Bullies: How The Lefts Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America
March 29, 2013
By Jamie Glazov
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Shapiro: The lefts favorite bully tactic is painting its opposition as morally deficient and unworthy of being part of the conversation. The left uses this tactic on virtually every topic. Sequestration? It turns out that those dastardly right-wingers just want to hurt first responders and teachers. Gun control? Those conservatives just dont care about dead kids. Gay marriage? Conservatives hate homosexuals. Once you paint your opposition as morally bankrupt, you dont have to win the debate. You win by default. Thats the basis of the political correctness movement.
The Obama administration uses that tactic to destroy its opposition. They work with groups outside the government to target their political opposition and destroy them personally and economically, launching smears and boycotts rather than countenancing the argument.
FP: Who are some of the biggest leftist bullies out there right now?
Shapiro: President Obama is clearly the ringleader of the leftist bullies. He seeks conflict so that he can paint his opposition as evil. Then he tells the American people that the people hes facing just wont compromise - even as he refuses compromise at every turn and begs for public support. Its very effective.
But the left couldnt get away with any of this without the media. The media are the greatest of all the leftist bullies, because they play at objectivity while sliding the knife in as deep as humanly possible. By lying to the American people about their disinterested reportage, they are able to convince Americans that people of good heart cannot take conservatives seriously. Thats a damaging message.
FP: Your thoughts on how the bullies have taken over our media, many of our institutions and academia. Why are all the major vehicles of political persuasion controlled by the Left?
Shapiro: We see leftist bullies in all the major institutions of American life: the university system, Hollywood, the non-profit world. The left thinks institutionally; we think individually. They think about how they can take over institutions and use them as weapons of mass conversion; we think about how wed like to be left alone. The left understands that its more important to control the means of distribution than to convince individuals. Thats why they see Americans as members of groups: religious groups, ethnic groups, age groups, classes. Nobody is an individual. Were all interchangeable widgets, defined by our socioeconomic environments. That means were infinitely changeable if we only had an institution to guide us. Conservatives dont think this way, so we lose.
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Shapiro: The goal of the left in bullying is to set a narrative that jibes with their view of the world. In the Duke lacrosse case, the left wanted a narrative of whites oppressing blacks, especially in the South. So they simply ignored the facts and created a story out of whole cloth about privileged white men raping a black woman. The entire media ran with it in order to talk about how America was still, underneath, a racist country. All of this was designed to remind the left that they are the white hats in this moral equation that they are fighters against the prevailing racist establishment. It turns out that the whole story was a fabrication. But the left media had already ruined the lives of the white lacrosse players. Even today, some members of the left media express little or no remorse for their actions in the Duke case including MSNBCs own Al Sharpton, who has done more damage to race relations in this country than virtually anybody.
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Shapiro: They hate it, predictably. Most wont read it. Thats okay. Its a handbook on how to fight them. Its foolish of them not to, just as its foolish for conservatives not to read Rules for Radicals by Alinsky. The left has reacted to the book and to my arguments by threatening me, tweeting my home address, and targeting me personally. I had to move my wife out of the house for a week. No shock there. This is who the left is, when the mask is off.
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Bullies: How The Left?s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America
