By Russell Patten

To satiate her morbid curiosity, I took her down to the anti-sharia protest in Roseville, California this afternoon. After parking a few blocks away and walking over, we found ourselves on a street corner behind the anti-anti-sharia “counter-protest.” From there we watched and observed for a while.

The whole scene was rather benign and fairly predictable. On the far side of the street were the anti-sharia protestors all decked out in red, white, and blue and repeatedly chanting “USA, USA, USA!” On each street corner were bemused police officers in riot gear calmly watching the event and directing traffic. On our side of the street were the leftists milling about, calling for “tolerance” and “inclusiveness,” and shouting oh-so creative slogans like “Hey-ho! Hey-ho! The racist pig has got to go!” while holding up a large ant-Trump poster.

To their credit, we didn’t see anyone on either side of the street doing anything particularly vulgar or nasty (unlike in other cities today), but we couldn’t help but find amusement in the self-inflicted ignorance of the left. They clearly had no idea what they were protesting against.

If sharia were the law of the land, none of those leftists would have been there protesting today because they wouldn’t have been allowed to. Many of the women I saw there would have been beaten or stoned simply for what they were wearing.

Actually, I think many of them were stoned … if you catch my drift.

There was no self-awareness on our side of the street that we could see. The leftist activists think they’re standing up for an oppressed minority, but Muslims in the United States are not oppressed, and in Middle Eastern countries where sharia is the law of the land they aren’t minorities either. These counter-protestors call for inclusiveness, but they immediately reject the valid concerns of the anti-sharia crowd. They call for tolerance, but are intolerant of any viewpoint that doesn’t fit into their carefully constructed worldview. Moreover, the supposedly “intolerant” western Judeo-Christian culture they constantly rail against is the only one in which the left is free to be the left. Nowhere else in the world could someone hold all of the contradicting views of the American left and remain free. Ask homosexuals in Iran how things are going.

It really is all quite backwards, isn’t it?

The problem with the left today is that they’re all too happy to line up with their team on their side of the street and shout at the other team on the other side of the street for no other reason than they are the other team on the other side of the street. They show up, they yell at the other side, they preach tolerance, they assign the motive of “racism” to any viewpoint they disagree with, and then they go home feeling like they accomplished something.

There is no self-awareness of their contradictory positions. There is no curiosity on their part to find out why the other side might hold an opposing view. There is no willingness to reach out or to learn from others.

They are hopeless.