The Silencing (23 page)

I asked Sharyl Attkisson, an investigative reporter who spent more than twenty years at CBS before leaving the network, if she thought any one group in particular was leading the illiberal left’s inquisition of dissident journalists. She pointed to Media Matters, which “has played a significant role in creating a toxic media climate for mainstream journalists trying to do their job fairly and honestly.” Media Matters, she said, “prints sometimes almost verbatim from the Obama administration . . . and the quasi-press will report it as if Media Matters was a neutral news organization . . . and then it gets picked up, and the social media campaign starts, and I think it has outgunned news organizations.”

Attkisson noted, “We are just trying to do our jobs and then we are met with campaigns that are well financed and we are outmatched. We don’t have the resources to be a counterpart. It’s easier in the minds of some bosses to not have the headache.” During her last two years at CBS, after she was put in the Obama doghouse for her investigative reporting, she said CBS “didn’t want me to do investigative stories on anything. They
assigned me to cover Benghazi, because they saw a good story. But then it elevates and the pushback comes. They wanted me to cover Fast and Furious, but then after a couple of weeks the pushback came. They did accept my story on Republican freshmen fundraising hypocrisy [which won an Emmy]. They liked that story.”

Attkisson believes that the quashing of stories that upset liberals is not a result of bias among the liberal network brass or staff. While such bias exists, she says the larger problem is that the controversy of social media campaigns intimidates news organizations like CBS.

I asked her if CBS felt similar pressure from conservatives. She replied that the social media “pushback was fairly isolated” to groups supporting the Obama administration “and even though I did stories that targeted GOP interests . . . [that] didn’t get pushback at all.”

Perhaps the most brazen example of the illiberal left’s attempts to shut down debate has been the assault on one of the nation’s most articulate and respected columnists, George Will.

In his June 6, 2014,
Washington Post
column, Will wrote:

          
[A]cademia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle. . . . [The Education Department] mandates adoption of a minimal “preponderance of the evidence” standard when adjudicating sexual assault charges between males and the female “survivors”—note the language of prejudgment. Combine this with capacious definitions of sexual assault . . . [and] the doctrine that the consent of a female who has been drinking might not protect a male from being found guilty of rape. Then comes costly litigation against institutions that have denied due process to males they accuse of what society considers serious felonies. . . . What government is inflicting on colleges and universities, and what they are
inflicting on themselves, diminishes their autonomy, resources, prestige and comity. Which serves them right. They have asked for this by asking for progressivism.
⁵⁰

Agree or disagree, Will was making a serious point about critical developments in American higher education. You would never have known it from the reactions of the new inquisitors.

As assembled by National Review Online’s Andrew Johnson:

          
Jezebel
’s Erin Gloria Ryan civilly characterized Will’s piece as “Ladies Love Being Rape Victims, Says Asshole,” and offered “a sincere and heartfelt
F[***] you, George Will
.” Meanwhile, at
The New Yorker
, Amy Davidson called Will’s take “confused and contemptuous.” Others said Will is not concerned about the issue of sexual assault. While Will clearly states that rape must be addressed and taken seriously and only criticized the current approach,
Salon
’s Katie McDonough stated that Will “does not think that sexual assault on campus is a big deal.” Others joined . . . her in that sentiment, and launched the #SurvivorPrivilege hashtag. Meanwhile, Georgetown professor and fill-in MSNBC host Michael Eric Dyson took it one step further: As the
Washington Free Beacon
noted, Dyson said women were “re-raped” and “re-traumatized again verbally and rhetorically” by the publication of Will’s column.
⁵¹

Eager to get in on the act, Democratic U.S. Senators Tammy Baldwin, Richard Blumenthal, Robert Casey, and Dianne Feinstein wrote a harshly worded letter to Will, charging that “Your thesis and statistics fly in the face of everything we know about this issue.”
⁵²
But as Michael Miner of the
Chicago Reader
subsequently pointed out, the senators did not take the time to rebut Will’s statistics.
⁵³
In his own response to the letter (which was published on June 13, 2014, in the
Washington Post
), Will said the
statistics he used “come from the Obama administration, and from simple arithmetic involving publicly available reports on campus sexual assaults.” Will went on: “I think I take sexual assault much more seriously than you do. Which is why I worry about definitions of that category of crime that might by their breadth, tend to trivialize it.”
⁵⁴

Meanwhile, even less concerned with actually engaging in reason and evidence than the senators, UltraViolet—described on its heavily trafficked website as “a powerful and rapidly growing community of people of all walks of life . . . mobilized to fight sexism and expand women’s rights”—called for its followers to “Tell the
Washington Post
: Fire George Will.”
⁵⁵
Not to be outdone, the National Organization for Women echoed on its site: “
The Washington Post
needs to dump George Will now!”
⁵⁶
Both provided space electronically to sign online petitions.

The anti-Will campaign scored some hits. Within days, the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
dropped Will from its editorial lineup. Editorial page editor Tony Messenger claimed that the switch had been under consideration for some time, but he noted that Will’s column “made the decision easier.” He went on to call the column “offensive and inaccurate” and apologized for publishing it.
⁵⁷

Some editors had the courage to take on the illiberal left. Most prominent was
Washington Post
Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, who responded directly to the criticisms. “George Will’s column,” he wrote, “was well within bounds of legitimate debate.” He continued: “I welcomed his contribution, as I welcome the discussion it sparked and the responses, some of which we will be publishing on our pages and website. This is what a good opinion site should do. Rather than urge me to silence a viewpoint they disagree with, I would urge others to join the debate, and to do so without mischaracterizing the original column.”
⁵⁸

It’s sad that it has to be explained to liberals that engaging with ideas or opinions they don’t like is a critical and expected part of life in the public square. But this is where we are with the illiberal left. Their intolerance is so unbound that the overwhelming dominance of lefty and
pro-Democratic viewpoints in the media doesn’t sate them. When it comes to views that dissent from their worldview, only one result is acceptable: total silence.

EIGHT

ILLIBERAL FEMINIST THOUGHT POLICE

              
The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed—would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

              
—GEORGE ORWELL,
1984

O
n June 30, 2014, in a closely watched case called
Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc
., the United States Supreme Court ruled that regulations developed by the Department of Health and Human Services requiring employers to provide free birth control under the provisions of Obamacare violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

That 1993 statute, which passed Congress on a nearly unanimous vote and was signed into law by President Clinton, was prompted by concerns that the heavy hand of government was intruding on Native American religious practices. But religious conservatives, namely the owners of the Hobby Lobby craft store chain, argued that it also should protect them from HHS regulations requiring employers to provide health insurance that covered a wide array of birth control procedures, including some it deemed in violation of their faith. Hobby Lobby covered sixteen of the twenty FDA-approved contraceptives mandated by HHS regulations, but opposed four that might take effect after the fertilization of an embryo.
Those included two forms of the “morning-after pill” (Ella and Plan B) and two types of intrauterine devices (hormonal and copper).
¹
Plan B may be purchased over the counter at drug stores without a prescription.
²
On a 5 to 4 vote, the court agreed with Hobby Lobby, unleashing the fury of Democratic Party leaders and their illiberal allies.

“We are a corporate theocracy now,” proclaimed a
Salon.com
headline. In an MSNBC interview, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz said the ruling would prevent women “from being able to join the middle class.” To prominent atheist activist Ronald A. Lindsay, the moral of the story was that the Supreme Court has too many Catholics.

Among feminists of the illiberal left, however, the Hobby Lobby decision was attacked as illegitimate for a simpler reason: the five justices in the majority were male, while three of the Democrat-appointed dissenters were women.

“The men who wrote this decision on behalf of the Supreme Court have entered into a war on women,” National Organization for Women (NOW) president Terry O’Neill
³
said on MSNBC. “They have become a blatantly politically activist anti-woman political organization.”

This quickly became a Democratic Party talking point. “It’s time that five men on the Supreme Court stop deciding what happens to women,” tweeted then–Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
⁴
Reid also vowed in a press conference that Democrats would do something about the Hobby Lobby decision to “ensure that women’s lives are not determined by virtue of five white men.” He didn’t say what he had in mind (or acknowledge the fact that Justice Clarence Thomas is actually black).

Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi chimed in with a rhetorical barrage that displayed a lack of even a basic knowledge of what the case was about. “Really, we should be afraid of this court,” Pelosi said. “The five guys who start determining what contraceptions are legal. Let’s not even go there.”
⁵
(Actually, the court hadn’t gone there: the question wasn’t what methods of birth control are legal, but what employers should be forced to
pay for.) But the identity politics attack was, by then, in full swing. As Ruth Marcus wrote in the
Washington Post
: “Of course, a uterus is not a prerequisite for understanding the importance of access to birth control. See, e.g., Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who voted . . . to uphold the contraceptive mandate. But let’s be clear: It helps.”
⁶

Not only is this line of argumentation ad hominem—all seven of the justices who wrote
Roe v. Wade
were men—but in the case of the Hobby Lobby decision, it’s transparently inaccurate.

Millions of women in this country supported Hobby Lobby, many out of religious convictions, and some on libertarian grounds. A 2012 Gallup poll
⁷
on the Affordable Care Act contraception mandate found that 82 percent of Republican women and 48 percent of independent women supported religious leaders over the Obama administration regarding whether religious-based employers should have to provide contraception coverage for employees as part of their health plans.

Friend-of-the-court briefs submitted to the high court bore the signatures of female lawyers, legislators, theologians, and private citizens. The Becket Fund, which brought the suit on Hobby Lobby’s behalf, had a legal team that was half female.
⁸
The team included six women; seven if you added Kristina Arriaga, the Becket Fund’s executive director. Arriaga is a dynamic Cuban-American woman heading up a major legal organization that has had enormous success winning religious liberty cases.
⁹
Yet no mainstream media outlet profiled her in light of her organization’s success in winning this case. They were too busy painting the court’s ruling as a misogynistic assault on American women.

The same media that ignored Arriaga and the six women of the Becket Fund legal team treated a law student named Sandra Fluke as the second coming of Martin Luther King Jr. for her free contraception crusade. Texas State Senator Wendy Davis was similarly lionized as a crusader for women’s rights for a filibuster opposing abortion clinic regulations and limits on late-term abortion. This happened despite the fact that a majority of American women opposed Davis’s position on late-term abortion. Gallup
polling on abortion shows Americans consistently oppose late-term abortion.
¹⁰
A
Washington Post
/ABC survey showed that 56 percent of Americans surveyed prefer to place limits on abortion after the first twenty weeks rather than after twenty-four weeks, as current law allows. When just women were asked, the figure jumped to 60 percent. Such measures are popular among every age range and income bracket. Even Democrats supported the measure 51 to 33 percent, though not voters who identified as “liberal.”
¹¹