The Silencing Read online

  The delegitimization campaign against Rhee seemed to be the blueprint of what would later happen to Brown. Richard Whitmire, the author of a book about Rhee’s reform efforts in the nation’s capital, characterized reactions to Rhee as “virulent” and “extreme,” with a marked tendency to personal attacks such as “Rhee’s a terrible mother!”8 Whitmire noted in his Education Week piece “What Is Behind the Discrediting of Michelle Rhee?” that her “critics come from left-wing, not right-wing, politics.” He also explained “this core group of critics—well represented in any online discussion of Rhee and usually writing under disguised identities—seems to have limited interest in debating the school reform decisions Rhee made. Rather, their goal is ‘proving’ Rhee is a flat-out fraud.”9 In other words, the illiberal left chooses to make dehumanizing attacks on Rhee, such as blasting her as an “Asian bitch,” as Florida teacher Ceresta Smith did at a 2013 “Occupy DOE 2.0” protest.10 This is easier than engaging in a rigorous debate about the best way forward for education.

  Another Rhee critic insinuated the avowed Democrat was a conservative and called her an “education Ann Coulter.”11 In an article for Salon.com nearly two years later, the same man called Brown a “Rhee-placement” in a piece called “Education ‘reform’s’ new Ann Coulter: A reeling Michelle Rhee passes the lead to Campbell Brown.”12 Like Brown, Rhee had her own union-funded attack site—RheeFirst.com.13

  The sexist and racist character assassinations of Campbell Brown and Michelle Rhee demonstrate the great lengths the illiberal left will go to label and demonize opponents and avoid contending against alternative ideas in the public square. It doesn’t matter if the label has any connection to reality. It only matters that it sticks. Since they can’t win the argument on the merits, the illiberal left instead attacks the people who make the arguments, trying to cast doubt on their abilities, their intentions, even their value as a person.

  TACTIC #1: DEHUMANIZING

  In Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, social philosopher and psychologist David Livingstone Smith explores the enduring practice of dehumanizing individuals we don’t like or with whom we disagree. He shows how ancient cultures and modern societies operate similarly in that groups that seek to maintain or expand their power base will often systematically question and attack the very core of their enemies’ human identities.

  New York University law professor Jeremy Waldron has even highlighted the harm of dehumanization as a justification to ban certain kinds of speech. In an article for the New York Times, Waldron argued that hate speech harms the dignity of those at whom it is directed. He defines dignity as “a person’s basic social status, his or her being treated as an ordinary member of society in good standing, his or her being included in the ordinary business of society. A person’s dignity is damaged, then, when he or she is publicly defamed or dehumanized, or when he or she is perceived as belonging to a group, all of whose members are defamed or dehumanized.”14

  Waldron is right about the harm of dehumanizing, but wrong about the solution. Laws that limit what a person can say, even when what they say is depraved, are illiberal and authoritarian. But if someone like Waldron, a liberal, believes that dehumanizing attacks are terrible enough to justify creating a legal cause of action for the targets of such language, then perhaps people who call themselves liberal should stop using dehumanizing smears to delegitimize their opponents.

  If Waldron’s theory was put into practice, we’d be slapping the cuffs on a who’s who of the illiberal elite. When they aren’t besmirching dissenters from their worldview as racist, sexist, and misogynist, the illiberal left are hurling racist, sexist, and misogynist attacks against those they wish to delegitimize in the public square. It’s a sad irony that those who claim to stand against racism or sexism turn into unrepentant bigots if it will help delegitimize their ideological or political opponents. In the illiberal silencing campaign, liberal principles are perpetual casualties.

  These attacks are fueled by the determinist assumption that certain groups of people, because of their race or sex, must support liberal policies and vote for Democrats. If the heretics deviate from the paternalistic preordained script, they are treated as self-loathing sub-humans. The illiberal left denies women and non-white members of society the right to choose which political party or ideological positions they may support. That’s only for white men (who, if they’re not Democrats, are presumed to be racist and sexist anyway). The rest of America is expected to line up behind liberals and the Democratic Party and if they don’t, the delegitimization commences.

  Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is often called an “Uncle Tom” who acts only to please white people. The illiberal left claim his conservative views derive from self-loathing or hate. As Democratic Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi said, “it’s almost to the point saying this man doesn’t like black people, he doesn’t like being black.”15 African American Republican Ron Christie, who worked for both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, was told by African American California Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters that he was a “sellout to [his] race” and that black Republicans are “Uncle Toms.” Christie noted in an article that this kind of treatment, “is all too familiar to black conservatives who dare to express views that are out of the liberal mainstream.”16

  The epithet “Uncle Tom” is derived from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The insult suggests black submissiveness to a white agenda. “Short of dropping the n-bomb on someone, there are few things more insulting to many African Americans than being called an ‘Uncle Tom,’” wrote journalist Dexter Mullins at the African American news website theGrio.com.17 Though there are variations on the theme. Condoleeza Rice was called an “Aunt Jemima” while working for the Bush administration.18

  Raffi Williams, a young black conservative who works as the deputy press secretary for the Republican National Committee, told me he regularly gets Facebook comments or tweets from supposed liberals calling him an “Uncle Tom,” “house n-word,”19 race traitor, and sellout.20 Audience members at a 2002 gubernatorial debate threw Oreos at then-Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele, he told me. This sent a message that he was “black on the outside and white inside,” reported the Baltimore Sun.21 He has also been called a “token negro” and “a white man with black skin” whose appointment as the head of the Republican National Committee “was propaganda to convince America the Republican party wasn’t run by racists since they’d appointed a Negro to their top position.”22 Former Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock compared Thomas Sowell to a reviled “house negro” character in the Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained.23

  The website “ThyBlackMan”—which describes itself as a place to remind black men “of our brotherhood and value as men in this society”—wrote without irony of conservative black man and commentator Larry Elder, “His coaches at the Republican Party always send in their white men in black skin whenever they need to check Obama for scoring too many points. And since they promote from within Elder probably will be coaching his own team of self haters pretty soon.”24 They’ve also made sport of dehumanizing and demonizing the African American commentator Deneen Borelli. In the same piece, Borelli was accused of hating “herself so much she gets her pictures photo shopped in order to look more European friendly,” and was ranked #9 on a list of “SAMBOs”—a SAMBO was described as a “white person trapped inside a black body.”25 Rather than accepting that Borelli might legitimately be conservative, she was accused of “demonizing her own people” to enrich herself financially.26

  The illiberal left loves to call Republicans racist for not having enough black and brown people representing them, but as soon as one is elected, the delegitimizing commences. They aren’t “real black or brown people” or they are self-hating sellouts and traitors. In 2015, Arsalan Iftikhar, a liberal human rights lawyer and media commentator, told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner that Louisiana Gover
nor Bobby Jindal was “trying . . . to scrub some of the brown off his skin as he runs to the right in a Republican presidential exploratory bid.”27 This is a double whammy: Jindal is portrayed as self-loathing and GOP voters as racists who will only like him if he isn’t brown. When Haitian-American Mia Love made history in 2014 as the first black female Republican to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the Huffington Post ran a story headlined, “She Looks Black, but Her Politics Are Red.” Her values were not her own, but were instead “grounded in a white, male, Christian context.” Love is apparently just a mindless puppet to her white male overlords. The writer—an assistant professor at Wichita State University—alleged that Love was “allowed to pass through [the halls of power] in her black, female body with the understanding that she must not see, speak or openly advocate for anything related to race or gender—an unholy compromise.”28 This echoed a post at the liberal website Gawker, in which Hamilton Nolan wrote “the only reason Mia Love has been so lovingly shepherded to the national podium to deliver this message is because of her own race. . . .”29 There isn’t a shred of evidence to support this contention, but if there was, one would think that Nolan would be cheering. Don’t liberals support affirmative action?

  Love was further portrayed in the Huffington Post article as “window dressing” and a useful idiot playing into the “pattern of using blacks to further white interests” comparing her position as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives to slavery. In the end, the Huffington Post writer concluded that Love’s “accomplishment is quite dangerous for people of color.”30 This kind of treatment unfortunately wasn’t new for Love. Following her August 2012 appearance at the Republican National Convention, Love’s Wikipedia page was vandalized with vile racist and sexist slurs. The page was altered to refer to Love as a “house n--ger” and a “dirty, worthless whore who sold out her soul in the name of big business.”31 The vandals also called her a “total sell-out to the Right Wing Hate Machine and the greedy bigots who control the GOP.”32 But who are the haters and bigots here?

  Love’s treatment was not unlike what met Republican Tim Scott, who was elected in 2014 to be one of three African American members of the U.S. Senate. In a January 2014 speech at Zion Baptist Church in Columbia, South Carolina, North Carolina’s NAACP chapter president, the Reverend William Barber, referred to Scott as a Republican pawn. “A ventriloquist can always find a good dummy,” he told the gathering of three hundred.33 Barber refused to apologize.34 House Assistant Democratic Leader Congressman James Clyburn told the Washington Post upon Scott’s historic election, “If you call progress electing a person with the pigmentation that he has, who votes against the interest and aspirations of 95 percent of the black people in South Carolina, then I guess that’s progress.”35 University of Pennsylvania Professor Adolph Reed wrote in a New York Times op-ed shortly after Scott’s appointment to the Senate that Scott was one of the GOP’s “cynical tokens.”36

  Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, a Filipino-American, is a frequent target of racist attacks from so-called liberals. After Malkin called actor Alec Baldwin a “Hollyweirdo” on Twitter in 2011 he responded by mobilizing his presumably liberal followers to “go all Town Hall on” Malkin because she was a “crypto fascist hater.” The responses to Malkin were unfortunately predictable. One said, “Don’t you realize the white wingers you look up to. Only [sic] see you as someone who should be doing manicures for their wife.” She was called an “Aunty Tom” and a “sellout Asian bitch.” Another of Baldwin’s followers wrote, “This stir-fry noodle believes she matters. You’ll always be the chink inferior to the Aryan conservatives.”37

  The same tactic is applied to Hispanic conservatives who oppose liberal policies. When conservative Gabriel Gomez was running for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts in 2013, a columnist labeled him a “LINO,” which stands for “Latino in name only.”38 When New Mexican gubernatorial candidate and Democrat Gary King wanted to attack his opponent, Republican Governor Susana Martinez, he didn’t open a dialogue on why she opposes drivers’ licenses for undocumented workers or vetoed an increase to the minimum wage. No, he commented that Martinez “does not have a Latino heart.”39 They seem to agree with Democratic Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who in 2010, while he was Senate majority leader, said, “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican.”40

  Racist delegitimization isn’t just for conservatives. Fox News political analyst Juan Williams—a lifelong Democrat—has experienced “rank intimidation” from “the ideological and rigid Left,” he told me in an interview. He is asked, “‘Why are you working [at Fox]? You can’t be a good black person and work at Fox.’” While he’s received racist e-mails during the 2008 and 2012 campaigns from both sides of the ideological spectrum, he says that with the left, “the idea is you have to choose a side and choose your army.” To do otherwise is to invite the worst kind of delegitimizing, or “muzzling” as Williams labeled the phenomena in his 2012 book, Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate.41 If he offers a sincere critique of Obama or Democrats, Williams told me, “The response from the Left is, ‘You’re a sellout. You’re attacking our president because Fox gives you a paycheck.’ Or that I’m performing sex acts on white men at Fox in order to get my check.” Illiberal left silencing of Williams cost him his job at National Public Radio where he had been a correspondent for a decade. NPR fired him ostensibly for what they deemed racist comments about Muslims. But according to Williams, the firing came after consistent pressure on the network from at least one senior Obama White House staffer unhappy that an African American liberal was appearing on Fox.

  Women who don’t stick to the illiberal left’s scripts are subject to the same kind of delegitimization. Conservative women in particular are deemed fair game for misogynistic attacks that would normally have the illiberal left screaming “War on Women.” Republican women are dehumanized as fake women, “female impersonators,”42 or “uninflected by the experience of the female body” (whatever that means).43 Alternatively, they are treated as sex objects with no brains or will of their own. When Senator Joni Ernst—a GOP rising star—delivered the State of the Union response in 2015, MSNBC host Ronan Farrow compared the U.S. senator to a flight attendant.44 This echoed comments made by then-Senator Tom Harkin during Ernst’s campaign for the Senate that described her as just a pretty face, comparable to the then twenty-four-year-old singer and actress Taylor Swift.45

  Liberal MSNBC host Ed Schultz once said on his radio show that Sarah Palin set off his “bimbo alert”46 and called conservative radio host and bestselling author Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut.”47 He even called me a “bimbo” for accurately quoting him in a column. It’s so much easier to insult a woman than to actually engage on the issue she raises. While still sitting atop the MSNBC heap, television host Keith Olbermann wished conservative S. E. Cupp had been aborted by her parents48 and called conservative pundit Michelle Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick.”49 Bill Maher dismissed Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann as a “bimbo” and called Sarah Palin the c-word and a “dumb twat.”50 What is it that makes liberal men think they can get away with treating dissenting women in the most callous possible way? It’s as if being “pro-choice” on abortion gives them carte blanche to mistreat, mischaracterize, and verbally abuse any woman with views contrary to their own. Liberals should know better, shouldn’t they? “Even mild sexism—a focus on hair and makeup—is a very lethal tool,” noted Siobhan Bennett, Women’s Campaign Fund president, to the magazine Mother Jones. “It can make a woman [running for office] drop 10 points [in the polls].”51

  I didn’t support the campaigns of Bachmann or Palin, but sexist dehumanizing should be off limits regardless of how much one might disagree with the politics of a female candidate or politician. These words are used specifically to attack their identity as women, and when they are used, they degrade all women. When Rush Limbaugh called law student and contraceptive manda
te activist Sandra Fluke a “slut,” I was very critical of him, but found it odd that some of the same people who were lobbying for him to lose his radio show for this one comment not only never called for Maher to lose his show, but were frequent guests.52 Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Robin Morgan found Limbaugh’s remarks too much to bear, writing at CNN that the FCC should deny his show a license in order to serve the public interest.53 Prior to Limbaugh’s comments, Steinem had happily appeared as Maher’s guest with nary a word about his well-chronicled misogynistic outbursts.54 It was left to Ann Coulter to confront Maher, telling him flat out on his show that he was a misogynist. I too have criticized Maher for his misogyny, but have never suggested he lose his show. It’s the illiberal left that wants to run their ideological enemies out of business under the false pretense of being the protectors of women—and then turns around and attacks their female opponents in the most demeaning, sexist ways.

  Illiberal feminists are perhaps the most ferocious warriors among the illiberal left. They deny conservative men the right to speak on any issue that affects women, and they are utterly intolerant of any dissenting women, even disallowing them their right to state their own opinions in their own words as when MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell told Republican strategist Juleanna Glover to refer to herself not as “pro-life” but “anti-abortion.”55