The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Worst People in the World (Part II)

Posted on | February 27, 2026 | No Comments

You will never understand liberals until you read Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. However often I’ve recommended that book over the years, I occasionally feel the need to repeat the recommendation for the simple reason that Sowell demystifies what would otherwise be incomprehensible, i.e., the persistent tendency of the Left to make their own good intentions an argument for supporting policies that are objectively harmful to the very people that liberals claim to be “helping.” Liberals think of themselves as morally and intellectually superior (i.e., “the Anointed”) and regard others as ignorant, at best, if not indeed immoral (“the Benighted,” as Sowell says). Because liberalism is so prevalent in the education system and the media, it is possible for the liberal to go through life with this attitude and never be forced to examine their own belief system.

It is not anomalous, but is instead a logical consequence of this problem with the Anointed that objectively bad people are often the loudest voices on the bandwagon of the latest liberal crusade. If all the most prestigious media outlets are proclaiming that it is a moral duty to oppose ICE agents engaged in deporting illegal aliens, we can then predict that the anti-ICE protests will attract various deranged fanatics who, having no objective basis for feeling good about themselves, seek an ego-boost by aligning themselves with the Anointed crusade. Hence, Renee Good.

Renee Good’s life was a series of failures. She had three kids by two different fathers, losing custody of two of her own children, then took up with a lesbian “wife” and decided to move to Canada before relocating to Minnesota and joining the anti-ICE protests there. What accomplishment in her own life could Renee Good cite as a success? On what basis could she think of herself as entitled to lecture others on right and wrong?

It was during the 2013 Kaitlyn Hunt controversy that I began repeating a simple slogan: “Bad causes attract bad people.” Here you had a story that the liberal media was trying to sell as a fight against homophobic bigotry — 18-year-old high school senior prosecuted for her involvement with a 14-year-old freshman girl — but if you looked past this victimhood narrative, the facts of the case were such that Kaitlyn was scarcely a martyred heroine. She had clearly broken the law and, according to the younger girl’s parents, had obsessively stalked her victim even after the parents had warned her to stop. Prosecutors had offered Hunt a plea bargain, as is common in statutory rape cases because prosecutors do not like having to go to court in circumstances where they must rely on the “consenting” victim being forced to testify. Every year, hundreds of statutory rape cases are settled by this kind of plea bargain, but for some reason Kaitlyn Hunt’s family decided that the deal offered by prosecutors wasn’t lenient enough and instead launched the #FreeKate movement, portraying their daughter as the victim of homophobic prejudice.

Kaitlyn Hunt’s 2013 mug shot

Lunatics came out of the woodwork to jump onto the #FreeKate bandwagon and, because my blog was one of the few that was regularly following the story, these lunatics turned on me with a rabid frenzy, spewing all manner of threats and imprecations. And in every instance where it was possible to identify these people (most of whom were hiding behind online pseudonyms), they could best be described as unsavory.

When caught in the midst of such a lunatic frenzy (which has happened a few times over the years), I find it necessary to remind myself that I’m a professional journalist. I’m not an idealist crusading for a cause, but rather a guy trying to make a living as a writer. “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” to quote Samuel Johnson, and if you’d like to hit the freaking tip jar, this would be as good a time as any.

The #FreeKate firestorm was, as I say, one of those moments when I had to step back and take stock: “Why am I doing this? What is my objective purpose here?” and then I remembered: MEDIA BIAS!

If the regular media were doing their job correctly, there would be no reason for me to dig in on something like the Kaitlyn Hunt saga. But you had major media outlets — including ABC’s 20/20 show — promoting the #FreeKate victimhood narrative, and here I was just a guy with a blog trying to fight back against that narrative, while being threatened by an online swarm of raving lunatics: “Bad causes attract bad people.”

Memories of that experience came back to me early this morning when I saw some of the weird Trump Derangement Syndrome reactions to the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s gold medal victory. One of the weirdest reactions was when the official NHL account posted to its X account a picture of a player who wasn’t even on the U.S. team, Washington Capitals center Dylan Strome, posing with his daughter at Disneyland, with a caption praising Strome as “the ultimate girl dad.” In response, a bunch of “pronoun people” (as Greg Price calls them) jumped in with vile comments ranting against the U.S. hockey team.

Do you see the relevance to The Vision of the Anointed? Because they are liberals, supporting the current crusade of the Anointed, these people believe they’re on the side of the angels and are justified in making hateful comments about a guy who actually had nothing to do with whatever it is they’re angry about. Dylan Strome and his wife were shocked and confused, and the NHL ended up deleting the tweet.

Daniel Friedman commented on this weird brouhaha:

A lot of progressives are really bad people, and the fact that these bad people think they’re good people — the best people who have ever lived — makes them much, much worse people.

Bingo! They are the worst people in the world (the reason the headline says “Part II” is because I’d previously used the same headline for a post last month about Slate’s Heather Schwedel). The point that Friedman makes is very important: It is precisely because “these bad people think they’re good people” that they are so despicably bad. Their belief in their own inherent righteousness makes them dangerous fanatics.

Once you figure this out — that the self-professed “good intentions” of liberals are, as Sowell says, an exercise in self-congratulations — everything else about them becomes transparent. And maybe that insight is valuable enough that you’ll consider it a good idea to hit the freaking tip jar, because I’m not a blockhead. Just doin’ my job here . . .



 

Category: Media Bias, Progressivism

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