The Silencing (6 page)

Love was further portrayed in the Huffington Post article as “window dressing” and a useful idiot playing into the “pattern of using blacks to further white interests” comparing her position as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives to slavery. In the end, the Huffington Post writer concluded that Love’s “accomplishment is quite dangerous for people of color.”
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This kind of treatment unfortunately wasn’t new for Love. Following her August 2012 appearance at the Republican National Convention, Love’s Wikipedia page was vandalized with vile racist and sexist slurs. The page was altered to refer to Love as a “house n--ger” and a “dirty, worthless whore who sold out her soul in the name of big business.”
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The vandals also called her a “total sell-out to the Right Wing Hate Machine and the greedy bigots who control the GOP.”
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But who are the haters and bigots here?

Love’s treatment was not unlike what met Republican Tim Scott, who was elected in 2014 to be one of three African American members of the U.S. Senate. In a January 2014 speech at Zion Baptist Church in Columbia, South Carolina, North Carolina’s NAACP chapter president, the Reverend
William Barber, referred to Scott as a Republican pawn. “A ventriloquist can always find a good dummy,” he told the gathering of three hundred.
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Barber refused to apologize.
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House Assistant Democratic Leader Congressman James Clyburn told the
Washington Post
upon Scott’s historic election, “If you call progress electing a person with the pigmentation that he has, who votes against the interest and aspirations of 95 percent of the black people in South Carolina, then I guess that’s progress.”
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University of Pennsylvania Professor Adolph Reed wrote in a
New York Times
op-ed shortly after Scott’s appointment to the Senate that Scott was one of the GOP’s “cynical tokens.”
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Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, a Filipino-American, is a frequent target of racist attacks from so-called liberals. After Malkin called actor Alec Baldwin a “Hollyweirdo” on Twitter in 2011 he responded by mobilizing his presumably liberal followers to “go all Town Hall on” Malkin because she was a “crypto fascist hater.” The responses to Malkin were unfortunately predictable. One said, “Don’t you realize the white wingers you look up to. Only [sic] see you as someone who should be doing manicures for their wife.” She was called an “Aunty Tom” and a “sellout Asian bitch.” Another of Baldwin’s followers wrote, “This stir-fry noodle believes she matters. You’ll always be the chink inferior to the Aryan conservatives.”
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The same tactic is applied to Hispanic conservatives who oppose liberal policies. When conservative Gabriel Gomez was running for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts in 2013, a columnist labeled him a “LINO,” which stands for “Latino in name only.”
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When New Mexican gubernatorial candidate and Democrat Gary King wanted to attack his opponent, Republican Governor Susana Martinez, he didn’t open a dialogue on why she opposes drivers’ licenses for undocumented workers or vetoed an increase to the minimum wage. No, he commented that Martinez “does not have a Latino heart.”
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They seem to agree with Democratic Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who in 2010, while he was Senate majority leader, said, “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican.”
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Racist delegitimization isn’t just for conservatives. Fox News political analyst Juan Williams—a lifelong Democrat—has experienced “rank intimidation” from “the ideological and rigid Left,” he told me in an interview. He is asked, “‘Why are you working [at Fox]? You can’t be a good black person and work at Fox.’” While he’s received racist e-mails during the 2008 and 2012 campaigns from both sides of the ideological spectrum, he says that with the left, “the idea is you have to choose a side and choose your army.” To do otherwise is to invite the worst kind of delegitimizing, or “muzzling” as Williams labeled the phenomena in his 2012 book,
Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate
.
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If he offers a sincere critique of Obama or Democrats, Williams told me, “The response from the Left is, ‘You’re a sellout. You’re attacking our president because Fox gives you a paycheck.’ Or that I’m performing sex acts on white men at Fox in order to get my check.” Illiberal left silencing of Williams cost him his job at National Public Radio where he had been a correspondent for a decade. NPR fired him ostensibly for what they deemed racist comments about Muslims. But according to Williams, the firing came after consistent pressure on the network from at least one senior Obama White House staffer unhappy that an African American liberal was appearing on Fox.

Women who don’t stick to the illiberal left’s scripts are subject to the same kind of delegitimization. Conservative women in particular are deemed fair game for misogynistic attacks that would normally have the illiberal left screaming “War on Women.” Republican women are dehumanized as fake women, “female impersonators,”
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or “uninflected by the experience of the female body” (whatever that means).
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Alternatively, they are treated as sex objects with no brains or will of their own. When Senator Joni Ernst—a GOP rising star—delivered the State of the Union response in 2015, MSNBC host Ronan Farrow compared the U.S. senator to a flight attendant.
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This echoed comments made by then-Senator Tom Harkin during Ernst’s campaign for the Senate that described her as just a pretty face, comparable to the then twenty-four-year-old singer and actress Taylor Swift.
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Liberal MSNBC host Ed Schultz once said on his radio show that Sarah Palin set off his “bimbo alert”
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and called conservative radio host and bestselling author Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut.”
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He even called me a “bimbo” for accurately quoting him in a column. It’s so much easier to insult a woman than to actually engage on the issue she raises. While still sitting atop the MSNBC heap, television host Keith Olbermann wished conservative S. E. Cupp had been aborted by her parents
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and called conservative pundit Michelle Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick.”
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Bill Maher dismissed Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann as a “bimbo” and called Sarah Palin the c-word and a “dumb twat.”
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What is it that makes liberal men think they can get away with treating dissenting women in the most callous possible way? It’s as if being “pro-choice” on abortion gives them carte blanche to mistreat, mischaracterize, and verbally abuse any woman with views contrary to their own. Liberals should know better, shouldn’t they? “Even mild sexism—a focus on hair and makeup—is a very lethal tool,” noted Siobhan Bennett, Women’s Campaign Fund president, to the magazine
Mother Jones
. “It can make a woman [running for office] drop 10 points [in the polls].”
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I didn’t support the campaigns of Bachmann or Palin, but sexist dehumanizing should be off limits regardless of how much one might disagree with the politics of a female candidate or politician. These words are used specifically to attack their identity as women, and when they are used, they degrade all women. When Rush Limbaugh called law student and contraceptive mandate activist Sandra Fluke a “slut,” I was very critical of him, but found it odd that some of the same people who were lobbying for him to lose his radio show for this one comment not only never called for Maher to lose his show, but were frequent guests.
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Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Robin Morgan found Limbaugh’s remarks too much to bear, writing at CNN that the FCC should deny his show a license in order to serve the public interest.
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Prior to Limbaugh’s comments, Steinem had happily appeared as Maher’s guest with nary a word about his well-chronicled misogynistic outbursts.
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It was left to Ann Coulter to confront Maher,
telling him flat out on his show that he was a misogynist. I too have criticized Maher for his misogyny, but have never suggested he lose his show. It’s the illiberal left that wants to run their ideological enemies out of business under the false pretense of being the protectors of women—and then turns around and attacks their female opponents in the most demeaning, sexist ways.

Illiberal feminists are perhaps the most ferocious warriors among the illiberal left. They deny conservative men the right to speak on any issue that affects women, and they are utterly intolerant of any dissenting women, even disallowing them their right to state their own opinions in their own words as when MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell told Republican strategist Juleanna Glover to refer to herself not as “pro-life” but “anti-abortion.”
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Liberal writer Nina Burleigh profiled conservative women as “baby Palins” in a 2011
Elle
magazine article. In addition to infantilizing conservative women, Burleigh portrayed her subjects as ungrateful traitors to their sex. “The young women I interviewed for this article share almost every goal of feminism. They want to be—and in many cases, already believe themselves to be—‘empowered’: educationally, financially, sexually,” Burleigh wrote. “But they resist any effort to put advancing their fellow women front and center. That means opposing everything from gender-based affirmative action, such as government-mandated quotas for female athletes under Title IX, to equal-pay-for-equal-work laws.”
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Somehow it escapes the illiberal left that it is possible to sincerely believe that conservative policies are best for all people, including women. Is it really so hard to understand that people can have differing yet reasonable opinions on these issues?

TACTIC #2: DEMONIZING

Demonizing is another favored tactic utilized by the illiberal left to delegitimize opponents. They simultaneously make racist and misogynist
attacks against opponents
and
accuse opponents of being racists, bigots, misogynists, rape apologists, traitors, and homophobes. As we saw with Campbell Brown and Michelle Rhee, for any Democrat, liberal, or ideological agnostic who questions the sanctioned illiberal line, there’s another tactic: accusing dissenters of being closet conservatives.

The purpose of demonizing opponents is to make them radioactive to the broader culture. The illiberal left uses character assassination to ensure their opponents won’t be treated as sincere or thoughtful contributors to the national conversation. The illiberal left doesn’t desire debate, it wants a monologue on one side and silence on the other.

ALL DISSENT IS RACIST

The illiberal left’s inability to treat differing viewpoints as valid leads them to demonize disagreement as racism. In September 2009, during a speech at Emory University, former President Jimmy Carter said that racist attitudes were driving criticism of President Obama. It wasn’t the first time he’d made such comments. The day before, Carter told NBC’s
Nightly News
, “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African-American.”
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Actor and liberal activist Robert Redford echoed Carter’s sentiments, saying that GOP congressional members want to “paralyze the system. I think what sits underneath it, unfortunately, is there’s probably some racism involved, which is really awful.”
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This line of argument depends on the fallacy that President Obama has endured uniquely hostile treatment while in the White House. In this alternate universe, no president has ever been harshly criticized by members of the opposing party or had their signature efforts opposed by Congress. We are asked to forget that Bill Clinton had his attempt at health-care reform demonized and destroyed by strident Republican opposition. Or that he was accused of having approved the killing of one of his best friends, Vince Foster, whose death was ruled a suicide. Indiana Republican
Congressman Dan Burton, who ran the House inquiry into Foster’s death, said in 1998 of Clinton, “If I could prove 10 percent of what I believe happened [regarding the death of Vincent Foster], he’d be gone. This guy’s a scumbag. That’s why I’m after him.”
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An e-mail that circulated widely starting in 1998 accused Bill Clinton of being responsible for more than fifty suspicious deaths. It became such an urban legend that the website
Snopes.com
had to investigate and rule it “false.” There is also the fact that Clinton was one of only two presidents in American history to be impeached.

Still, the notion that racism is the only possible reason Republicans would oppose President Obama has become such conventional wisdom that baseball legend Hank Aaron compared Republican opposition to President Obama to the KKK, telling an interviewer, “When you look at a black president, President Obama is left with his foot stuck in the mud from all of the Republicans with the way he’s treated. We have moved in the right direction, and there have been improvements, but we still have a long ways to go in the country. The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.”
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By late 2013, MSNBC host Chris Matthews had labeled Obama’s critics racists at least twenty times on the air.
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In 2014, U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana said that Obama’s unpopularity in the state was due to the fact that “the South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans.”
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Isn’t it possible that conservatives oppose Obama because they oppose his
policies
? And isn’t it also true that the South is one of the more conservative parts of the country? It would have been more accurate for Landrieu to say that the South has not lately been the friendliest place for
Democrats
.
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When she made her claim, Landrieu was the only Democrat representing the Deep South in the Senate,
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And there was only one white Southern Democrat serving in the House: Georgia Congressman John Barrow, a pro-gun, fiscally conservative Democrat, running for his sixth term. Both Landrieu and Barrow ended up losing their elections in 2014,
while the voters of South Carolina elected Republican African American Tim Scott to the U.S. Senate.
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