Bullies

by Ben Shapiro

  ANGRY “PATRIOTIC” MALES

  The left has bullied Americans into believing that mere belief in the superiority of their country constitutes dangerous intolerance of others. No wonder the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a report shortly after Obama took office decrying “Rightwing Extremism” and suggesting that “Current Economic and Political Climate [Are] Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” Its own admission that they have “no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence” didn’t stop DHS from releasing the report, which said that the election of a black president and the shoddy economy were going to cause an upswing in Timothy McVeigh types. “Rightwing extremists are harnessing this historical election as a recruitment tool,” said the minions of the historic election winner. “Many rightwing extremists are antagonistic on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use. Rightwing extremists are increasingly galvanized by these concerns and leverage them as drivers for recruitment.” What’s more, said DHS, those psycho right-wingers might recruit soldiers, forming an army of insane conservatives with paramilitary skill sets.46

  Those jingoistic morons tend to grab their guns and go postal when they can’t afford their cigs and lottery tickets, after all. Meanwhile, Occupiers who poop on themselves, hit cops with frying pans, rape and kill people, cause tens of millions of dollars in property damage, and wear shirts featuring noted murderous maniac Che Guevara are deemed American patriots by the left.

  Every time an insane person decides to shoot a politician or bomb a building, the left immediately pegs him or her in the press as a right-winger. When a psychopath named Jared Lee Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) through the head at a “Congress on Your Corner” event in Tucson, Arizona, in January 2011—along with seventeen others, including a Republican-appointed federal judge, resulting in six deaths—the media labeled him a conservative who had been influenced by Sarah Palin. In particular, the media cited an obviously figurative map on Palin’s website that showed targeted political districts by placing a crosshairs on those districts. There was zero evidence that Loughner had ever visited Palin’s website. Zero.

  As it turns out, Loughner had a serious history of dangerous behavior and was mentally unstable; the Giffords event had no police presence. Actually, like most of the murderers in the United States, Loughner was a left-winger. He was a pothead. He said that he liked both The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. He cut a video of himself burning an American flag. But that didn’t stop leftist politicians and media folks from speculating as to Loughner’s motives. “You look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government,” said Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik. “The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. . . . We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.47 He doubled down on the statement on Megyn Kelly’s show on Fox News: “There are a whole lot of people in this country who are very angry about the politics of people like Gabrielle.” Kelly then forced him to admit that he had no evidence whatsoever that Loughner was even listening to radio or watching television or was inspired by politics.48

  In a shocking coincidence, it turns out that Dupnik was a vocal opponent of the Tea Party; he said that it was racist, evidence that “bigotry is alive and well in America,” “the worst in America.”49 He called Arizona’s SB 1070, the state’s anti–illegal immigration law, “unwise,” “stupid,” and racist. But according to Dupnik, dastardly right-wing rhetoric caused the shooting, and certainly not his department’s failure to investigate Loughner.50

  None of that stopped the left from bringing out rhetorical firearms to assassinate conservative reputations. “When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised?” wrote Nobel Prize–winning bearded moron Paul Krugman of the New York Times. “Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen? Put me in the latter category. I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008 campaign.” In fact, Krugman cited the bogus DHS report as background to support his evidence-less argument.51 Jon Stewart, the comedian-no-wait-I’m-a-reporter-no-wait-I’m-a-comedian comic/left-wing hack/journalist, agreed with Krugman, suggesting that in this case, “actions match the disturbing nature of words.”52

  Keith Olbermann, the prettier Rachel Maddow, put down his vat of hydrochloric acid long enough to sanctimoniously lecture conservative Americans, and Sarah Palin in particular, that “this age in which this country would accept ‘targeting’ of political opponents and putting bullseyes over their faces and of the dangerous blurring between political rallies and gun shows, ended.”53 Olbermann said that Palin, Representative Allen West (R-FL), Nevada U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle, and the Tea Party had to be “repudiated” by the Republican Party. “If all of these are not responsible for what happened in Tucson, they must now be responsible for doing everything they can to make sure Tucson doesn’t happen again,” the dumbest Cornell graduate in history intoned.54 The new advocate of civility had, over the course of his MSNBC show, called conservatives “terrorists” and “fascists,” suggested that Rush Limbaugh had “blood on [his] hands,” accused the Tea Party of wanting to return America to the era of Jim Crow and destroy the country outright, called Michelle Malkin a “big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it,” slurred Chris Wallace of Fox News as a “monkey posing as a newscaster,” and compared Kenneth Starr to Nazi thug Heinrich Himmler, “including the glasses.”55

  The point of all of this was obvious: shut up, conservatives. Civility is the left’s code word for silence. Historically speaking, America’s politics today is far more civil than at any other time during our history. During the founding era, people tarred and feathered each other—literally, they poured hot tar over people and then doused them in feathers—over politics. The left never seems to care about left-wing civility—they said nothing about Olbermann causing violence when stalkers began threatening Sarah Palin, or about the Democratic Leadership Council posting a map with shooting targets on particular districts—but they’re quick to blame right-wing rhetoric when a left-wing nut job kills a Republican judge and shoots a blue-dog Democrat. That wasn’t rare. Virtually every major American shooting of an elected official during the twentieth century was committed by a left-winger. Leon Czolgosz, who murdered President William McKinley in 1901, was a left-wing anarchist. Giuseppe Zangara, who tried to shoot FDR and succeeded in murdering Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, confessed, “I have the gun in my hand. I kill kings and presidents first, and next all capitalists.” Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian terrorist who hated Robert F. Kennedy’s pro-Israel record. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who tried to kill President Gerald Ford, was a former member of the insane radical left Manson family. It’s far more common for leftists to routinely pick up weapons and try to kill those with whom they disagree than it is for those on the other side of the ideological spectrum.

  The most infamous assassin of all, Lee Harvey Oswald, defected to Soviet Russia and tried to emigrate to communist Cuba before killing JFK. As with Loughner, leftists attempted to label Oswald a right-winger, or at least thrust collective responsibility on conservatives across America. When Lady Bird Johnson asked Jackie Kennedy if she wanted to change out of her blood-spattered clothes on Air Force One after JFK’s assassination, Jackie said, “No. I want them to see what they have done.” What did she mean? As James Piereson details in Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, she meant the same thing Jon Stewart did: conservatives didn’t shut up, so JFK had been shot. Sure, Oswald was a commie. Jackie later lamented, “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little Communist.” But that didn’t matter. The left quickly turned Oswald into a hero of the right.

  N
ew York Times columnist James Reston wrote a piece after the assassination that might have been plagiarized by Krugman some fifty years later. The title: “Why America Weeps: Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation.” Said Reston, “America wept tonight, not alone for its dead young president, but for itself. The grief was general, for somehow the worst in the nation had prevailed over the best. . . . From the beginning to the end of his administration, he was trying to tamp down the violence of the extremists from the right.”

  Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren seconded the motion, stating in his eulogy on the Capitol steps, “It is not too much to hope that the martyrdom of our beloved president might even soften the hearts of those who would themselves recoil from assassination, but who do not shrink from spreading the venom which kindles thoughts of it in others.” Was he talking about communists? Of course not. He was talking about Kennedy’s political opponents.

  Lyndon Johnson himself played this card: “It is this work that I most want us to do—to banish rancor from our words and malice from our hearts—to close down the poison springs of hatred and intolerance and fanaticism.” He’d have no such words for SDS or the violent leftists who would plague the nation for the next decade. After all, they were leftists. And LBJ’s agenda was leftist. So instead of telling the truth about Oswald, LBJ twisted it, standing on JFK’s coffin to ram through his legislative agenda.

  In fact, in the wake of the JFK assassination, LBJ was most concerned that Americans would turn against the communists for the killing. As Reston reported, “One of the things President Johnson is said to be concerned about is that the pro-Communist background of Lee Harvey Oswald . . . may lead in some places to another Communist hunt that will divide the country and complicate the new President’s relations with Moscow.”56

  Hand it to the left: from Oswald to Loughner, they’re unbelievably consistent.

  Even after a leftist had shot the president of the United States, the right had to be blamed. Because, after all, we wouldn’t want those flag-waving idiots pushing for a stronger pro-American foreign policy, would we?

  “ISLAMOPHOBES”

  Fast-forward almost four decades from the JFK assassination.

  On September 11, 2001, three thousand Americans were murdered in flame and ash.

  The left responded with fury and fear—not about the Muslim terrorists who had forced Americans to leap to their deaths from the World Trade Center or crash a plane in a field in Pennsylvania, but about those dastardly conservatives, who would no doubt start burning mosques.

  The left quickly proclaimed that Islam meant peace, and that Americans had to be policed for signs of Islamophobia. If we weren’t, they implied, we were sure to go around burning crescents into lawns and stringing Iranian shopkeepers up on lampposts. This philosophy was so deeply rooted that it became a hallmark of the Bush administration, which routinely implied that Americans were on the verge of rioting in the streets, throwing lard on Muslim kids.

  It was a subtle bully tactic. And it worked. It taught Americans that any action against any Muslims in any country—no matter how guilty they were—would only enmesh America in a cycle of violence. President Bush, infected with the spinelessness of a perversely Arabist State Department, said in the days after September 11, “We must be mindful that, as we seek to win the war, we treat Arab-Americans with the respect they deserve. There are thousands of Arab-Americans who live in New York City who love their flag. We should not hold one who is a Muslim responsible for an act of terror.”57 This was a warning that would go unheeded by actual racists—after all, why would they care about what Bush said?—but it would infect the American mentality with the notion that any anti-Muslim action had to be secretly linked with xenophobia.

  That sentiment broke out into the open immediately after September 11, when members of the far left began complaining about American action in Afghanistan. International Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) began marching against action in Afghanistan immediately. Not coincidentally, ANSWER’s steering committee was composed of groups like the Free Palestine Alliance, the Muslim Students Association, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Actually, ANSWER was closely associated with the Stalinist Workers World Party. They were anti-Semitic and anti-American. But their accusations—that America wanted war with brown people to gain oil—began to seep into the public consciousness.

  A more subtle form of the argument came from the less openly ridiculous left. They suggested that September 11 was itself a symptom of evil American foreign policy in the Middle East. Howard Zinn’s popular A People’s History of the United States informed the American people that “terrorism was rooted in deep grievances against the United States. . . . However, these issues could not be addressed without fundamental changes in American foreign policy.” Those changes, however, could not be undertaken, thanks to the interference from “the military-industrial complex that dominated both parties.”58 Ron Paul, a leftist on foreign policy, echoed this perspective. Osama bin Laden, said Paul, was driven by anger at the Gulf War in 1991, which had been fought to “protect our oil. . . . Muslims see this as an invasion and domination by a foreign enemy, which inspires radicalism.”59 In this perspective, Americans were “little Eichmanns” (Professor Ward Churchill’s words), and America’s “chickens were coming home to roost” (the perspective of Obama spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright).

  By the time the Bush administration began pushing for military action against Saddam Hussein, this underground view became full-blown leftist bullying. There were many legitimate reasons to attack the war in Iraq. Supposed racism was not one of them. Neither was supposed profit-making for Halliburton and the oil industry. But that didn’t stop the left, which now accused the Bush administration—the same Bush administration that had been parroting the liberal line that Americans were secret anti-Muslim, anti-Arab racists—of racism and imperialism.

  The “America fights racist wars” perspective is now common parlance on the left. Tom Hanks, producer of Saving Private Ryan as well as HBO’s Band of Brothers and The Pacific, said that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were just like the American war against the Japanese: “Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar to what’s going on today?”60 Tom must have forgotten about that whole Pearl Harbor thing.

  This sort of bullying by the left teaches Americans to back down in the face of real threats. Americans have been taught by the left that they’re like Bruce Banner—if something, anything bad happens, we’ve been told, we immediately go berserk, transforming into a ten-foot-tall green monster that likes to bash minorities against walls. And if we do push for military action, all we’re doing is participating in a racist cycle of violence.

  This has become a regular media narrative. On the second anniversary of September 11, the BBC ran a piece titled “US Muslims fight 9/11 backlash.”61 On the eighth anniversary of September 11, the Associated Press ran a long piece decrying the treatment of Muslims in America. “There is the dread of leaving the house that morning. People might stare, or worse, yell insults.” The AP reported, disapproval dripping from its pen, “A poll released this week by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 38 percent of Americans believe Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence.” That might have something to do with the fact that Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence. But the point of the AP story was obvious: Americans are racists. The 9/11 attacks just showed it.62

  And because Americans are racists, they must be stopped from interfering in world affairs.

  On the tenth anniversary of September 11, the New York Times ran an editorial by Ahmed Rashid proclaiming just that. “After 9/11,” he said, “Hate Begat Hate.” Because of America’s knee-jerk intolerance of Islam, said Ras
hid, “the wave of anti-Americanism is rising in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, even among many who once admired the United States, and the short reason for that is plain. . . . The more belligerent detractors of America will tell you that Americans are imperialists who hate Islam, and that Americans’ so-called civilizing instincts have nothing to do with democracy or human rights. A more politically attuned attitude is that the detractor doesn’t hate Americans, just the policies that American leaders pursue.” How can we solve this problem? Says Rashid, “The questions about who hates whom will become only more difficult until the warfare ends and national healing begins.”63

  In other words, leave those terrorists alone, dammit.

  This has an impact. The “cycle of violence” rhetoric, which implies that our response to Muslim violence springs from xenophobia and corruption, cows Americans into inaction when we’re attacked. That, of course, is the goal of the left, which doesn’t want America fighting back.

  BULLYING THE TROOPS

  The left bullies Americans into fearing their own patriotism. But since the 1970s, they haven’t attempted to bully Americans into fearing or disowning the military.

  That’s not to say their anti-military bias doesn’t come creeping out at inopportune moments. When Hillary Clinton was first lady, she may not have been able to control her husband’s pants, but she tried to control the wearing of military uniforms in the White House. And every so often, you get an honest leftist appraisal of the military from geniuses like Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), who compared military treatment of terrorist detainees to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings.”64 But overall, the left has been on its best behavior about our troops since the halcyon Kerry Winter Soldier days.