The Silencing (5 page)

Teachers unions and their illiberal left allies quickly deemed Brown public enemy number one. Rather than debating Brown and challenging her arguments, the illiberal left began a delegitimization campaign. Brown was no longer an accomplished woman, nor was her desire to improve the
education system sincere. No, she was a nefarious right-wing bimbo under the control of conservative men lurking in the background. It started in 2012, when Brown wrote an article in the
Wall Street Journal
criticizing teachers unions for protecting teachers guilty of sexual misconduct from getting fired.
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In a Twitter exchange, Brown asked president of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten about the issue. Weingarten responded and ultimately accused Brown of having a secret agenda. “Campbell did not want to be balanced. She’s married to Romney advisor Dan Senor,” Weingarten tweeted.
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In other words, Brown was a mindless parrot who adopted her Republican husband’s political views. As Campbell responded, “Wow, no sexism here. Sad.”

The teachers union–affiliated Alliance for Quality Education set up a website (
RealCampbellBrown.com
) depicting Brown as a stringed puppet holding a GOP sign and wearing a “1%” button. The tagline below her image read, “Right wing. Elitist. Wrong about Public Schools.” The website also claimed she was a registered Republican.

Brown told me she has donated to five political campaigns, all Democrat. She explained that she was a political independent throughout her journalistic career. To vote in the New York City primary, she registered as a Democrat, then later as a Republican to vote in a different primary. In their attempt to portray Brown’s organization as a front for the Republican Party, the illiberal left ignored not only her publicly accessible donations to Democratic campaigns, but also that Brown had recruited notable Democrats, including former Obama White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and former Obama campaign spokesperson Ben LaBolt, to work for her organization.
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Then there was the inconvenient fact that the organization’s chairman was David Boies, who represented Al Gore in
Bush v. Gore
.
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Diane Ravitch, an education historian and professor at New York University, invoked a favorite delegitimization tactic by chauvinistically dismissing Brown for her beauty and portrayed her as an empty-headed interloper into the education debate. “[Brown] is a good media figure because of her looks, but she doesn’t seem to know or understand anything
about teaching and why tenure matters,” Ravitch told the
Washington Post
. “I know it sounds sexist to say that she is pretty, but that makes her telegenic, even if what she has to say is total nonsense.”
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Never mind that Boies, Gibbs, and LaBolt all believed that same “nonsense.”

The voices portraying a professional woman as a bimbo and appendage of her husband belong to liberals who are supposed to be advocates for human dignity, respecters of women, and protectors of free speech. They chose to drag an accomplished journalist and earnest advocate through the mud. Infuriated by her audacity to question policy darlings like teacher tenure, they used sexist and dishonest labels to try to shut her up.

Opponents of Brown’s new endeavor saw her as the “new Michelle Rhee,” the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor whose dedication to reforming failing schools led her to support vouchers and other reform efforts opposed by teachers unions. “As a lifelong Democrat I was adamantly against vouchers,” Rhee explained in a Daily Beast piece called “My Break with the Democrats.” When the
Washington Post
asked about her position on renewing a D.C. voucher program, she knew that “as a good Democrat,” she was supposed to say “no.” Instead, she decided to talk directly to parents in an effort to make a fully informed decision. “After my listening tour of families, and hearing so many parents plead for an immediate solution to their desire for a quality education, I came out in favor of the voucher program,” she said. “People went nuts. Democrats chastised me for going against the party, but the most vocal detractors were my biggest supporters.”
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It’s normal for political parties to close ranks when one of their members deviates from a key policy position. This doesn’t make it right, but it’s not unique to liberals or Democrats. What sets the illiberal left apart are their campaigns to delegitimize people who deviate on even one issue by openly engaging in racist and sexist attacks, all the while presenting themselves as the protectors and representatives of all women and non-white people.

The delegitimization campaign against Rhee seemed to be the blueprint of what would later happen to Brown. Richard Whitmire, the
author of a book about Rhee’s reform efforts in the nation’s capital, characterized reactions to Rhee as “virulent” and “extreme,” with a marked tendency to personal attacks such as “Rhee’s a terrible mother!”
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Whitmire noted in his
Education Week
piece “What Is Behind the Discrediting of Michelle Rhee?” that her “critics come from left-wing, not right-wing, politics.” He also explained “this core group of critics—well represented in any online discussion of Rhee and usually writing under disguised identities—seems to have limited interest in debating the school reform decisions Rhee made. Rather, their goal is ‘proving’ Rhee is a flat-out fraud.”
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In other words, the illiberal left chooses to make dehumanizing attacks on Rhee, such as blasting her as an “Asian bitch,” as Florida teacher Ceresta Smith did at a 2013 “Occupy DOE 2.0” protest.
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This is easier than engaging in a rigorous debate about the best way forward for education.

Another Rhee critic insinuated the avowed Democrat was a conservative and called her an “education Ann Coulter.”
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In an article for
Salon.com
nearly two years later, the same man called Brown a “Rhee-placement” in a piece called “Education ‘reform’s’ new Ann Coulter: A reeling Michelle Rhee passes the lead to Campbell Brown.”
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Like Brown, Rhee had her own union-funded attack site—
RheeFirst.com
.
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The sexist and racist character assassinations of Campbell Brown and Michelle Rhee demonstrate the great lengths the illiberal left will go to label and demonize opponents and avoid contending against alternative ideas in the public square. It doesn’t matter if the label has any connection to reality. It only matters that it sticks. Since they can’t win the argument on the merits, the illiberal left instead attacks the people who make the arguments, trying to cast doubt on their abilities, their intentions, even their value as a person.

TACTIC #1: DEHUMANIZING

In
Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others
, social philosopher and psychologist David Livingstone Smith explores
the enduring practice of dehumanizing individuals we don’t like or with whom we disagree. He shows how ancient cultures and modern societies operate similarly in that groups that seek to maintain or expand their power base will often systematically question and attack the very core of their enemies’ human identities.

New York University law professor Jeremy Waldron has even highlighted the harm of dehumanization as a justification to ban certain kinds of speech. In an article for the
New York Times
, Waldron argued that hate speech harms the dignity of those at whom it is directed. He defines dignity as “a person’s basic social status, his or her being treated as an ordinary member of society in good standing, his or her being included in the ordinary business of society. A person’s dignity is damaged, then, when he or she is publicly defamed or dehumanized, or when he or she is perceived as belonging to a group, all of whose members are defamed or dehumanized.”
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Waldron is right about the harm of dehumanizing, but wrong about the solution. Laws that limit what a person can say, even when what they say is depraved, are illiberal and authoritarian. But if someone like Waldron, a liberal, believes that dehumanizing attacks are terrible enough to justify creating a legal cause of action for the targets of such language, then perhaps people who call themselves liberal should stop using dehumanizing smears to delegitimize their opponents.

If Waldron’s theory was put into practice, we’d be slapping the cuffs on a who’s who of the illiberal elite. When they aren’t besmirching dissenters from their worldview as racist, sexist, and misogynist, the illiberal left are hurling racist, sexist, and misogynist attacks against those they wish to delegitimize in the public square. It’s a sad irony that those who claim to stand against racism or sexism turn into unrepentant bigots if it will help delegitimize their ideological or political opponents. In the illiberal silencing campaign, liberal principles are perpetual casualties.

These attacks are fueled by the determinist assumption that certain groups of people, because of their race or sex, must support liberal policies
and vote for Democrats. If the heretics deviate from the paternalistic preordained script, they are treated as self-loathing sub-humans. The illiberal left denies women and non-white members of society the right to choose which political party or ideological positions they may support. That’s only for white men (who, if they’re not Democrats, are presumed to be racist and sexist anyway). The rest of America is expected to line up behind liberals and the Democratic Party and if they don’t, the delegitimization commences.

Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is often called an “Uncle Tom” who acts only to please white people. The illiberal left claim his conservative views derive from self-loathing or hate. As Democratic Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi said, “it’s almost to the point saying this man doesn’t like black people, he doesn’t like being black.”
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African American Republican Ron Christie, who worked for both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, was told by African American California Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters that he was a “sellout to [his] race” and that black Republicans are “Uncle Toms.” Christie noted in an article that this kind of treatment, “is all too familiar to black conservatives who dare to express views that are out of the liberal mainstream.”
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The epithet “Uncle Tom” is derived from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. The insult suggests black submissiveness to a white agenda. “Short of dropping the n-bomb on someone, there are few things more insulting to many African Americans than being called an ‘Uncle Tom,’” wrote journalist Dexter Mullins at the African American news website
theGrio.com
.
¹⁷
Though there are variations on the theme. Condoleeza Rice was called an “Aunt Jemima” while working for the Bush administration.
¹⁸

Raffi Williams, a young black conservative who works as the deputy press secretary for the Republican National Committee, told me he regularly gets Facebook comments or tweets from supposed liberals calling him an “Uncle Tom,” “house n-word,”
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race traitor, and sellout.
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Audience members
at a 2002 gubernatorial debate threw Oreos at then-Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele, he told me. This sent a message that he was “black on the outside and white inside,” reported the
Baltimore Sun.
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He has also been called a “token negro” and “a white man with black skin” whose appointment as the head of the Republican National Committee “was propaganda to convince America the Republican party wasn’t run by racists since they’d appointed a Negro to their top position.”
²²
Former Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock compared Thomas Sowell to a reviled “house negro” character in the Quentin Tarantino film
Django Unchained
.
²³

The website “ThyBlackMan”—which describes itself as a place to remind black men “of our brotherhood and value as men in this society”—wrote without irony of conservative black man and commentator Larry Elder, “His coaches at the Republican Party always send in their white men in black skin whenever they need to check Obama for scoring too many points. And since they promote from within Elder probably will be coaching his own team of self haters pretty soon.”
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They’ve also made sport of dehumanizing and demonizing the African American commentator Deneen Borelli. In the same piece, Borelli was accused of hating “herself so much she gets her pictures photo shopped in order to look more European friendly,” and was ranked #9 on a list of “SAMBOs”—a SAMBO was described as a “white person trapped inside a black body.”
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Rather than accepting that Borelli might legitimately be conservative, she was accused of “demonizing her own people” to enrich herself financially.
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The illiberal left loves to call Republicans racist for not having enough black and brown people representing them, but as soon as one is elected, the delegitimizing commences. They aren’t “real black or brown people” or they are self-hating sellouts and traitors. In 2015, Arsalan Iftikhar, a liberal human rights lawyer and media commentator, told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was “trying . . . to scrub some of the brown off his skin as he runs to the right in a Republican presidential exploratory bid.”
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This is a double whammy: Jindal is portrayed as self-loathing and GOP voters as racists who will only like him if
he isn’t brown. When Haitian-American Mia Love made history in 2014 as the first black female Republican to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the Huffington Post ran a story headlined, “She Looks Black, but Her Politics Are Red.” Her values were not her own, but were instead “grounded in a white, male, Christian context.” Love is apparently just a mindless puppet to her white male overlords. The writer—an assistant professor at Wichita State University—alleged that Love was “allowed to pass through [the halls of power] in her black, female body with the understanding that she must not see, speak or openly advocate for anything related to race or gender—an unholy compromise.”
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This echoed a post at the liberal website
Gawker
, in which Hamilton Nolan wrote “the only reason Mia Love has been so lovingly shepherded to the national podium to deliver this message is because of her own race. . . .”
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There isn’t a shred of evidence to support this contention, but if there was, one would think that Nolan would be cheering. Don’t liberals support affirmative action?