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.