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.
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.
