by Ben Shapiro
Barack Obama is a Chicago thug who threatened during 2008, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Obama surrounded himself with the worst sort of hatchet men. Guys like Rahm Emanuel, who sent dead fish to political opponents and reportedly accosted unfriendly congressmen naked in the House showers. People like Van Jones, who suggested that the Bush administration “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen,” and who later founded an Obama-associated group called ColorOfChange, designed to destroy Obama’s political opponents. Folks like Robert Gibbs, who said that Obama would have to put his foot on the neck of British Petroleum. During the 2012 campaign, Obama ratcheted it up—as one aide reported, Obama was “putting the bully in bully pulpit.”5
And he opened the White House to other bullies. Andrew Sullivan, the former gay conservative journalist turned radical leftist, suggested that Sarah Palin didn’t give birth to her own child, Trig—and for that, Sullivan earned a White House invitation to a state dinner with Great Britain. Louis C.K.—the monotone comedian most famous for his despicably vulgar tweets, which we will thankfully not confront until later—went to the White House, too, and visited with White House speechwriter Jonathan Favreau. Joy Behar of The View also got to visit the White House—well after she had called Nevada U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle a “b—,” of course. Obama accepted $1 million from once-humorous jester dwarf Bill Maher, who called Sarah Palin a “c—t.” Meanwhile, Obama’s media allies granted all of these establishment left figures the patina of “objectivity” and legitimacy.
It’s not just Obama and friends of Obama, either. The bullies pervade the left. They come in all shapes and sizes. They’re a diverse crowd. They’re black and white and Hispanic and Asian and Jewish and Christian. They’re environmentalists and socialists and pacifists and feminists. But they all share an ideology. And they all share a love for grinding their opponents under their heel with absolute lies.
They ooze from every green nook and every red cranny. Anti-American bullies portray America as a force for evil in the world, a great maw of global nastiness, chewing up subject populations (usually “brown” and “yellow”) on behalf of their corporate overlords. They are, like Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), believers that the American military is filled with Pol Pot knockoffs and Hitler and Stalin fans; they think, like John Kerry (D-MA), that the military is filled with morons who just couldn’t make it in life and instead ended up in the deserts of Iraq. They label America a terrorist nation.
Race bullies like Al Sharpton help incite riots ending in murder, trumpet charges against innocent district attorneys, or threaten civil disobedience to small towns in Florida; groups like the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panthers stand outside polling places with billy clubs, all with the approval of leftist power players like the Eric Holder Department of Justice. Immigration bullies send death threats to Arizona governor Jan Brewer for enforcing the border, or compare Arizona to the Third Reich.
Class bullies like the Occupy Wall Street Neanderthals fling poop and urine while chanting incoherently at the behest of their union paymasters; government redistributionist bullies like Obama threaten corporations with “the pitchforks” should the corporations fail to give Obama and his cronies what they want.
Feminist bullies call pro-life women traitors to the female gender for not supporting the liberal agenda. Gay activist bullies are perhaps the most vicious of all, destroying careers, outing enemies, and insisting that schoolchildren be indoctrinated with homosexual history.
Environmentalist bullies like Obama science czar John Holdren pen books suggesting forced abortion and mandatory sterilization as potential solutions to planetary overcrowding. Secular bullies follow President Obama’s lead, ripping religious folks as Dark Age morons, “bitter clingers” who think God is important only because they’re racist and ignorant. Anti-Israel bullies like M. J. “Alfred” Rosenberg of Media Matters label pro-Israel Jews “Israel Firsters,” mirroring the worst attributes of white supremacist rhetoric; others, like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, write books talking about how the Jews control government with their dirty Hebe money.
The bullying strategy couldn’t work without a complex public relations, governmental, and astroturfed strategy. And that’s precisely what the left has constructed.
The old-school strategy for the left was easy: use the government to bully your opponents. President Clinton used the FBI and Department of Justice as his personal enemy-fighting force, unleashing them on Republican opponents.
Obama has done this, too. During the 2008 campaign, Obama minions famously went after Joe the Plumber, digging up his tax records illegally after he had the temerity to ask Obama about his tax policy. During the 2012 campaign, Obama ratcheted up such tactics. Even as Obama played the victim, asking his supporters to “get Barack’s back”—normally, that’s the job of the Secret Service—he targeted private citizens for destruction simply because they opposed him.
But all of this is old hat. It’s out in the open, and it’s easy to spot and fight.
So the left has gotten more sophisticated. Where Clinton used the levers of government to target his opponents directly, Obama’s strategy is more subtle: he coordinates with his extragovernmental allies to launch devastating attacks on political enemies.
It begins inside the White House and the Democratic Party, where anti-conservative strategies are hatched. The White House begins putting out its talking points via groups like the Center for American Progress and David Brock’s Media Matters. Those groups put in phone calls and emails to their allies in the mainstream media—people like Ben Smith at BuzzFeed, the crew at MSNBC, Greg Sargent and E. J. Dionne at the Washington Post, Sam Stein and Nico Pitney at Huffington Post, and Brian Stelter at the New York Times, among others.
That’s the media strategy. And that’s why you’ll hear a Greek chorus chanting mantras in unison: “War on women!” “Racial profiling!” “The 1 percent!” Zubin Mehta couldn’t conduct the media any better than the Democratic Party does.
But the media isn’t enough: liberals need public support. Or at least the appearance of public support. That’s where Media Matters and its allies in unions across the country play a crucial role. These groups work with other Obama allies to boycott advertisers who have the temerity to spend their money on shows Obama doesn’t like. So far, this strategy has resulted in massive astroturfed attacks on Don Imus, Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and the American Legislative Exchange Council. And it won’t stop there. Businesses are Alinskyed—targeted, isolated, destroyed. It doesn’t matter that the businesses have nothing to do with politics. If they’re spending money on Rush, they have to be smacked around. Individuals, too, are destroyed—if they’re backing efforts like Proposition 8 in California, their restaurants should be boycotted, their jobs should be stripped from them. They should be bullied into submission.
Finally, there’s the government itself. With the media supposedly creating public outcry—and with Media Matters and friends building fake public outcry to match the media’s propagandizing—the perfect loop has been created. Now there’s supposed support for legislation. Bring on the Lily Ledbetter Act, or whatever the latest trial lawyer giveaway is. Knock down the “stand your ground” laws. Destroy state voter ID laws. Or whatever the hot cause of the moment is.
It’s a wonderful strategy. And it works, so long as the American people remain silent.
Incredibly, for the past few decades, the American people have remained silent. That’s because they’re scared of the left. And rightly so.
This isn’t to say there aren’t bullies on the right, people who want to shut up their political opponents. Of course there are. But as a practical matter, bullying requires power—and when it comes to politics, all the centers of power are inherently geared toward the left. The government is one center of power; its power grows as its size grows. Because the left believes that government growth is the end goal of all p
olitics, the left tends to utilize the government as a coercive tool far more than the right does. The press is a second center of power; the press is massively biased toward the left. The same holds true of Hollywood. The education system in America is a fourth center of power, and it too skews left, both for reasons of government funding and for ideological reasons. The heretofore undiscovered fifth center of power in American politics is nonprofit organizations, which have been utilized to great effect by both sides—but in which only leftist nonprofits receive significant government support, and therefore have a tremendous advantage.
Power derives from institutions. The right thinks individually; the left thinks institutionally. And so the left wields more power, and therefore has far more opportunity to bully.
As an ideological matter, too, the left has far more of a tendency to bully than the right. This plain fact makes the left insanely uncomfortable—hence their pathetic attempts to categorize the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Germany as a right-wing party, and even to brand Castro, Mao, and Stalin as right-wing authoritarians. But it is leftism that insists that collective needs trump individual needs, that freedom be subjected to societal dictates, and that rights spring not from nature or God, but from the state. It is a left-wing point of view that says that to make an omelet, you have to bully a few eggs.
The left likes to bully, and it’s good at it. The predictable outcome has been the incredible rise of the American left in a country that leans to the right.
Domestically, the left has been able to bully Americans into accepting abortion-on-demand as somehow mandated by emanations, penumbras, and Casper the Friendly Ghost in the Constitution. The left has forced Americans into accepting the radical redefinition of economic freedom to encompass government control over how you flush your toilet; unwed motherhood as equal in moral quality and outcome to traditional family structure; the complete removal of religion from public life, and its replacement with vulgarity; rejection of a color-blind society in favor of reverse racism; the creation of a massive social safety net that provides safety for the lazy and a net for the productive. The list goes on and on.
America was a nation built on the notion that nobody should be bullied by the government. That’s what freedom means. Now the left has convinced Americans that they’re bullies if they oppose the increasing encroachment of government. We’re bullies if we want to control our own fate. We’re victims if we don’t get to control how other people live their lives.
When it comes to foreign policy, the left has completely reversed notions of American goodness. America has destroyed more bullies than every other nation in the history of mankind combined. We started as a rebel nation against the bully and tyrant King George III; we continued to fight the good fight against slavery; we took down the Kaiser and Hitler; we brought down the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein and the Taliban; we prevented the domination of South Korea and, if the left had allowed for it, would have prevented the domination of Vietnam by bullies.
And yet the left has convinced the world—and many Americans—that America is the world’s biggest bully. Patriotism, they say, is bullying; dissent, they say, is patriotism. When America was struck on September 11, 2001, leftists like Professor Ward Churchill described the victims as the “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire . . . little Eichmanns.” We were the bad guys. We deserved it, because we are global bullies, and bullies deserve chickens coming home to roost, in the words of Jeremiah Wright.
Like any good bullies, these ones deserve an enormous punch in the face. But you’re considered a bully if you suggest that hating America might be mildly unpatriotic. And you’re considered a flag-waver if you’re a flag-burner.
This is the world the left has bequeathed to us. It is filled with lies; it says that truth is thuggish, and obfuscation of truth a required element of civility. It says that moral clarity is nasty and uncouth, and moral relativism morally preferable. It reverses bullies and victims, emboldening the world’s true bullies in the process.
That promise the founders made to us—what Andrew called the sexiest selling point in human history—has been turned into the mark of Cain by the left.
“I hate these people,” Andrew said. He exposed them. And he fought them.
“I see exactly what is going on here,” Andrew said to me about two years before he died. “It is my unfortunate burden to take my understanding of what these people are, what their tactics are, and to start trying to form an army to destroy them.”
Now we must pick up Andrew’s torch. We must expose the bullies. And we must stand up to them.
1.
INSTITUTIONAL BULLIES
For decades, the biggest problem for conservatives—and the biggest advantage for liberals—has been the fact that conservatives think individually, while liberals think institutionally. Think about politics in terms of religious outreach. Conservatives are like Jehovah’s Witnesses, going door to door, trying to convince people of the truth of their teachings. Liberals are like radical Muslims, toppling governments and installing shariah law, then forcibly converting enormous masses of the population.
That’s why all the major instruments of political persuasion are in the hands of liberals. And it’s also why liberalism, though almost invariably based on pernicious and dangerous misinterpretation at best, and outright falsehood at worst, has been ascendant in America for the last hundred years.
Look at every major bully move by the left over the past few decades and you’ll be able to spot the coordination between the left’s instruments. The politicians and regulators work with the unions; the unions work with the journalists; the journalists work with the Hollywood clique; the Hollywood clique works with the leftist charitable foundations; the leftist charitable foundations work with the university professors; the university professors work with the judges. And all of them work with each other.
There is only one way to make an institution conservativerein. It has to be purged.
Now, in America, we generally don’t look fondly on Soviet-style purges, complete with gulags and hastily dug graves. And so the American left has stayed away from that sort of thing. The left has taken advantage, however, of the American freedom to employ and work with whom you choose. The left doesn’t do anything illegal in preventing their ideological opponents from working. They just do something tremendously immoral—and unbelievably hypocritical, considering that they want private religious schools to have to employ transvestites who show up one day wearing a feather boa and a tutu.
To understand just how the system of bullying works, we need to explore how the left took over the institutions that enable that bullying—and we have to take a look at how the current system works.
MEDIA BULLIES
On April 18, 2006, police arrested Duke University lacrosse players Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty for the alleged rape and kidnapping of stripper Crystal Mangum. Mangum had falsely accused three white lacrosse players of raping her at a March party; the entire 2006 Duke lacrosse season was ultimately canceled.
The media couldn’t get enough of the case. They quickly turned it into an example of white-on-black racism, brutal exploitation in the mold of pre–Civil War slavery. Amanda Marcotte, a feminist bully blogger, attacked CNN for not immediately condemning the accused: “Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.” A few months later, Marcotte was hired by the John Edwards presidential campaign as an official blogger.1 (As it turned out, there was actually a better shot that John Edwards had had sex with Crystal Mangum than that the Duke lacrosse players had.)
Marcotte may have been the loudest of the bunch, but she certainly wasn’t the only journalist preternaturally eager to beat Duke lacrosse with a stripper pole. USA Today tracked down a Duke graduate student to complain, “I’m still afraid that the people involved will just get a slap on the wrist. Because of Duke’s culture of privilege and
superiority, they’ll get away with it.” That same reporter also lauded Duke students for distributing a flyer that “looked like a wanted poster: 40 faces of young men, smiling smugly for the camera. . . . These men are wanted on the Duke campus.” Janet Reitman of Rolling Stone “reported” on Duke’s “retro view of rape.”2 Reitman did not report on the strippers’ retro view of perjury.
Nancy Grace of CNN led the disgraceful posse looking to string up the Duke defendants sans evidence. On June 9, 2006, Grace interviewed a local North Carolina reporter, who expressed the widespread sentiment that the case was falling apart already. Grace quickly whipped a Hitler mustache out of her back pocket and stapled it to the guy’s upper lip: “Well I’m glad you have already decided the outcome of the case, based on all of the defense filings. Why don’t we just all move to Nazi Germany, where we don’t have a justice system and a jury of one’s peers? What about it, Joe Lawless?”3
The New York Times, too, worked to keep the case alive, even as it began to crumble. Duff Wilson and Jonathan Glater penned a piece in August 2006 stating, “By disclosing pieces of evidence favorable to the defendants, the defense has created an image of a case heading for the rocks. But an examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution in the four months after the accusation yields a more ambiguous picture. It shows that while there are big weaknesses in Mr. Nifong’s case, there is also a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.”4
Except that there wasn’t a body of evidence to support it. As it turned out, the stripper accuser had told a second dancer at the lacrosse party to “put marks on me” to fake injury after the party; Nifong admitted he hadn’t talked to the alleged victim as late as October. DNA tests showed no DNA from the supposed rapists. Seligmann, it turned out, had a solid alibi. Nifong, who was running for reelection as he was pursuing the case, ended up dropping it and resigning his job. But not before the Times ran more than one hundred pieces on the case.5
