Bullies
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1. INSTITUTIONAL BULLIES
2. ANTI-PATRIOTIC BULLIES
3. RACE BULLIES
4. CLASS BULLIES
5. SEX BULLIES
6. GREEN BULLIES
7. SECULAR BULLIES
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT BEN SHAPIRO
NOTES
INDEX
TO MY FRIEND AND MENTOR, THE IRREPLACEABLE ANDREW BREITBART
INTRODUCTION
On March 10, 2011, President Barack Obama led a White House conference on a crisis plaguing America: the crisis of bullying.
In the middle of the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, with American soldiers involved in two wars overseas, with Iran on the brink of nuclear weapons development, the White House was focused, laserlike, on kids getting thrown into lockers.
There had been no measurable uptick in school bullying across America. In fact, by all available statistics, bullying is down across the board, with young Americans demonstrating particular tolerance for those of different backgrounds. All Americans, virtually without exception, hate bullies.1 But President Obama felt the necessity to call leaders across America together to decry bullying.
“Bullying isn’t a problem that makes headlines every day,” the president said, his sonorous baritone trembling with emotion. “But every day it touches the lives of young people all across this country. . . . And that’s why we’re here today. If there’s one goal of this conference, it’s to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up. It’s not.”2
Obama didn’t stop there. He appeared on Cartoon Network to preface a documentary on bullying, solemnly intoning, “I care about this issue deeply, not just as the president, but as a dad. . . . We’ve all got more to do. Everyone has to take action against bullying.”3 He launched a website under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services, StopBullying.gov—because God knows that HHS shouldn’t be utilizing its resources on, say, fighting cancer. Obama even cut videos on behalf of anti-bullying groups like the It Gets Better campaign.
So, what prompted President Obama’s sudden recognition, two years after taking office, that bullying was an issue worth tackling? Jonathan Capehart, an Obama administration ally at the Washington Post, asked White House senior advisor and Obama mentor Valerie Jarrett exactly that question the day of the White House conference. Taking on bullying, Jarrett admitted, was part of the president’s “Winning the Future” campaign strategy. In fact, the goal was to recruit all Americans as part of Obama’s anti-bullying campaign: “The purpose here is to engage people in that conversation and to give it the spotlight of the White House so that perhaps people who’ve been ignoring this issue or weren’t aware of it—we can capture their attention. . . . Everybody in the community has a role to play. Not just parents and students.”4
What could a childless eighty-year-old shut-in from Hoboken, for example, do about bullying? Obama and Jarrett never made that clear. What they did make clear, however, was that bullying—not just school bullying—was something that had to be fought. Americans had to take up the challenge. America had to become an anti-bullying country.
This was a weird pitch, to say the least. After all, America has the greatest anti-bullying record of any country in human history. America hates bullies. Over the course of the twentieth century, America defeated Nazism and communism abroad, Jim Crow and sexism at home. Why would Americans—Americans, of all people on earth—need a remedial course in anti-bullying?
We didn’t. We just needed a bit of Obama reeducation.
The strategy here was simple. Obama and his friends in the media and on the organized left picked the one thing all Americans can agree on: bullying. They strategically placed President Obama at the head of the anti-bullying cause. Then came the brilliant gambit: they appropriated bullying to apply only to anything remotely conservative.
The Tea Party? A bunch of bullies. Religious people? Bullies. Global warming unbelievers, defense hawks, venture capitalists, fans of voter identification or traditional marriage, opponents of affirmative action, right-to-work advocates, supporters of Israel, haters of Glee? Bullies. Those who dislike President Obama? They were the biggest bullies of all. Liberalism and anti-bullying, it turned out, were—miracle of miracles!—one and the same.
Their twisted logic was deceptively easy. Liberals claim that they are all about protecting victim classes from bullies. Conservatives oppose liberals. Therefore, by definition, conservatives must be bullies. And bullies must be stopped.
This was the Obama campaign’s entire reelection strategy. Everyone is against bullying; unite Americans behind Obama on bullying; then redefine bullying to include everything that Obama and the left oppose. Voilà! A unified coalition against bullying becomes a unified coalition against conservatism. Leftists, by definition, become anti-bullying pugilists standing up for the little guy; right-wingers, by definition, become bullies who ought to be punched in the mouth.
The Obama embrace of the anti-bullying cause, and the subsequent linguistic trick of conflating anti-bullying with anti-conservatism, is the single best bully tactic in the history of American politics. The liberal anti-bullying campaign justifies every leftist thug tactic they’ve ever embraced.
It’s not a new tactic. Victims hold a cherished place in the liberal heart. With victimhood comes moral power, and the power to extort the supposed victimizers. Liberals have always claimed to be fighting bullies. The only difference is that now the president of the United States openly conflates opposing his agenda with bullying.
To that end, President Obama routinely plays the victim. He’s told us—even as he plays the race card—that people treat him differently because he has a “funny name” and because if he had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin. He trots out race flaks like 9/11 truther Touré to suggest that white people—the same white people who idiotically voted him into office—have been turned violent by the rise of a successful black man. He’s got Tom Hanks narrating a campaign video in which he suggests that Obama’s failures are due to this naïve, beautiful waif of a man facing down the harsh realities of scum-sucking Republicans who oppose Glorious Change. No wonder Obama looks like he’s lost weight. He’s been lugging that gigantic cross around for the last four years.
But, says the Obama campaign, there is a way to end Obama’s victimization. Vote for him. And destroy anybody who opposes him.
See, that’s the dirty little secret: buried beneath all of the left’s supposed hatred for bullying is a passionate love for bullying—the use of power to force those who disagree to shut up, back down, or face crushing consequences up to and including loss of reputation, career destruction, and even death.
The left’s anti-bullying stance is an enormous lie. It is a purposeful lie. It is a lie designed to disguise the fact that leftists are the greatest group of bullies in American history.
• • •
The day before Andrew Breitbart died, he was obsessing, as he often did, about Media Matters for America, the George Soros–funded, Obama-connected think tank dedicated to pressuring its opponents into silence. Andrew had recently dictated a column to me in which he ripped the founder of Media Matters, former conservative turncoat David Brock. Media Matters, Andrew wrote, was a mechanism to promote a “special bran
d of David Brock career-enhancing blindly self-motivated political assassinations.”
Brock and company, Andrew would point out again and again, were the worst kind of bullies.
And Andrew hated bullies.
In fact, he hated them so much that he’d go around the office shouting it from the rafters. Literally.
The Breitbart offices had recently been relocated in a bizarre 1990s-style dot-com-bust warehouse. It was a storage garage with no light, a giant green screen that doubled as a home for the Ping-Pong table (Andrew played while chatting on his cell phone), a group of chairs apparently hijacked from the set of Austin Powers, and a balcony that lined the walls and looked down on the common area below. Andrew would sit up top; the rest of the editorial team had desks up top, too, but we’d often sit below in group formation.
And every so often, we’d hear him shout at random: “I hate these people!”
Andrew had a very clear picture of himself. He wasn’t a philosopher. He wasn’t an academic. He was a fighter. “A lot of what has happened to me,” he once told me, “is less because of what I know what it is that needs to be protected, than that I’ve fundamentally figured out what the left wants to destroy.” And what they wanted to destroy, more than anything, was American freedom. America, Andrew said, was about one simple message: “Follow your individual dreams, hopes, and aspirations. America provides all men, all women, of all religions, the opportunity to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. That’s about as sexy a selling point to a nation as I can possibly imagine.”
The reason Andrew hated the left is that he recognized what they were trying to do. They were trying to separate Americans from one another by pitting “victims” against “bullies.” “The left has created a false order that separates people away from e pluribus unum, one from many, where we have our language and our culture, our Constitution in common,” he explained. “And it has separated us into these artificial sections and then pitted them against one another. And it’s achieved all that by portraying one side of the aisle as motivated by base, nasty faults like racism and sexism and greed.”
The left, Andrew knew, has rammed large chunks of its radical socialist agenda down Americans’ throats, and they’ve done so with one simple tactic: bullying.
One of Andrew’s earliest experiences with this phenomenon came long before he became a conservative.
Andrew barely graduated from Tulane University, where he indulged in every vice imaginable. When Andrew got back to Los Angeles from Tulane, he decided to get a job and become a productive citizen. He began working at a “very liberal, hipster place in Venice called Hal’s.” It was Andrew’s favorite restaurant—and Andrew fit right in. He was a self-described “brain-dead liberal.” But there was one guy who worked there who would make Andrew’s life miserable—an African-American fellow I’ll call Will. Will used to target Andrew and accuse him of racism at every possible turn—despite the fact that Andrew had, at Tulane, been the sole sponsor of the first black pledge in the history of his fraternity.
Andrew recalled being stunned by Will’s hostility. “I thought, ‘But you don’t understand, Will. I’m a liberal Jew. I’m for you, baby!’ But there was no hoop [I could jump through], nothing I could say to him that didn’t reinforce his hatred of me. I thought my newfound liberalism was a badge that granted me absolution. And I kept playing it.”
It didn’t work. And soon enough, the Andrew Breitbart we all came to know and love came to the forefront. The jaw-jutting, take-on-the-world Andrew Breitbart who wouldn’t take crap from anyone, especially bullies.
“Finally,” Andrew told me, “I started to taunt him. I finally got my first taste of going against the politically correct grain . . . I started punching back. I started mocking him. . . . That was one of the first moments it occurred to me: these liberals are bullies.”
And, Andrew said with a grin, “I realized how fun it is to call out these intellectual bullies.”
It was this task that got Andrew up in the morning. It’s the fight he sought. It’s the fight in which he reveled.
Andrew’s fight really had two components. The first was exposing the fact that the left is filled with bullies. Andrew planned gambit after gambit intended to draw them into the open. That’s why he helped build the Huffington Post. “The goal,” he said, “was to expose the left for how crazy they were.” In that he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
But Andrew’s favorite tool, of course, was Twitter, where hateful leftists spewed enough bile at him to melt through six feet of titanium. Andrew was the father of the now-famous Twitter tactic: retweeting the hate. He loved to show the world what nasty people resided on the supposed kind and tolerant left. As he tweeted the week he died, “My fave leftist H8 tweets are ones that drip with desire to inflict emotional pain. The desperation is deliciously palpable.”
Andrew made the left insane. And he knew it. They accused him of cocaine use, alcoholism, homosexuality (he got particular joy from that label, since he never considered it an insult as the left apparently did). He tweeted two days before he died, “For all my alleged drinking, coking & homosexualizing, I’ve managed the time to get really under the skin of organized left.”
There was no question about that. Bullies can’t deal with those who stand up to them.
I knew that Andrew hated bullies from the day I met him. Back in 2001, Andrew, hanging out in Westwood, picked up a copy of the UCLA Daily Bruin. I was a columnist for the Bruin at the time—actually, their token conservative columnist. The column was well read around campus, mainly because it was the only column in the paper that provided a different opinion from the politically correct bull that pervaded the rest of the pages.
Andrew saw my column and emailed me. The email went something like this: “Hey, my name’s Andrew, and I work with Matt Drudge. I’d love to get together.”
And that’s how, at age seventeen, I found myself sitting across from an anonymous webmaster, listening to him unravel the mysteries of the leftist universe. And first and foremost on Andrew’s mind was bullying. Political correctness, Andrew said, was a form of bullying. And he was overjoyed to see somebody hitting the bullies back.
We were friends from then on. We talked regularly as I went through UCLA, got a syndicated column with Creators Syndicate, and wrote my first books; he came over to my parents’ house for dinner with his beautiful family; we chatted frequently as I went through Harvard Law. When he wrote his book, I had the tremendous honor of giving him comments. By the time he hired me in February 2012 to be editor-at-large of Breitbart News, we’d known each other for more than a decade. He termed it “the longest flirtation in political history.”
I started work formally with Andrew the day before his famed speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC, in which he told President Obama that we’d be vetting him. I watched him stalk out to the Occupy bullies and tell them to stop raping people.
Three weeks later, he was gone.
On the morning after Andrew died, I went into the office early and sat a couple of desks down from his. He’d left his computer on, and it pinged every few seconds as his emails began to come in.
Later, we went through the emails. We also went through the tweets. And, not surprisingly, a huge swath of them were unbelievably hateful.
“It is very hard to have sympathy for an evil person like Andrew Breitbart!” wrote one tweeter. “I am done being NICE.”
“America truly lost an a—h—. I’m sure Satan will treat him good.”
“Ya reap what ya sow #breitbart.”
“L.A. Coroner confirms Andrew Breitbart will lie no more.”
All day, the hate flowed in. The leftist bullies came out of the woodwork to celebrate his death. Andrew’s wife, Suzie, received a Hallmark card telling her how happy the anonymous writer was that Andrew was dead.
“Even in death,” tweeted Michelle Malkin, “@andrewbreitbart exposes the rabid Left’s intolerance.”
So Andrew Breitbart is dead. Here’s what I have to say to that, and I’m sure Breitbart himself would have respected this reaction: Good! F—him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead. . . . Good riddance, c—s—er. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Andrew despised Taibbi, and with good reason—Taibbi was a shock troop for what Andrew called the Democrat-Media Complex. But Andrew would have been perfectly happy to see Taibbi do what he did. Andrew drew the hatred of the left like a zapper does moths.
Then he zapped them.
Which is precisely what happened to Taibbi. His Wikipedia page was hacked and rewritten. Hilariously, Taibbi failed to understand that Andrew wasn’t just about exposing the hate, he was about fighting it.
And the right must understand that, too. Conservatives have allowed liberals to win the culture war because we’re generally civil people. When the left says we’re uncivil, we tend to shy away from the fight rather than, as Andrew put it, walking toward the fire.
That’s a huge mistake. A century of civility has bought us a century of liberalism. We’re not the thugs here. They are.
Bullying is the left’s go-to tactic. It has become a way of life for them. Leftists think and act like protofascists. Control is the key. And control through fear, threat of force, and rhetorical intimidation is the modus operandi.
Now, we’re not talking about legislation here. All legislation is inherently coercive: it forces somebody to do something. That’s not bullying, because it takes form via a consent process—we vote for the clowns who put our laws into place.
When we talk about political bullying, we’re talking about the bullying of private citizens by government actors, media heavies, Hollywood, and organizational allies outside of government. That sort of bullying creates a climate of fear among Americans, forcing them to abandon cherished principles, back nasty causes, or shut up entirely. And the left relies on that sort of bullying to the exclusion of all other tactics.