When Will Biden Denounce Efforts To Silence Dissent?
/While Joe Biden issues calls for “unity” in the aftermath of the election, the effort to silence conservative and Republican voices proceeds apace. We have just had a bitter election season, and I would very much like to support and join calls for unity and reconciliation. The problem is that the actions of the people who supported Biden undermine progress toward those goals, and make achieving them well nigh impossible. Where are the Democrats who denounce these actions? For that matter, where is Biden’s own denunciation of these actions?
It was back at the beginning of this blog that I first called out as a fundamental characteristic of the progressives — the people who seek to perfect the world through government action — that they come to believe that anyone who would oppose their project must be evil:
[S]ince [progressives believe that] all problems can be solved by taxing and spending, therefore they must be solved by taxing and spending, and anyone who stands in the way of those solutions is immoral.
And if your opponents are immoral and evil, all strategies and tactics to suppress them and extirpate them are justified and indeed necessary.
A couple of weeks ago I had a post with a short roundup of various instances of Biden and his supporters calling those who failed to support him either “racists”or “white supremacists” or both. The name callers I quoted were not some fringe characters who might appropriately be ignored, but rather leading figures and organizations of the Democratic Party, including the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and indeed Biden himself (who called President Trump a “racist” in the first debate this year).
But that post did not get to the next important issue, which is the effort to silence conservative and Republican voices and make sure that they cannot be heard. You may already be aware of some or all of these, but just putting a collection together in one place makes you realize how pervasive and dangerous this has become:
To begin, there have been the calls by prominent Democrats for identifying and punishing anyone who “supported” or “enabled” the Trump presidency. In the prior post I cited something called the “Trump Accountability Project,” initiated by Congresswoman AOC, which however appears to be suspended, at least for the moment. But there are plenty more of the same ilk, including this October 23 tweet from Robert Reich (former Secretary of Labor under Obama and current professor at UC Berkeley): “When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies, comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.”
From California Democratic Party official and DNC member David Atkins, we have these tweets on November 17: “No seriously...how *do* you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook? We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. . . . This is not your standard partisan policy disagreement. This is a conspiracy theory fueled belligerent death cult against reality & basic decency.” In case you have your doubts that these people think that those who disagree with them are evil, try reading that again.
You have probably heard of “cancel culture,” and of at least a few efforts, particularly on college campuses, to get any dissent from the conservative side expelled from the campus; but unless you are paying close attention, you are probably not aware of the vast scope of this scourge. The National Association of Scholars has been keeping a spreadsheet of campus cancelations, which is now up to 105 entries. Included among the long list of professors who students have demanded be fired from their academic positions are such famous cases as Nicholas and Erika Christakis of Yale (for the sin of asking students to relax about Halloween costumes), Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto (for a video titled “Professor Against Political Correctness”), Brett Weinstein of Evergreen College (for showing up on a “day of absence” demanded of white students and teachers), Bruce Gilley of Portland State University (for writing the book “The Case for Colonialism”), Amy Wax of Penn Law School (for criticizing affirmative action in a podcast), Susan Crockford of the University of Victoria (for publishing data showing that polar bear populations are increasing), and many, many more.
Then there is the petition from students in the Harvard graduate school, demanding that members of the Trump administration not be hired or invited as speakers to the Harvard campus. From the Washington Post, November 19 (quoting the petition): “‘That is why today we are asking you to set up a system of accountability for high-level political appointees and Trump administration consultants before they are invited as fellows or to teach or speak on campus. . . . These accountability guidelines should be publicly shared with students by the end of the calendar year.’ The petitioners also call on the university to ‘fully vet speakers for their role in undermining’ democracy and either ‘boldly confront’ them for it or decline to invite them to the school at all.”
Next we have that group of conservative voices who suddenly find that they are being “de-platformed” or “de-monetized” by their big tech web hosts for nebulous “violations” that can’t be specified or articulated. I’m not talking about fringe or conspiracy theory sites here, but rather relatively or very prominent conservative voices that just seem to be getting too much traction. The most famous example occurred when the New York Post obtained a laptop computer belonging to Hunter Biden, and published a story on October 14 revealing certain of its contents. When the Post tried to circulate the story via a tweet, Twitter suddenly shut down its account. Twitter never offered a remotely acceptable explanation — the laptop was clearly genuine — but kept the Post’s account shuttered for about two weeks, right in the run-up to the election. Other examples of the same phenomenon include the Conservative Treehouse, which was informed on November 10 that it was being de-platformed by WordPress (“Given the incompatibility between your site’s content and our terms, you need to find a new hosting provider and must migrate the site by Wednesday, December 2nd.”); Dan Bongino, who was informed on November 18 that his website was being de-monetized by the Outbrain advertising service; and the Northern Virginia Tea Party, which was suspended from MailChimp several days ago for no articulated reason.
And then we have the active suppression of specific information inconvenient to the political fortunes of Democrats. Glenn Reynolds, prominent conservative blogger, has had a regular column at USA Today for several years. On October 20 Reynolds submitted a column on the subject of the Hunter Biden emails, and USA Today rejected it without explanation. (Reynolds later published the piece in the New York Post.). Several days later, well-known reporter Glenn Greenwald — definitely not a conservative — attempted to post a piece critical of Biden relating to the Hunter Biden situation, in particular eviscerating Biden’s official party line that the Hunter laptop was “Russian disinformation.” Greenwald found his piece rejected by the Intercept — a site he had co-founded; whereupon Greenwald determined to leave the Intercept and go out on his own.
The above compilation is just a small sampling of recent attempts at silencing.
The question is, how do you “reconcile” with people who would treat you and your legitimate opinions and political views in this manner? I don’t have an answer to that question.
But the first step must be for the people at the top — particularly Biden, and also Harris — to reject and denounce the Stalinism of many of their supporters. So far, they haven’t done it. I seriously doubt that they will ever do it, any more than they will denounce the widespread rioting and looting that has occurred in this country over the past several months. They don’t think they have to, and they think they can get away with it.