISIS beheadings.

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. As far as Maddow is concerned, anti-Clinton paraphernalia is apparently an emotional experience akin to witnessing videos of ISIS beheadings, fatal car accidents, and dead kittens.

The trigger warning hysteria that once appeared confined to students on ultra-liberal college campuses seems to have infected allegedly mature adults. In March 2016, CNN’s Don Lemon, never one to be out-imbeciled by Maddow, issued an effective trigger warning to viewers about possibly “sexist” comments — before complimenting Heidi Cruz on her looks.

Along with their close cousin, the “safe space,” trigger warnings are symptomatic of the modern Left’s Orwellian desire to effectively censor, or disregard entirely, that which it hates.

[lz_third_party includes=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbkXd9OSMgs”]

In 2014, Oberlin College issued guidelines — which they eventually abandoned — suggesting faculty “remove triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals.” This “triggering” material was defined as “something that recalls a traumatic event to an individual.”

The college advised professors to “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism and other issues of privilege and oppression.” From a Left wing perspective, this litany of Newspeak labels would conveniently see warnings placed on anything remotely conservative or tied to the traditional values or morality of Western civilization.

In May 2015, students at Columbia University demanded trigger warnings on classical mythology. “Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom,” wrote the concerned students, members of Columbia’s Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board.

“These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background,” they claimed. What, exactly, Ancient Greece has to do with modern race-relations or income inequality, they did not specify.

In March 2016, the “Marginalized Students of the University of Arizona” demanded the “implementation of Trigger Warnings within course materials and content … Trigger Warnings should also be specifically addressed before potentially problematic material.”

[lz_related_box id=”130773″]

Trigger warnings are clearly linked to the Left’s loathing of Western civilization and its manipulation of identity politics. “The warnings hinge on topics that are more likely to affect the lives of marginalized groups,” writes The Guardian journalist Jill Filipovic.

“The kinds of suffering typically imaged and experienced in the white Western male realm — war, intra-male violence — are standard,” she writes. However, “traumas that impact women, people of color, LGBT people, the mentally ill, and other groups whose collective lives far outnumber those most often canonized in the American or European classroom are set apart as … particularly traumatizing,” Filipovic writes.

Now, however, the trigger warning trend has spread well beyond the confines of subversive students. But hysterical, emotionally dysfunctional liberal adults like Rachel Maddow, free from the exposure to the Western canon to which hysterical, emotionally dysfunctional liberal college kids are subjected, have only conservatives and Republicans — and their cheap, anti-Hillary souvenirs — to fear.