Why We Must Fight the Leftists and Their Thought Police

We have seen in the past hundred years that there are times when detachment from civic and political life is not an option.  When the bad guys in civic and political life are not just wrong-headed and not just evil even, but are determined that people who choose not to support their evil are punished.  Allowing the Nazis and the Communists to take power bit by bit were not viable options.  And trying selfishly to stay detached from it all hardly worked.  To paraphrase some dark humor, you may not be interested in totalitarians, but totalitarians are interested in you.

We are now at such a time.  Totalitarian-minded Leftists, among whom the Pink Shirts are just one manifestation, are taking more and more power in American political and civic life.  And they are not satisfied with defeating their freedom-minded opposition.  They want to vilify and crush them, not unlike their totalitarian forebears, with cries of “bigot” and “racist” and “homophobe” and the like and with demands for firings and boycotts.  And, as in the 20^th Century, these are only the beginning. 

Us of a mindset of traditional values and freedom are the new “Dirty Jews” of the Fascists, to be vilified, ostracized, and worse.  Just as in the Soviet Union, being an open Jew or not a member of the Communist Party made one a 3^rd Class citizen, if even that, today’s Leftists want to do likewise with those who do not agree with them.  (More noble-minded people of the Left, such as Andrew Sullivan, are excepted from this critique.  But they are a shrinking minority.)

That is the direction the United States is now heading.  We used to have an unspoken agreement (if imperfectly adhered to) that we contest for our values in the public sphere, but we have enough genuine tolerance for political adversaries that we respect their freedoms to speak, associate, and live that we value for ourselves.  The Leftists are shattering that agreement every day.

And we cannot rely on the Constitution or the law or the Supreme Court to protect us.  For the Supreme Court is but one vote away from turning Constitutional rights protecting the individual from the predations of those in control of the state into collective rights.  And even now, the Supreme Court will not even hear the case of a photographer who does not want to be forced by New Mexico law to take photographs against his conscience.

I revere the Constitution.  But when every branch of the Federal Government breaks their oaths to defend the Constitution, we can no more stop the Leftist thugs with the Constitution than we can stop drug gangs by reading to them the Ten Commandments.  We have trusted the government to defend us.  But the government itself is attacking our freedoms and threatening to become even worse in so doing. 

I regret that we as a country have gotten to this point, but it is time to fight and stop the Leftists and their Thought Police by whatever means are ethical, effective, and necessary.  We may not win.  But doing nothing will ensure that we will lose and head for a gulag that is oh-so “tolerant” and “inclusive.”  Jay Caruso has summarized the situation well, concluding (I’ve edited his saltly language slightly.):

This is the United States of America. Yet we have a reached a point where people have to fear for their jobs because a bunch of self appointed leftist [jerks] believe they get to determine what people are and are not allowed to think or believe.

[Imprecations upon them.]

There needs to be serious push back against these left-wing fascists because where does it end? Today it’s a donation to a cause the hard left deems inappropriate. Tomorrow it will be a politician you voted for. Then they’ll go after the websites you like to frequent…. The list can go on for quite some time.

We have a choice to make. We can either kick these punks back into their little sewer of “tolerance” or we can allow them to continue to permeate our culture, attempting to shame the masses into believing exactly as they do.

I choose the former.

As do I.  As. Do. I.

More on Mozilla and the Pink Shirts (Or You think I’m ticked?)

Mozilla and the Pink Shirts are finding out the hard way that a lot of Americans do not like the squelching and punishment of free speech.  The backlash is so great that Mozilla has decided to clam up.

And if you think I’ve been worked up over the firing (or the equivalent) of Brendan Eich, read Matt Walsh’s post on this matter.  The beginning will give you the flavor:

Dear gay rights militants, dear progressive tyrants, dear liberal fascists, dear haters of free speech, dear crusaders for ideological conformity, dear left wing bullies:

You will lose.

I know you’ve got legions of sycophants kowtowing to you these days, and the rest you’ve set out to destroy — but you will lose.

So, you’ve tracked another dissident and skinned him alive. You’ve made an example of Brendan Eich, and now you dance joyously around his disemboweled carcass. You have his head on a spike, and you consider this a conquest in your eternal crusade to eradicate diversity and punish differing opinions. You launched your millionth campaign of intimidation, and now another good man has been dragged through the mud, to the sounds of taunting and jeering and death threats.

Please read the whole thing.  It is a wonderful rant I can only envy.  Walsh’s main thesis is that Pink Shirts with this episode have discredited themselves for all to see.  Addressing them still, he writes:

You fancy yourselves the ideological descendants of civil rights pioneers, but these tactics put you in the same vein as book burners and Puritan witch hunters. When your story is ultimately told, it’ll read more like The Crucible than the Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

And that’s why you’ll lose.

You might have fooled society forever if you’d just kept singing about love and kindness, and never started bombarding Christians with your bitter hate and hostility. You might have gained some lasting ground if you hoisted your banner of free love, and never used it to diminish free speech.

But the proverbial cat is out of the bag. You’ve been made.

Because of your own behavior, when people like myself tell the world about the vicious death wishes and vulgar hate mail we receive from your kind on a DAILY basis, everyone will believe us. It’s no secret anymore. Without question and without exaggeration, the ‘gay rights movement’ is the angriest, most ruthless, most controlling, most intolerant of all the ideological enterprises in the country. Now, everyone knows it.

So you’ll lose. People are starting to see that you are the pigs on this Animal Farm, and the equality of which you preach is a very unequal equality indeed.

I certainly hope Walsh is correct about this outcome.  I am not as confident in the American people as I once was, but he may be right.

George Will also points out that the Pink Shirts are “sore winners” who “unsatisfied with victory… want to stamp out and punish people for their previous views.”

And he sagely notes that this episode makes the full disclosure of political donations problematic.

This case is an example of why some of us who used to be for full disclosure no longer are. The people advocating full disclosure in campaign contributions say we just want voters to be able to make an informed choice. That's not what they're doing at all. They really want to enable themselves to mount punitive campaigns and to tear people and chill political speech.

Exactly.  In the current toxic atmosphere belched out by the progressives and their ilk, we not only need a secret ballot, we need secret donations to at least a substantial extent so people can participate in the political process without fear of retaliation and black listing.

Richard Fernandez has written a thoughtful column about the culture war and the raw and dangerous power behind it.

The removal of Eich is about fascism.  It’s about one group of people forcing everyone else to bow to their hat on a pole; it’s about book burning, compelling obeisance to, as Jame Surowiecki put it, “a universal ideology” in a manner so bald that even those who might gain politically in the short term from it are horrified by its crudity.

Do read it all.

Kevin Williamson looks at various Lib/Left efforts to squelch and punish free speech.  He begins (And, again, do read it all.):

The word “liberal” has taken a beating over the last few days: A Mozilla executive was hounded out of his position at the firm he co-founded by left-wing campaigners resolved to punish him for having made a donation to a successful California ballot initiative that defined marriage in traditional terms; Adam Weinstein, whose downwardly mobile credibility has taken him from ABC to Gawker, called for literally imprisoning people with the wrong views about global warming, writing, “Those malcontents must be punished and stopped”; Mr. Weinstein himself was simply forwarding a dumbed-down-enough-for-Gawker version of the arguments of philosophy professor Lawrence Torcello; Katherine Timpf, a reporter for Campus Reform, faced a human barricade to keep her from asking questions of those attending a feminist leadership conference, whose organizers informed her that the group was “inclusive” and therefore she was “not welcome here”; Charles Murray, one of the most important social scientists of his generation, was denounced as a “known white supremacist” by Texas Democrats for holding heterodox views about education policy; national Democrats spent the week arguing for the anti-free-speech side of a landmark First Amendment case and the anti-religious-freedom side of a case involving the Religious Freedom Restoration Act; Lois Lerner, the Left’s best friend at the IRS, faces contempt charges related to her role in the Democrats’ coopting the IRS as a weapon against their political enemies; . . . .

The convocation of clowns on the left screeched with one semi-literate and inchoate voice when my colleague Jonah Goldberg, borrowing the precise words of one of their own, titled a book Liberal Fascism. Most of them didn’t read it, but the ones who did apparently took what was intended as criticism and read it as a blueprint for political action.

Welcome to the Liberal Gulag.

That term may be perverse, but it is not an exaggeration.

It is indeed not an exaggeration.  The Bookworm also points out the attacks on our freedom are more dangerous than that from a Gay Mafia.  It is more like a Soviet:

Yes, there’s thuggery involved, which is a mafia tactic.  But unlike the mafia, which was just in it for the money, the new Soviet is in it to subordinate the individual and his beliefs entirely to the will of the Leftist state.

Nor is this thuggery a fringe movement.  While I am very honored here at the Bookworm Room to have gay readers who understand that the safest place for all individuals (regardless of race, color, creed, gender indentification, sexual orientation, etc.) is in a nation that leaves the individual alone, I can tell you that every one of my Leftist friends on my “real me” Facebook, gay or straight, applauds the gay Soviet’s successful thuggery against Eich.  These Facebook friends are, without exception, affluent, educated, successful, and vocal, and they think it’s a great thing that a productive man who has never once been accused of fomenting any discrimination in the workplace was the target of an attack aimed at destroying his livelihood.

This time, it was the non-governmental Leftist collective that acted, but you know they were thinking how much better it would be if they could just outlaw opposing thought. Why convince someone that your position has merit when you can more easily destroy them, which has the useful feature of sending a strong message to any other heretics out there?

And guess who is next?  Us Christians.  Heck, we are under attack already.

Some may think “turning the other cheek” is the operative scripture in this situation.  But, particularly since it is not just us Christians under attack, I think it is Proverbs 25:26 (ESV):

Like a muddied spring or a polluted fountain

is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked.

It Is Time to Stand Up to the Pink Shirts UPDATED

Yesterday was a dark day for free speech in America.  Because he gave a political contribution six years ago to defend traditional marriage, namely to Proposition 8, Brendan Eich was hounded from his CEO job at Mozilla.  The Pink Shirts demanded his resignation and the board of Mozilla caved like a house of cards.

One may say I am getting worked up against an exercise of free speech.  Those who are convinced that opposition to gay “marriage” is intolerable bigotry worthy of banning from society spoke out and were listened to.  And this was not a government attack on free speech.

But using one’s free speech to say that those one disagrees with must be silenced and fired from their jobs is abusing free speech to attack free speech.  Private citizens have the legal right to act so odiously in America.  But it is still an attack on free speech and one to be called out and opposed.

And do not be too sure the Feds are not supporting the Pink Shirts.    Remember the IRS leaked the names of Proposition 8 contributors to the Gay Mafia’s Human Right Campaign, aiding Pink Shirt attacks on them.

And please do not think this is merely a gay rights issue.  The firing of Eich (Oh, yeah.  He “resigned.”  Yeah, right.) is a successful attack on free speech.  And there are gays and gay rights supporters who are appalled at this attack.  Andrew Sullivan:

The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.

Gay marriage supporter Moe Lane is urging a boycott of Mozilla’s Firefox browser.  I heartily join him in so doing.

And gays also are targets of the Pink Shirts.  One such example:

[Brandon] Ambrosino is a liberal gay male who has enraged they gay community by writing, among other things, that the gay left “routinely scour the private lives and social media accounts of our political opponents in the hopes of demonizing them as archaic, unthinking, and bigoted”

For these and other sins, Ambrosino has made himself an enemy to the very group of which he is a part.

What is perhaps most galling is that the Pink Shirts insist they are acting in the name of “tolerance” and “inclusion”.  (Sound familiar?)  This e-mail from GLAAD stands out:

Mozilla’s strong statement in favor of equality today reflects where corporate America is: inclusive, safe, and welcoming to all.

. . . Unless you disagree with GLAAD, of course.

The Pink Shirts are a different version of the bullies they so self-righteously oppose.  Like all bullies and like all who attack free speech in America, they must be stood up to and opposed.  Or they and other Leftist Brown Shirts will continue to march and trample upon our freedoms.  And free speech will more and more be mangled to mean: “You’re free to agree with the mob. You’re not free to disagree with the mob.”

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MORE:

David Fischler does a brilliant send up of the PC Doublespeak from Mozilla.  For example:

We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.

We forgot that freedom of thought was not supposed to exist at Mozilla, and didn’t remember fact enough. Self-flagellation will begin immediately.

Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO. He’s made this decision for Mozilla and our community.

We built an auto da fe in the company atrium, and Brendan was gracious enough to jump right into it.

Do read it all.

Totalitarians and their toadies are so good at lying and at removing all meaning from language to lie.