Dissent Is Seditious – If It Comes From The Right

by T.L. James | 9:18 pm, April 5, 2009 | Comments Off

At RedState, writer Caleb describes succinctly the tendency of the left to pin every tragedy on the center-right commentariat:

This wing of Democrats, Kos and those who follow him, they want only one thing from conservatives: Silence. And convincing people that being conservative is enough to warrant cop killing is just one example of how they expect to attain it.

Something ugly has been growing on the left for many years, most visibly the last eight. It’s a closed loop ideology that holds that opposing points of view are de facto violence. It is filled with a rage and contempt, a vile and sneering disdain which views conservatives as less than human, that considers conservative thought to be … thought crime. It is festering and spreading, and it carries with it the specter of the silencing of dissent. Because it does not engage, it does not debate, and it does not quibble over policy or argue on the merits.

Instead it points an indignant finger at the whole of conservatism and names us murderous. That is not political discourse, it’s not any kind of discourse. It’s Olbermann and Garafalo claiming conservatism represents mental disease and Frank “once an evangelical” Schaeffer urging Obama to purge conservatives from the political arena. And it’s Markos Moulitsas and his minions routinely pinning murder on talk show hosts. It isn’t political discourse, it’s invective and spittle-flecked rage masquerading as commentary.

This blame game is hardly new, of course; the best-known early example of it in the talk-radio age is President (!) Bill Clinton’s contrived blaming of Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombing, and before talk radio, the Johnson campaign’s smearing of Barry Goldwater as a Strangelovian madman who would plunge the world into nuclear apocalypse.  More broadly, this blame game includes the left’s most cherished calumny: recasting Naziism and fascism generally as phenomena of the right rather than implementations of their own socialist philosophy, slyly and persistently equating the classical liberal/libertarian strain in our own country with an unrelated political philosophy which brought about the destruction of Europe and the industrialized murder of millions of Jews and other minorities until it became an unquestioned and unquestionable “truth”.

What is new, however, is the focus and energy this demonization of the right by the left has acquired since the rise of the ‘netroots’ in 2004.  And what is chilling is not as much the libel itself nor the eliminationist rhetoric which increasingly accompanies it, but the fact that the left now talks openly about reimplementing the Fairness Doctrine and possesses the power of one-party rule with which to do so.  With the FTC considering applying truth-in-advertising rules to blogs and social networking sites, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine the FEC applying “campaign finance” restrictions on free speech to the political speech of ordinary citizens on the internet.

I long ago noticed another tendency on the left: a form of projection whereby the left paints its deepest paranoid fears onto the right while out of power, and then proceeds to do exactly what they accused the right of doing when they are eventually put back in control of government. 

Markos Moulitsas — a.k.a. “kos” — created Daily Kos on May 26, 2002, in those dark days when an oppressive and war-crazed administration suppressed all dissent as unpatriotic and treasonous. As a veteran, Moulitsas was offended that the freedoms he pledged his life for were so carelessly being tossed aside by the reckless and destructive Republican administration. [emphasis added]

While this reads like irony, the left honestly believes that their dissenting views were systematically suppressed – just read any lefty blog or listen to any lefty talk radio show…they rarely shut up about how they have been silenced.  This habit of warped political projection provides the left with a self-righteous rationalization for implementing their own suppression of dissent…for real, and not just in the fever dreams of the politically paranoid.

The left wants to silence the right, as Caleb describes in the linked article, the left now has the power to do so via unchallengable one-party rule, and the left has a rationalization by which to legitimize this silencing (at least to themselves). That is a dangerous combination.

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