Bullies

by Ben Shapiro

  That warmth has only increased. J Street honchos have held fund-raisers for Obama.53 Valerie Jarrett spoke at J Street to push the Obama reelection campaign.54 In May, J Street published—then scrubbed—a video showing Carinne Luck, J Street’s vice president for campaigns, stating that “the administration” and people “on the Hill” want J Street to push American Jews to the left, and to “provide [the left] with cover.”55 This sort of coordination between the Obama administration and an organization specifically dedicated to bullying Israel and Jewish advocates isn’t just despicable, it’s downright vomit-inducing—especially considering that Obama lies to Jews that he has Israel’s back.

  Secularism underlies all of this. It’s no coincidence that the anti-Israel agenda is led by secular leftists, many of whom are ethnically Jewish (or, as I call them, Jews In Name Only). Karl Marx was the first such self-hating Jew—and he hated his own Jewishness because he was a secular bully. “What is the Jew’s foundation in this world? Usury. What is his worldly god? Money,” wrote Marx. “Money is the zealous one God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand. . . . The bill of exchange is the Jew’s real God. . . . Only then could Jewry become universally dominant. . . . The social emancipation of Jewry is the emancipation of society from Jewry.”

  This sort of rhetoric isn’t exactly popular nowadays. But the secularist anti-Semitic bullies haven’t changed much. They simply substitute Israel for Jewry and they’re good to go. Tony Kushner, writer of the anti-Israel travesty Munich, which makes excuses for the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics by Palestinians, says that “the founding of the State of Israel was for the Jewish people a historical, moral, political calamity.” Not coincidentally, he feels that religion generally, and Judaism in particular, are invested with “a tremendous amount of prejudice.”56 Noam Chomsky hates Israel—and, not coincidentally, thinks that religion is “irrational.” Chomsky also hates the “Christian fundamentalist right” and therefore despises their support for Israel. He suggests that Israel be dissolved and a binational state take its place.

  This is anti-Semitic bullying. It fundamentally denies the legitimacy of another point of view; it suggests that Judaism should not have the same right to respect as other religions, and that Jews do not deserve their own state—a unique proposition that the anti-Semitic bullies never aim at the nearly fifty Muslim countries dotting the globe. And it all springs not from honest appraisal of Israel’s flaws or strengths, but from a secular dislike of the Bible, the Jewish role in the world, and the very concept of a separate Jewish way of life.

  CONCLUSION

  The secular bullies do not like religion. What’s more, they don’t want religious values expressed in nondenominational legislation. They want religion removed from the public square—and they scorn religious believers with the hatred of a Karl Marx. They don’t like Christians. They don’t like Jews. They don’t like Mormons. They don’t like anyone who has the temerity to base their value system on anything like a Judeo-Christian scriptural system.

  Just check the polling data. When it comes to Jews, 70 percent of Republicans have a positive evaluation of Jews; just 51 percent of Democrats do. Catholics? Republicans are warmer, 68 to 51. Methodists? Republicans like them better, by a 67–51 margin. Mormons? Republicans are friendlier by a 12-point margin. Evangelical Christians: 32 points. Unbelievably, Republicans and Democrats are actually dead even when it comes to positive evaluation of Muslims—even though liberals like to pretend that conservatives are anti-Semites and Islamophobes. As it turns out, Democrats are way bigger anti-Semites, and neither group really likes Muslims all that much. The only areas of religious thought in which Democrats outpace Republicans: atheism and Scientology.57 So at least Tom Cruise and John Travolta can sign their checks to Barack Obama and sleep easy between massage therapies.

  The secular bully media, of course, plays it as though evangelical Christians aren’t just bigoted Taliban types when it comes to atheism, an ever-present theocracy lurking in the wings—they act as though conservative Christians are also the people who won’t vote Mormon. This meme has grabbed center stage with the nomination of Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate for president. Martin Bashir of MSNBC, who seems more intelligent because he has a British accent, said that “the vast majority of evangelicals . . . believe Mormonism is a cult . . . [and] they share Mark Twain’s view of the Book of Mormon, which in 1861, as you probably know, he described it as ‘chloroform in print.’ And that’s what many of these people believe.”58 Dennis Wagner wrote in USA Today, “[R]eligious discrimination remains an obstacle for Mormon political candidates for president and a vexation for members of the church.”59 Michelangelo Signorile, who spends most of his days staking out people’s bedrooms so he can out them, says that Mormons are the new gays: “Mitt Romney is very much like a gay Republican. . . . No matter how much Romney joins in the bullying of gays, he continues to get bullied himself by the same gang of thugs for being a Mormon.”60

  Sure, there are Christians who won’t vote for Romney thanks to his religious beliefs. But there are way more secular bigots who won’t vote for Romney for the same reason—and they’ll make fun of his religious practices to boot. The polls show that anti-Mormon bias has skyrocketed among liberals ever since Mormons became politically involved. Since 2007, anti-Mormon bias among secularists has jumped from 21 percent to 41 percent; among liberals, that number has jumped from 28 percent to 43 percent. As for evangelicals, the numbers have actually dropped, from 36 percent in 2007 to 33 percent in 2012.61

  If you don’t believe the stats, just take a look at secularist hatred for Mormons. Mormons were nice folks when they were leaving the Folger’s on the supermarket shelves and avoiding the Coke machines. But when they got all uppity and started wanting to influence American politics according to Judeo-Christian values, then they were worthy of mockery. Thus the gorgeous and brilliant Joy Behar of Al Gore’s Current TV (current viewership: Keith Olbermann’s cats) ranted, “I’d like to see his house burn, one of his millions of houses burning down. Who’s he going to call, the Mormon fire patrol?”62 Cher, who is not a transvestite, called Romney “Uncaring Richie Rich! The whitest man in MAGIC UNDERWEAR in the WH.”63 And intellectual giant Charles Blow of the New York Times tweeted, “Let me just tell you this Mitt ‘Muddle Mouth’: I’m a single parent and my kids are ‘amazing’! Stick that in your magic underwear.”64 Blow still works for the Times; the Times still blows. Coincidence?

  As soon as Mormons had the temerity to start acting out traditional values on the national stage, the targets were painted on their backs by the secular bullies. The moment Mormons stood up for traditional marriage in California, they found themselves relentlessly mocked. They were told to sit down and shut up. If that sort of open hatred had been directed at Muslims, the press would have gone nuts. It was directed at Mormons, so the press picked up a bat and started whacking that piñata.

  But that’s how it works for the secular bullies. Religion is never to be part of the political conversation, unless it’s being blamed for bombings or bigotry. America, say the secular bullies, has no roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Because the secular bullies have taken over our major cultural institutions, they’ve been able to implement their vision of society, despite the opposition of the vast majority of Americans, who still believe in Judeo-Christian values. Undoubtedly, the Supreme Court will soon rule that same-sex marriage is mandated by the Constitution of the United States—and religious people will be told that they must allow public schools to instruct their kids in gay history, as they already do in California.

  The true threat to American values isn’t the Christian going door to door with a Bible. It’s the secular bullies going network to network, school to school, and church to church with legal and rhetorical clubs.

  CONCLUSION

  I hate bullies.

  I entered high school at the age of thirteen—and I entered as a sophomore, skipping freshman year. Since I
didn’t hit my major growth spurt until I was sixteen, the year I graduated, I wasn’t just younger than the rest of my class, I was significantly shorter. As in five foot two and 110 pounds throughout most of high school.

  This meant that bullies targeted me regularly. I spent my share of time on the receiving end of both fists and belts; I learned to keep my head down and my grades up. I went to the administration, but they did nothing about it. After all, I was at a private school, and these were rich kids, and the school cared more about their parents’ cash than about preventing physical abuse on campus.

  And then one day, I decided I’d had enough.

  One of the bigger bullies considered himself a terrific athlete, and had visions of playing baseball on scholarship in college. As it turned out, his opinion of his own athletic ability was approximately as accurate as his perception of his intelligence (he was a moron).

  On this particular day, he started picking on me just as he always did. Only this time, I talked back to him. He threatened to beat me up. I told him to go ahead and try.

  Now, I wasn’t bulky. I wasn’t muscular. But I was relatively quick, and so I was able to slip through his grasp. I scampered around the room avoiding him, until I finally undercut his legs. He went down, and I proceeded to hold him down. The other kids cheered in disbelief and mockery for this now-unfortunate thug.

  Well, they cheered for a moment.

  Then a couple of his friends pulled me off him. He regained his feet, then proceeded to thrash me. Once I was on the floor again, he placed a desk on top of me—one of those chair-desk all-in-one deals—and then sat on the chair for the rest of the class. The teachers did nothing.

  So I lost. But he didn’t bother me as much anymore.

  Here’s the takeaway: bullies don’t stop bullying until somebody fights them. In today’s political world—and for the last few decades—the biggest bullies have been almost universally on the left. It is the left that uses thug tactics to silence voices rather than celebrating the grand panoply that makes up American politics. It is the left that tells Americans that political unity is more important than freedom of speech. It is the left that uses the clubs of race and class to attack those on the right; it is the left that labels religious people and traditional values people rubes and simpletons, and tells them that their perspective has no place in the public square; it is the left that creates environmental crises out of whole cloth, then rams remunerative measures down our collective throats. It is the left that tells us that it is unpatriotic to be patriotic. And most of all, it is the left that uses our most powerful institutions—the institutions through which we connect with each other and build common bonds—to tear us apart.

  So we have to fight the left.

  In the days leading up to Andrew Breitbart’s death, Andrew was increasingly concerned with a new phenomenon dreamt up by the radical leftist bullies: SWATting. In his last broadcast radio interview, on Hugh Hewitt’s show, Andrew talked about this new and sickening phenomenon: “[O]ne of the things they’ve done to people who have worked with me in the past, including an L.A. prosecutor, is to ‘SWAT.’. . . It’s happened twice: once in New Jersey, once in Los Angeles, with an L.A. County . . . prosecutor who [is] associated with me.”

  Here’s what SWATting was. Anonymous leftists would target conservatives. They would then imitate the phone numbers of conservatives and call 911. They would tell the operators that they had murdered a loved one; the SWAT team would then show up, guns blazing. The risk of death was tremendous.

  The Los Angeles County prosecutor to whom Breitbart referred was Patrick Frey, also known in the blogosphere as Patterico. And here’s what happened to him: “At 12:35 a.m. on July 1, 2011, sheriff’s deputies pounded on my front door and rang my doorbell. They shouted for me to open the door and come out with my hands up. When I opened the door, deputies pointed guns at me and ordered me to put my hands in the air. I had a cell phone in my hand. Fortunately, they did not mistake it for a gun. They ordered me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. They handcuffed me. They shouted questions at me: IS THERE ANYONE ELSE IN THE HOUSE? and WHERE ARE THEY? and ARE THEY ALIVE? I told them: Yes, my wife and my children are in the house. They’re upstairs in their bedrooms, sleeping. Of course they’re alive. . . . Meanwhile, police rushed into my home. They woke up my wife, led her downstairs and to the front porch, frisked her, and asked her where the children were. Then police ordered her to stand on the front porch with her hands against the wall while they entered my children’s bedrooms to make sure they were alive. The call that sent deputies to my home was a hoax. Someone had pretended to be me. They called the police to say I had shot my wife.”1

  It didn’t happen just to Frey. It also happened to Red State founder and CNN contributor Erick Erickson; luckily, Erickson had already warned the cops that somebody might try such a tactic.2

  Who was behind the SWATtings? The evidence is still unclear. But there were many on the right who speculated that the circumstances point to the involvement of Brett Kimberlin. Kimberlin is the cofounder of Velvet Revolution, a far-left site devoted to calling for the arrest and prosecution of nonliberals. But there’s more to Kimberlin than involvement with a little-known thug website. He’s a convicted domestic terrorist also known as the Speedway Bomber. In 1981, Kimberlin planted a series of bombs throughout Indianapolis; he blew up a police cruiser and maimed one Carl DeLong so badly that DeLong had to have a leg amputated. DeLong later committed suicide; his wife won a $1.6 million civil suit against Kimberlin. Kimberlin has also been involved with drug running, impersonation of federal officials, and receipt of explosives. Kimberlin claimed publicly that he had sold pot to former vice president Dan Quayle.

  These days, Kimberlin’s organization receives cash from the George Soros–funded Tides Foundation.3 He has bragged on court tape that he speaks regularly with congressmen—undoubtedly Democrats.4 In Kimberlin’s spare time, he files frivolous lawsuits against conservatives.5 Columnist Robert Stacy McCain says that Kimberlin harasses conservatives with the most brutal of thug tactics—tactics so egregious that McCain himself was forced to flee the state of Maryland “to ensure the safety of my family and others who might be endangered if Kimberlin resorts to violence to accomplish his malicious purposes.”6

  Not every leftist is like Kimberlin. Most aren’t. But Kimberlin represents the political theology of the left: the ends justify the means. The right disowns Timothy McVeigh. The left funds Brett Kimberlin. Deep down, they are thugs, and they will not stop until they are stopped.

  “I’m a soldier in this war,” Andrew told me hours before he died. “And I’m not going to back down against these people. Because if they win, they will not stop until they have destroyed the country I love. F— them.”

  I got the call about Andrew’s death the next morning from Alex Marlow, Andrew’s right hand and first employee at Big Hollywood. Like everyone else, I was stunned. Andrew was a life force. Unflinchingly honest, unvaryingly uncompromising in the face of thuggery, Andrew—as his lifelong friend and Breitbart News business partner Larry Solov said—was willing to take slings and arrows on behalf of others. His instinct was to protect. When a leftist bully launched an attack, Andrew would spring into action. His jaw would jut out. He’d smile—but behind his eyes, there was no smile. He’d enter battle mode. Game on.

  And now he was gone.

  And the revisionist history began.

  Now Andrew wasn’t a bully-fighter. He was a bully himself, according to the left. “Provocateur, website founder and collector of America’s largest wads of spittle Andrew Breitbart died last Thursday morning, when some sentient shred of his cardiac organ kamikazed out of an exhausted sense of justice,” wrote one columnist at Gawker. “Like any good bully, Breitbart picked his targets well.”7 This is sick stuff, but it wasn’t an atypical feeling from members of the left, who were still sore from Andrew’s destruction of ACORN and exposing of Anthony Weiner. Every element of the leftist bullies’ ar
senal came out against Andrew’s memory. He was a racist; he was a sexist; he was a homophobe; he was a bigot. Commentators like Howard Kurtz of CNN said Andrew left a “mixed legacy.” Touré—whom Andrew had once jokingly suggested should host a show called “That Broccoli Is Racist,” because to Touré, everything is racist—promptly said that Andrew had been “dangerous” and “offensive.”8 David Frum, columnist for the Daily Beast and a supposed Republican always eager to attack other conservatives, said that Andrew’s “impact upon American media and American politics . . . [was] poisonous.”9 Slate’s Matthew Yglesias, a man whose neural circuitry could power an Easy-Bake-Oven—said, “The world outlook is slightly improved with @AndrewBreitbart dead.”10

  The torch had been dropped; the vultures were circling.

  But Andrew was always about more than just Andrew. He was about creating a movement of people who would be emboldened to speak their minds and join the debate. And as the torch fell, a million hands reached to hold it aloft. Those were the hands Andrew had trained; they were Americans Andrew had inspired. Across Twitter, the hashtags #IAmBreitbart and #BreitbartIsHere began trending. Posters of Andrew’s face began appearing at events across the country.

  It wasn’t because Andrew was a folk hero, though he was. It was because Andrew empowered everyone else to stand up to the bullies. He wasn’t just a shield. He was a testament that you could—to use his phrase—walk toward the fire, and have a wonderful time doing it. As he once told me, “Walk toward the fire. Don’t worry about what they call you. All those things are said against you because they want to stop you in your tracks. But if you keep going, you’re sending a message to people who are rooting for you, who are agreeing with you. The message is that they can do it, too.”