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The only people who cant recognize that our nation has a smug liberal problem are smug liberals. Case in point, smug liberal (and television comedienne) Samantha Bee. On Sunday, CNNs Jake Tapper asked Bee to react to a pre-election Ross Douthat column that called out Bee and other late-night comics in part for creating a comedy world of hectoring monologues, full of comedians who are less comics than propagandists liberal explanatory journalists with laugh lines.

Were all familiar with the style. It features the generous use of selective clips from Fox News, copious amounts of mockery, and a quick Wikipedia- and Google-search level of factual understanding. The basic theme is always the same: Look at how corrupt, evil, and stupid our opponents are, look how obviously correct we are, and laugh at my marvelous and clever explanatory talent. Its like sitting through an especially ignorant and heavy-handed Ivy League lecture, complete with the sycophantic crowd lapping up every word.

Bee, the host of TBSs Full Frontal, of course, couldnt see the problem and not only told Tapper that she didnt think there was a smug-liberal problem, she also howlingly added that in her own show, We always err on the side of comedy.

Yep, they sure are hilarious (language warning):

The irony is that at the exact moment when Bee was denying Americas smug-liberal problem, smug liberals were in full meltdown mode over Bret Stephenss first column for New York Times. Stephens is a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist, anti-Trump conservative, and a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In his essay for the Times, Stephens had the audacity to gasp address the possibility of scientific uncertainty in the climate-change debate.

Lets be clear about what Stephens actually said. Heres his summary of the current state of climate science:

While the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the Northern Hemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. Thats especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future.

Heres the translation: Science teaches us that humans have helped cause global warming, but when we try to forecast the extent of the warming and its effects on our lives, the certainty starts to recede. In addition, the activism has gotten ahead of the science. Indeed, Stephens even quotes the New York Times own environmental reporter, Andrew Revkin, who has observed that he saw a widening gap between what scientists had been learning about global warming and what advocates were claiming as they pushed ever harder to pass climate legislation.

Not only did the hyperbole not fit the science at the time, but Stephens writes censoriously asserting ones moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.

As if on cue, parts of liberal Twitter melted down. Stephens was instantly treated as, yes, an imbecile and a deplorable. Not only did the vast majority of commentators ignore his argument, they treated it as beneath contempt. But can anyone actually doubt that climate predictions are uncertain? Does anyone doubt that climate activists rhetoric has far outstripped not just the scientific consensus but even the bounds of good sense? This 2008 Good Morning America report is just too funny not to repost:

Note that GMAs dystopian future with Manhattan sinking under the waves is set in 2015.

Bizarrely, even the commentary calling for Stephenss head inadvertently make his point. For example, David Roberts writes in Vox that the New York Times should not have hired climate change bullshitter Bret Stephens, but buried in the middle of Robertss harangue is this to be sure paragraph:

Of course we are never certain about anything. Of course scientists have been wrong before. And of course climate science especially when it tries to project damages at smaller temporal and geographic scales, like the next several decades is filled with probabilities and uncertainties.

Umm, yes, and thats exactly why we need to ask hard questions about proposed solutions rather than simply accepting environmentalist propaganda at face value.

Liberal dogma is rapidly becoming a secular religion, a faith that conspicuously omits any requirement that one love his enemies. Christians have long struggled to keep one of Christs most difficult commands, but many leftists dont even try. To many, its not even a virtue. Indeed, the same kind of vitriol is a hallmark of the post-religious Right and is part of the explanation for extreme polarization. Post-Christian countries eschew Christian values, including the very values that can and should prevent even the most ardent activists from becoming arrogant...and intolerant.

Yes, there is a smug-liberal problem in America, one that smart liberals recognize. Stephens is right. You dont win converts with mockery. You can sometimes win grudging compliance, but you mainly make enemies especially when your mockery reveals your own ignorance and inconsistency. But as we know, the smug liberal doesnt care. They want to make enemies. After all, how do they measure their own virtue? When the Right rages, they rejoice. The unbelievers deserve their pain.

David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

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America's 'Smug-Liberal Problem' - National Review

Politics: We've been arguing for some time that if you want to find intolerance, extremism, hate and bigotry in this country, it's thriving on the left. The past week provides several bits of fresh evidence of this.

First, there's the ABC News/Washington Postpoll published last week that found just 28% think the Democratic Party is "in touch with the concerns of most people in the United States today." Even among Democrats, only slightly more than half (52%) think the party is in touch with people in the country.

It's not as if President Trump or the Republicans do that much better. The poll found that 38% say Trump is in touch, and 32% say Republicans are in touch with the people.

Nevertheless, it's a shocking finding, given that Democrats have spent decades portraying Republicans as out-of-touch extremists who only care about the rich. Or, as newly appointed DNC chairman Tom Perez put it, Republicans "don't give a sh-- about people."

The New York Times fretted in an editorial that "for the first time in memory, Democrats are seen as more out of touch with ordinary Americans than the party's political opponents."

Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, called it a huge wake-up call. "Having two-thirds of the country think that your party is in la-la-land, that's a bombshell."

In fact, IBD has for years been pointing out the Democrats' drift to the fringe, using data from the IBD/TIPP poll and voting records in Congress.

As for the ABC poll being a wake-up call, the party's leadership has given no indication that it's even heard the phone ringing. Last we checked, the same people who drove the party to the fringes are still in charge.

Next we have a lengthy article in the left-of-center Daily Beast on Sunday by respected demographer Joel Kotkin, titled "The Arrogance of Blue America," in which he details how liberals have grown increasingly isolated from and intolerant of those who don't live in deep blue urban centers." Many in the deepest blue cores" are, he writes, "developing oikophobia an irrational fear of their fellow citizens" and are "abandoning the toiling masses."

"The argument made by the blue bourgeoisie is simple," he says, "Dense core cities, and what goes on there, is infinitely more important, and consequential, than the activities centered in the dumber suburbs and small towns."

Kotkin concludes his biting article by saying that progressives need to "leave their bastions and bubbles, and understand the country that they are determined to rule."

Despite such entreaties, the left appears to be retreating deeper into its bubble.

When CNN's Jake Tapper asked smug liberal comedian/political commentator Samantha Bee this weekend whether there is a "smug liberal problem," her response was: "I don't think there is."

Meanwhile, a survey of Dartmouth students published last week found that not only are liberals smug, they are far less tolerant of other viewpoints than Republicans on campus.

More than two-thirds of Republican students at Dartmouth (69%) say they'd be comfortable with a roommate who had opposing political views. But only 39% of Democrats said that. Nearly half of Democrats said they'd be uncomfortable with a roommate of a different political persuasion; just 12% of Republicans said that.

"It's unfortunate I wish we had more political diversity," Dartmouth College Democrats President Charlie Blatt said. "I think the dialogue is good." Even if Blatt believes this, many of her fellow liberals on campuses around the country clearly would rather shout down and assault people who'd provide that diversity.

This intolerance is not just limited to "free thinking" college campuses, it shows up everywhere these days on the supposedly tolerant left. When The New York Times hired Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator Bret Stephens as a columnist, liberals went ballistic.

After Stephen's first column ran, which focused on global warming and in which he argued that "treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts," liberals started canceling subscriptions and the Times was forced to defend itself for publishing such environmental blasphemy.

Times' executive editor Dean Baquet said on Sunday: "Didn't we learn from this past election that our goal should be to understand different views?"

Apparently not.

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Now We Know: It's Liberals Who Are Out-Of-Touch, Arrogant, Smug ... - Investor's Business Daily

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent out a lot of emails last week, each one sounding more needy than the last.

Now we know why: The latest Elections Canada fundraising reports reveal that the first three months of this year were grim for the governing Liberals especially in comparison to their Conservative rivals.

Even without a permanent leader, the Conservatives hauled in nearly double the dollars that the Liberals did from January to the end of March, from an impressive 10,000 more contributors. And thats not even counting the money and the donors being amassed in the Conservative leadership race.

Whoever the Conservative party chooses, their new leader will have access to the millions of dollars their party has been raising, Trudeau (or more likely a Liberal staffer) wrote in one fundraising email pitch last week.

Thats not an exaggeration. The Conservatives raised $5.3 million from about 42,000 contributors in the first quarter of 2017; the Liberals gathered up $2.8 million from roughly 32,000 donors over the same time period.

The entire field of Conservative leadership contenders, meanwhile, managed to wring another $4 million out of Canadians in the first three months of this year. Thats right. Conservative leadership contenders have out-fundraised the entire, governing Liberal Party of Canada so far in 2017.

Liberals might be tempted to write this off as the usual flurry of cash and excitement that surrounds leadership contests. But that wasnt the case four years ago, when the tables were turned and the Liberals were choosing a leader with the Conservatives still in power.

In the first three months of 2013, leading up to the Liberal leadership convention in early April that elected Trudeau, the party raised about $1.7 million. Conservatives raised $4.4 million during that same quarter.Since then, the Conservatives have lost power without, apparently, losing their knack for out-fundraising the Liberals.

One of Trudeaus email appeals last week also made reference to those heady days in 2013 when he assumed the leadership of the party (it seems like yesterday and, also, a long time ago).

Today we find ourselves on that same timeline 30 months before another election campaign in 2019, the email said, urging would-be supporters to deposit their dollars into a new 30-Month Fund.

The fundraising gap with the Conservatives is no doubt the subject of many heateddiscussions in the corridors of federal power. Is this just a temporary blip, the doldrums of power or an early warning about that power in peril?

We also learned this week that the Liberal government is planning to introduce legislation soon to govern fundraising by political parties and leadership contestants another sign that this business of pulling in cash is much on the minds of the Trudeau crewthese days.

We will be bringing forward legislation to give Canadians information about fundraisers involving cabinet ministers, party leaders, and leadership contestants. Canadians will know about the events in advance, where they are being held, the cost to attend, and they will know who attended them, Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould told the Commons on Monday. Goulds office wasnt offering any more information beyond promising that details would be coming soon.

The legislation is obviously a response, at least in part, to the controversy over so-called cash-for-access Liberal events that dominated the Commons for much of last fall.

If youre wondering whether thats a possible explanation for the dip in Liberal fundraising fortunes well, do the math. In the last three months of 2016, the Liberals raised $5.8 million from about 46,000 contributors, compared to $4.6 million for the Conservatives and their 36,000 donors.

Its quite possible that the drip-drip-drip of news stories about the Liberals fundraising events late last year left people with the impression that the party was rolling in dough, and thus not in dire need of citizens contributions. Or potential donors may have decided not to reward what they saw as bad behaviour.

We probably shouldnt ignore the Donald Trump effect either. Trumps surprise election victory last November may have helped Liberals in the immediate term late in 2016, with shell-shocked progressives keen to contribute to any cause seen as anti-Trump.

But theres also no doubt that, over the longer term, Trumps victory has given a jolt of adrenaline to conservative-leaning folks a sign that progressive parties can be defeated.

Trudeaus Liberals, well remember, have been working closely for years with Democrats in the United States, trading tips on raising funds and building support. That alliance doesnt look half as clever in 2017 as it did before the U.S. election; the plummet in Liberals contributions may be a sign that theyre in need of new inspiration and new tactics.

And what was Trudeau doing for much of the first three months of this year? He was paying attention to Trump, trying to stay on the presidents good side and preserve Canadas special relationship with the United States. Perhaps this single-minded focus on the United States was off-putting to potential Liberal donors and the support that Trudeau had cultivated on the progressive left.

There are a variety of other, more domestic reasons for the fundraising decline, too. Between the last quarterly report and the latest one, Trudeaus expensive vacations were in the news. It might be hard to argue now that the leader needs money when hes jetting off to private islands.

One also cant rule out the possibility that Trudeau probably cost himself some support by breaking his electoral-reform promise in early 2017 (Ive heard from Liberal voters who cut their contributions for that reason alone).

Whatever the reason, this latest fundraising report will be casting a shadow over sunny-ways politics. Somehow, I suspect well be seeing a lot more emails from Justin Trudeau in the next fundraising quarter.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the authors alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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The Liberals are losing the money war. Should they panic? - iPolitics.ca (subscription)

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This is a moment of extreme hyperbole in America, with words like "fascism" and "Russian coup" mixing in seamlessly in our superlative-heavy political discourse with "creeping sharia" and "Mexican invasion." But perhaps no phrase is deployed as recklessly as "hate speech," a nebulous non-legal term of which there is no agreed-upon definition.

While neither red nor blue America has a monopoly on trying to use the force of government or the violence of the citizenry to silence its opponents, the idea that the most vulnerable among us can be protected from the wounds of "hate speech" through loopholes in the First Amendment has been gaining disquieting momentum among liberal thinkers who should really know better.

Howard Dean recently demonstrated his mangled misunderstanding of Supreme Court jurisprudence when he followed up a widely mocked tweet asserting hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment with later tweets and media appearances in which he repeatedly cited a Supreme Court decision that deemed certain speech to constitute "fighting words." The physician and former DNC chair was arguing that conservative gadfly Ann Coulter's well-worn shtick constitutes both "hate speech" and "fighting words," and is therefore not constitutionally protected.

That is simply nonsense.

"Hate speech" as a legal concept does not exist, which is a good thing, because hate is subjective and anything from the most vile forms of bigotry to opposition to abortion to support for gay rights to criticism of religious institutions have all been deemed beyond the pale of public discourse by various groups and individuals. Offensiveness lies in the eye of the beholder. Thankfully, the right to express offensive ideas persists.

To be clear, there are jerks out there who have no desire to engage in good faith debating and who profit off of deliberately causing offense, the receipt of which only makes them more popular with their audiences. They promote noxious ideas and stand on "free speech" the way a child would claim to be standing on "base" in a backyard game of tag. Coulter is one of these jerks, and one only needs to recall the outrage she helped stoke over a Muslim community center opening a few blocks from the World Trade Center back in 2010 to be aware of how little she truly values free speech, freedom of religion, and private property rights when she and her comrades demanded the "Ground Zero mosque" be stopped.

These characters might not "deserve" free speech, but they are entitled to it. Rights are not earned by the righteousness of one's values. They're just rights. And the right to freedom of expression is the tool that cultivated the fight to win every civil right in this country's history. There is no civil rights movement, no gay rights movement, no feminist movement, and no anti-war movement without broad free speech protections for unpopular expression.

The good isn't safe unless the bad is, too.

Considering the former governor of Vermont made his name on the national stage as the most strident anti-war candidate of the 2004 presidential campaign, it's particularly ironic that Howard Dean would cite Chaplinsky v. State of New Hampshire, a case centering around a Jehovah's Witness named Walter Chaplinsky who had been passing out anti-WWII materials, attracted a hostile crowd, and then was arrested after a town marshal deemed him to be the cause of the unrest. What "fighting words" did Chaplinsky utter? He called the marshal "a damned fascist."

Never mind the details of the case or how many anti-war protesters have used that other "f word" to describe any number of people both in and out of government. Dean's citing of Chaplinsky ignores the history of the Supreme Court repeatedly clarifying and narrowing the definition of "fighting words," as well as the fact that the Court has never cited the case as a precedent to curtail freedom of speech. In fact, some legal scholars even consider the fighting words exception to be for all intents and purposes a pile of dead letters, if not explicitly overturned by the Court.

Though Dean would like to believe Coulter's tasteless musing about wishing Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had instead targeted The New York Times is unprotected speech, it is. Like a great deal of Coulter's output, it is mean-spirited and if intended as a joke of miniscule satirical value. But the right to speech does not require a value test. And yet, a value test is exactly what was advocated in The New York Times recently by NYU vice provost and professor Ulrich Baer:

The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community. [The New York Times]

This appears to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy on the part of Baer, because the freedom of speech requires no "balance" or "obligation to ensure" anything, primarily because someone would have to determine when sufficient "balance" had been achieved. Who does Baer think should be the arbiters of such balance? Why, right-thinking administrators like himself, who breathlessly determine that "there is no inherent value to be gained from debating" certain ideas in public.

Australian professor Robert Simpson, in a recent article at Quartz, also advocated for benevolent authority figures separating "good speech" from "bad speech." After cursory nods to the value of the right to free expression unencumbered by government interference or violent mobs ("Free speech is important However, once we extrapolate beyond the clear-cut cases, the question of what counts as free speech gets rather tricky"), Simpson argues for putting "free 'speech' as such to one side, and replace it with a series of more narrowly targeted expressive liberties."

Like Baer and Dean, Simpson assumes that those in power will always be as right-thinking as he, and that if the price of squashing the Ann Coulters of the world is abandoning the principle of universal free speech so long as it doesn't rise to direct threats or incitement to violence, well, that's a price they're willing to pay.

Erstwhile anti-war presidential candidates and distinguished professors should know better than to put their faith in authority when it comes to the competition of ideas. That they don't shows how little faith they have in the ability of the "good" to beat the "bad." Call me a hopeless optimist, but the value of robust free speech especially the right to offend has helped to facilitate the changing of minds regarding civil rights and has helped end or stop wars. That's why free speech, and not well-meaning censorship, will continue to be perhaps our greatest bulwark to tyranny.

This country has seen bigger threats to the republic than Ann Coulter and her ilk, and we should resist the urge to use state power or approvingly wink at masked, firework-wielding LARPers from creating "security threats" that prevent her from plugging a book to a few dozen young Republicans and a few hundred protesters on a college campus.

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Liberals' free-speech amnesia - The Week Magazine

The Democratic Party is in serious trouble. It has lost more than 900 state legislative seats, 12 governorships, 69 House seats and 13 Senate seats over the last decade, and a recent poll indicates that it has a lower approval rating than President Donald Trump.

To right this political ship, it must recapture pro-life liberals such as my mother, who was a loyal Democrat until 1996, when President Bill Clinton vetoed the bill banning partial-birth abortions.

The party lost her. And although it never lost me, it sure has done its best to push me out along with all the other pro-life Democrats in the United States, some 20 million in number.

Abortion activists claim that the fetus is just a mass of tissue, and that women are too weak to succeed without abortion. Not only do pro-life Democrats accept the settled science that shows the prenatal child is a human organism, we know that with the right support, women are more than up to the challenge of difficult or unplanned pregnancies.

We also support a living wage, Medicare, paid family leave, affordable child care and worker protections provided by strong unions. And we strongly resist a small-government Republican Party that refuses to support women and mothers.

Yet because of our views on abortion, many of us are intimidated into silence. Indeed, we get stronger pushback from Democratic leadership than from Republicans.

I first saw this dynamic in 1990, when I moved to Minnesota and pro-lifers were shouted down at the first Democratic caucus I attended. But I felt it most acutely when I ran for Congress in 2002. Planned Parenthoods executive director spread falsehoods about my position on government funding for contraceptives. Party activists I had worked with only months before explained that they couldnt vote for me or donate to my campaign. Even my Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee team hid my pro-life stance.

As a result, the following year, I joined Democrats for Life of America. Ive since learned that a large number of Democratic legislators hide their pro-life positions in order to get endorsed and raise money. Many others are under tremendous pressure to stay silent, including Muslims, women of color and, yes, members of the white working class.

The partys leadership, located largely in pro-choice bubbles on the coasts, claims that support for abortion is a political winner. This is simply not true. Tellingly, women support restrictions on late-term abortion at higher rates than men.

Democratic politicians shouldnt make sweeping statements about what the country believes without paying careful attention to regions. While polls consistently show that Americans are pretty evenly divided on abortion, opposition in the Midwest and South is higher than the national average.

If the Democratic Party is to become a truly national party one that can win consistently outside of urban, coastal America it has no choice but to welcome people with different views on abortion. The number of voters who cite abortion as their single-most-important issue is the highest in the history of Gallups poll. This group is dominated by pro-lifers.

Thankfully, after the Trump election, Democratic leaders seem to understand that they have a crisis on their hands. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez undertook a unity tour with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., with both leaders acknowledging that any political math for a 50-state strategy must include pro-life Democrats. And although NARAL and other pro-choice inquisitors pounced on Perez and got him to retract his position, a principle of openness to pro-lifers has been reiterated by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

During the 2016 campaign, Sanders rightly pointed out that Planned Parenthood belongs to the establishment, implying that a litmus test on abortion would not be required by the new, exciting, growing edge of the party. There is a legitimate debate about abortion to have within the party, but the progressive Sanders wing is wise to separate the toxicity of that argument from the partys central goals.

If the Democratic Party needs a litmus test, it should be economic justice and civil rights for all. The pro-life Democrat Hubert Humphrey said it best: The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

Tribune Content Agency

Janet Robert is a founder of Progressive Talk Radio AM 950 Minneapolis and president of Democrats for Life of America. This was written for the Los Angeles Times.

Related articles:

Anti-abortion? There's no room for you in the Democratic Party.

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Do not use any of my hard-earned tax dollars to support abortions

How Missouri added insult to the pain of my abortion

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Democrats should welcome pro-life liberals - Chicago Tribune