Hatred Has Become a Greater Driver Than the Opposite
By David Bittinger
July 22nd, 2026
Some philosophers believe the opposite of hatred is indifference. Less philosophical folk think the opposite is a more common word. Maybe today’s hard-edged digital culture has made that word seem quaint, old-fashioned, like “morality” or “values.” In fact I wasn’t comfortable using it in the headline above.
You know the word. It’s in the title of countless songs and Hallmark Channel movies. The opening lines of the 1967 Beatles song All You Need Is Love have nothing else:
Love, love, love / Love, love, love / Love, love, love. (Is that amorous or tedious?)
What a wild-eyed, tie-dyed, mixed blessing of a time that was. For some, “1967 Beatles” recalls the lads’ visit to a celebrity guru in India. For others, 1967 marked the lamentable conclusion of the group’s pre-Yoko period. (Cue the shrieking.)
Reviews vary, but I still prefer the Beatles’ brilliant 1966 LP Revolver to their later work, which seemed a bit more herbinfluenced. Their early energy was also golden, especially the greatest R&B cover ever, Twist And Shout.
On a love-hate axis, American culture has obviously moved toward hatred. If that development strikes you as strange and unaccountable, you’re probably one of those hale, hearty folks who see the sunny side of life and try to make it sunnier. If it strikes you as reasonable, you might say something like “He earned it.”
The hatred dominant in America now was prefaced by an insult joke. At the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, following President Obama’s snarky “roast” of attendee Trump, comedian Seth Meyers tossed off this howler: “Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican, which is surprising, since I just assumed he was running as a joke.”
Trump sat in the audience stone-faced but probably pondering. Four years later he did decide to run for president. With a casino owner’s luck, he ended up running against Hillary “Basket of Deplorables” Clinton, who was a more effective political joke than Meyers’.
Here we are 10 years later. Trump supporters would say that the driving force in our country over that decade has been the man himself: the tough-talking, deal-making, supremely confident, irascible patriot-salesman.
But that force can be viewed from another angle. Despite strong Trump support by as many as 77 million voters — especially for his 2024 shutting down the Democrats’ globalization of U.S. entitlements and further voter importation — the dominant force over the past decade has been Trump hatred.
Believing the presidency should remain theirs forever, Obama worshippers dealt with the Trump shock through sustained crazed hatred (also by building the world’s strangest house of worship / tourist attraction.)
They hate President Trump with a malevolence not even directed at Reagan or Obama. It was promoted so incessantly during the 2024 presidential campaign that within 64 days two progressives took it dead seriously.
A CNN pundit might have claimed the assassination attempts were mostly peaceful. But when Democrat politicians and leftist pundits repeatedly call the U.S. president a Nazi, a fascist, and a threat to extinguish democracy, some progressives will be inspired to end the threat.
The examples of this ideological illness are countless, from the previous president and vice-president to the party-decreed 2024 presidential nominee’s goofball running mate, the governor and enabler of Minnesota’s famous “Learing Center” Tim Walz: “No one has ever been more dangerous to this country than Donald Trump, and he is a fascist to his core.”
This hatred isn’t a simple matter of political preference; it comes from a vacuum in leftist ideology. They ran out of things to love (there’s the word!). The problem was that those loves were just poses, worse, poses turned insolvent. They’d spent so much on them, they had to ramp up the left’s go-to strategy: free everything, including their demand to give idle people other people’s money.
Free-everything is serious though crazy, proposed in the service of a federal government that’s become increasingly obese and decreasingly nourished by rational policy.
The free-everything strategy starts with education — or semblance of education. “Public schools” (the pseudonym for government schools) began their pivot toward semblance in the 1960s when teachers’ professional associations morphed into labor unions. Union dues increasingly financed a focus on pay, benefits and mushrooming administrative jobs while placing government authority above educational proficiency.
Even high school students got the message: Government is your friend and benefactor, unlike those profiteering businessmen, Simon Legree types, all of them. College students learn that lesson at grade peril.
Anyone who doubts that teaching reality should ask this question of someone who went through primary and secondary schools in this century or has children who did: Just how many conservative teachers or professors did you (or your offspring) have — how many anywhere to the right of Bernie Sanders? Ask them to recall just one.
I had fun asking this question of liberal friends of mine who live in Minnesota, “Land of 10,000 Educational Leftists.”
Over four decades, higher education kept upping its price tag — three times higher than the general inflation rate. The Democrat-College-Complex mandated this hyper-inflation of college costs through a backhanded ploy: trillions of dollars in juiceman-easy loans, many financing degrees in professionally laughable majors. (Good luck with your diploma in Weight Stigma Gender Studies.)
Then the Complex began crying progressive tears over the many students buried under the mountain ranges of student debt the Complex itself had created. Government compassion leaders like Sen. Elizabeth Warren demanded these loans be forgiven by “the government,” as if our 21st century government had any financial instruments left other than Treasury Bonds, that is, even deeper debt.
Another decades-long doomed Democrat freebie crusade: health care. In 1993 President Clinton’s “Task Force on National Health Care Reform” (headed by the president’s wife and dominated by lawyers and political advisers) went nowhere and retired to K Street. The president husband conceded, “We bit off more than we could chew.” Smooth, Bubba.
Now gone but forever the genius chronicler of real-world comedy, P.J. O’Rourke wrote in 1993, “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.”
Democrats’ next serious effort to drive the free health care road came 15 years later, when they had the magical navigator of a president who won a Nobel Prize for doing nothing at all. Only 14 months into the Obama deity, Democrats proudly produced “Obamacare” backed by the pledge that all could keep their insurance plan and doctor (“wrong” buzzer!) and this system would cut costs for everyone (louder “wrong” buzzer!!)
Sixteen years later, the free health care crowd is angrier than ever. They wail as if the system everyone hates dealing with is Trump. No, it’s Obamacare, Freebie Democrats. Your baby.
And recall the Covid Requires Free-Everything Era, not letting your head explode at Fauci’s press-backed lies. Remember it for being authoritarian, insanely budgeted, and aggressively fraudulent. Six years on, the federal budget baseline remains $3 trillion larger than the pre-Covid budget of 2020. And what substantial benefits to citizens does that $3 trillion provide? More debt.
A new avenue for Freebie Democrats opened up in 2024. It had a Broadway feel to it, if you could imagine Broadway in Red Square. In 2021, former Foreclosure Prevention Housing Counselor Zohran Mamdani said the quiet part out loud in a speech to a group of young comrades, quoting Marx’ famous “Seize the means of production.” In 2024 he set out to seize New York City.
He succeeded, elected mayor by NYC voters who’d discovered something disturbing about their city. After 35 years as a sanctuary city supporting every citizen and non-citizen who wanted support, enforcing heavy-handed regulation and taxation, and counting on the base of a wealthy financial sector it wanted to push out, New Yorkers finally noticed that their city was — what? how did this happen? — too expensive to live in.
Zohran believed “the people” deserved more free stuff, or as free as communists calling themselves socialists could provide: free buses, child care, CUNY tuition, “baby baskets,” Deliverista Hubs, city-run grocery stores, an increased Trans Equity Fund, Office of LGBTQIA+ . . . .
That list isn’t the half of it. Not even close.
Of course, the free-everything campaigns of socialists / communists never work in the real world, but they’re a dreamy success in the left’s utopian fantasy. They feed on the hardships they create in sanctuary asylums where mostly young, ideologically-educated, lazy oafs can vote for a revolutionary movement from 1917. Their numbers are growing, so look for New York fantasies to keep spreading like bad music. Residents of Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle and other sanctuaries already struggle to survive in these progressive dystopias.
Don’t love it? Too bad. It’s hard to fight “Democratic Socialism,” because they are the revolutionaries, aggressively revolting. Ask Europe, ask England.
Or ask the Chicagoans who elected Brandon Johnson mayor. I’m reaching for optimism here, but if those Chicagoans pay property taxes, you might be able to engage them in conversation. They might come to understand that they can go broke supporting a structurally bankrupt city.
Texas, Florida and other sanctuaries of capitalism are available. If you find yourself still trying to live in Dystopia, please consider that proximity of loved ones is valuable, but keep all the costs in mind.
-30-
Bittinger lives in Wisconsin as a long-time White Sox refugee and glad grandfather/babysitter. Recalling the Chicago and Glen Ellyn of the previous century with affection, he admires fellow JKN readers brave enough to still try surviving in Chicago, also music fans of high character who risk the thug takeovers to go hear the world’s greatest orchestra play Mahler.
Comments 29
Those electing the likes of B.J. are primarily minorities from the south and west side, who just want more free stuff. On the other hand, academia has to be cleaned out, and true Americans put in their place.
Larry I think you meant to say ….. Those that bothered to show up and vote
The rest is spot on
Though I disagree with your points, there is no defense for the Democrats as they are corrupt elitists who do peddle hate. But here is where you are wrong. Love is the message of Christ, and we can never have enough of it. In fact, many of our problems exist because we do not as a society love our neighbors. In fact, we are encouraged to dislike them by a media that is doing the oligarchs bidding.
The various boondoggles that our nation has squandered treasure; wars, covid, bailing out Wall Street, etc., most of which went directly to the oligarchs, could have actually funded many of the things Dems propose, but have no intention of actually delivering. You see, politics is all about survival and one survive by steering money to the right people and by lying to thr public on a regular basis.
The left/right thing is a con. Your criticism of someone saying we need more love in the world is ridiculous. Do you hear yourself? Have you read the Beattiudes? Have you ever been to thre Holy Land and walked the stations of the cross? Why did He come? Why did He die for us?
Flexible ethics, morality of convenience, and propagandized and manipulated to the hilt is what we, the American people are. Make the rubes hate each other and keep them fighting while we rape pillage and squander the fruits of their labor and the vast resources of this beautiful Earth to make a relative few rich. This is what is happening to us.
Perfectly stared Robert. It is a con game.
DJT is still the sexual predator pervert who states about women: “you can do anything to them, you can grab em by the pussy,.” What a gentlemen. May the GOP can change name of the party to GBPP.
Doc, the brainwashing is thorough and almost complete. Look at the vile people who are the “leaders” of the two parties. Trump, Pelosi, Obama, Speaker Johnson. In Texas, they nominated obviously gay Talarico who talks about Trans and they expect Blacks and Hispanics to vote for him? Paxton, the POS that he is will win.
Only corrupt compromised political whores win major elected office. This is a systemic problem. They peddle division in order to keep the grift going. Endless wars, careening from crisis to crisis, keep dropping bombs on people on the other side of the world. It’s got to be the most cowardly thing to do, bomb people. Their no better than the Weather Undergrounder Ayer’s and Dorhn whom they despise so much.
Maitino seems to have taken over the comment section, how about one comment per column.
The site is called John Kass news not Robert Maitinos Comments.
Thomas Rudd there is still hope for your TDS, they have meds for that.
I’ve commented more than once. But if your suggestion would immunize us from the inane and repetitive windbaggery of the idiot duo of Maitino and Rudd, I’m all for it. This IS – as you point out – JKNews; not Maitino and Rudd windbaggery.
Niiiiice!
Amen, Robert, amen
The Left/Right thing is not a con. It’s a basic dichotomy of how one views life and personal responsibility. Please view C.W. Christianson’s poignant observation below for an obvious ramification.
As for why did He come and die? Because it was apparent that mankind always has and always will come up short loving one another.
I moved from Florida to Illinois to be closer to grandchildren. Here in Illinois, if you Earn it, Own it, Buy it, or Use it, we tax it. That would be fine if we had good
Schools and Roads, but we don’t.
There is never enough money. So we have the Lottery, Casinos, Legal Marijuana to tax – and that’s not enough. So we have a cleverly disguised Tax on poor people- Video gambling.
On south Harlem Avenue there is a gas station with 24 hour Video Poker. You won’t find wealthy people there, just ordinary people trying to make their lives a little better. Pretty sure that’s not the answer.
We left Illinois 5 years ago and moved to Florida. What a difference a well run state makes. Our home is slightly larger than the one we left here. Our taxes went from $15,000 to $3400! And public schools are very good too!
Great column!
Yes, the promise of free stuff is every bit as addicting as crack to the “everyone gets a trophy” crowd.
Always victims. The misfortunes and the slaps that life throws at all of us are always someone else’s fault. It’s white supremacism and privilege. It’s colonizers on stolen land. Educated by anti-American activists, we have a couple generations of young people with a college degree that are sorely lacking in common sense.
These socialist/communists may be winning certain offices in deep blue regions based on pie in the sky promises, but the percentage of eligible voters turning out is shockingly small in most cases. They suck up all the oxygen in the room, and admittedly are good at organizing their base.
Is the silent majority finally waking up? Let’s see what happens in the midterms.
In the meantime, sure let’s love our neighbors, but that’s sometime hard to do when your new neighbors hate you and this country.
Prolem solving technique
Democrat: Complain. Go to a Board, complain. Get enough people to complain. Set up an elite task force. Complain. Set up a new Board. Allocate tax dollars to a program to solve problem. Set up NGOs to help administer the new program. Problem not solved. Complain. Get more tax dollars. Problem not solved. Lather rinse repeat.
Republican: Set up a business to solve problem. Make money solving problem. Pay taxes. Get regulated by Democrats and big government Republicans.
Great column.
“Free” is the true, most effective, opiate of the masses.
With all politicians peddling fear, anxiety, and anger we are driven to vote against (hate) the “worst” candidate. I truly long to simply “like” and want to vote “for” a candidate again.
Revolver is a truly brilliant album! It’s my Beatles go-to.
My first president was Harry “the buck stops here” Truman. A small town businessman from Independence Mo. hard work and common sense. He was thrust into a difficult place after Roosevelt died before the war ended. He made a tough decision. An invasion of Japan that would have cost untold lives on both sides. While it unleashed a terrible fury it ended the war. Our country’s values for better or worse were preserved. Now we are a nation where much if the population generation after generation sucks at the government teat. Free is good. Maggie said it best “socialism works until you run out if other people’s money to pay for it.” Now we have the first president who really understands from a business perspective. The “free” crowd might have to make an effort. My my, what a concept. Midterms critical and 28 will set the course for the future. Do we take the tough road or watch this 250 year old concept circle the drain. My hope is the former.
Oops I forgot Ronnie. Shame on me.
Great column David, the nonsense started with “W” “ Stole the 2000 election.
It has grown to epic levels with people like the above commenting by the TDS victim who still lives in the Orange man bad mode.
What Trump said in that remark cannot even remotely be compared to the actions of the Maine Nazi, Eric Salwell, Bill Clinton, the Arizona senator Gallepo (sic)the list is endless and with the Epstein list which I’m sure contains a majority of Hollywood and Democrat politicians.
That being said with guys like “ Tommy” the hatred will never stop and will be passed on to the next Republican president.
The Democrats soon to be the communist party do not know love or morality or respect.
They just want unfettered power.
If you think healthcare is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free
That is a great line
Well put David. I think your columns are the ones that come close to what John himself would write. These so called ” Democratic Socialists ” are in the process of hijacking the Democrat Party by using the Democrats hatred of Trump against them. When we were kids back in the 70’s there were always three names on a presidential ballot. A Republican, a Democrat and Gus Hall. Gus was the perennial Communist Party candidate never getting more than a few thousand votes. His political campaigns were taken as a joke. Now thanks to the cooperative Democrat Party, the Communists are actually veering to running a serious candidate for president. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. A charismatic joke but still a joke. A Communist in sheeps clothing is still a Communist. This reeks of the self destruction of the Democrat Party. We’ll see. What remains to be seen is if Republicans can capitalize on the Jihadist loving, Pro- trans
(a contradiction if nothing else), Woman Abusing Monster Looney Party and hold on to the House and Senate. The Democrat clowns are certainly giving them ample opportunity.
Great work Dave. Your mixture of truth with humor is most entertaining.
PJs line was spot on long ago.
Ronaldus Magnus once said the scariest words in the English language are I’m with the government, and I’m here to help you. He said this jokingly, but he wasn’t kidding.
God bless America
It’s heartening to see sanity and wisdom reinforced in Comments by the eloquent Enrique Diaz. Also appreciated bruce kleinman’s wish for JKN immunization against the “windbaggery” of those two insufferable bores. Why do they think they’re persuading anyone with their nonsense that both sides of the political spectrum are the same and everyone is wrong except them?
I appreciate Enrique’s compliment, but when he says “come close to what John would write,” I’d suggest he means (my effort to paraphrase): If only the brilliant columns that John is producing these days were producible three times every week.
We all know that John’s been working heroically through serious health issues, as has another great writer, Victor Davis Hansen. I do my best as a wise-guy creative writer with preferences for foundational American freedom and capitalism. But a journalist of John Kass’ genius is a rarity. Think H.L. (Mencken), Victor, P.J., and Mike.
Anyway, I will keep doing my best to write for Mr. Diaz and the other demanding JKN readers whose reactions mean a lot to me.
DB’s last line, “If you find yourself still trying to live in Dystopia,…keep all the costs in mind.” Well said in conclusion. Only this evening I received a hand circulated copy from a DSA woman from the Democratic Women of DuPage County attesting for the statewide candidates for the upcoming mid-term election. And it lists their familiar ‘Go to items’ as Dave B put it. ” Illinois Democrats Deliver:
8 balanced budgets & 10 credit upgrades (?), free school meals for all children, child tax credit for working families, gun safety laws, prescription drug pricing relief, minimum wage increase, paid leave for workers, reproductive health care protections, and pre-trial fairness act (which let lose a 72-time convicted felon on the street who set an innocent young lady on fire riding the CTA train!)”
And a typical housewife, like mine, who doesn’t have to write a single check or file a tax return thinks these demoRats “are good people doing good things to poor people”! – Nambi
Liberals don’t recall or have not lived through the incredible improvements made in our lives so they don’t appreciate how good they have it. Clean water and sewer, auto tune-ups and new tires every 10k miles, air conditioning in homes and cars, encyclopedias in their pockets, phones and news in their pockets. So, they need to fight for something since they have never fought for anything. Looking at the past and history gives someone an appreciation for where they currently are. Of course, the media, like Don Henley’s song says, “give us dirty laundry”. People eat it up.
Brilliant, David! THEY RAN OUT of Things To Love! What a sad bunch of creeps.
Your quote, ” They ran out of things to love (there’s the word!). The problem was that those loves were just poses, ” As you say later ‘Insolvent poses’ is as hard-hitting a turn of phrase as it gets.
My compliments, Sir!
Thanks, Pat. When I do think I’ve produced a nice turn of phrase, the thought sometimes occurs, “Hey, maybe Hickey will like that!”
The only money the government spends comes from us.
Yeah, that money comes from only 30% of us middle class people and top 1% of billionaires. Rest of them are all on well-fare. It’s estimated that 1 in 4 in Illinois are on Medicaid! I hear some of my retired fellow country men who have transferred all their IRA and other assets to their kids and grandkids’ names and are on Medicare/Medecaid! They show only their social security in come and don’t have to pay any taxes!
-Nambi