I have detailed the dire threat the Democratic Party poses to America if it regains control and implements its leftist agenda. But it can continue to do plenty of damage outside government as well. The left has a stranglehold on the media, our academic institutions, Hollywood, and social media. This means that even if we beat back the Democrats’ effort to win the presidency and control of Congress, they’ll continue to impose their lunacy through the culture. Yes, we must work hard to elect conservatives at the local, state, and national levels, but we can no longer afford to neglect the culture battlefield.
Leftists are a totalitarian, intolerant bunch who now look to shut down opposing viewpoints in both the public and private sectors. In the private sector, we’ve seen the left bully Chick-fil-A for its founder’s biblical views on marriage. Though the restaurant chain withstood that pressure for years, it finally succumbed and withdrew funding for the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes—Christian charities that have also come under withering attack from the left. Note that neither of the charities was accused of discriminating against gays or anyone else—they’ve simply voiced politically incorrect viewpoints on issues like gay marriage, so they are subjected to a torrent of left-wing abuse and boycott demands regardless of the tens of millions of downtrodden people they’ve assisted. So for the left, helping the poor is all well and good, but if you don’t mouth the right political platitudes, there’s no place for you in society.
Inside the policy arena, through laws and regulations, they are limiting our First Amendment freedoms. Outside the policy arena, through political correctness and cultural shaming, they are policing thought and speech, and in many cases, using violent means to do so. They readily suppress our speech, religious liberties, and freedom of assembly. The left has become so intolerant that even some progressives—such as popular blogger Dave Rubin, political commentator Kirsten Powers, and comedian Bill Maher—have denounced this tendency among their own comrades.1
On college campuses the left shuts down debates inside and outside the classroom. Among younger students they set up “zero tolerance” crusades, where kids are punished for such benign activities as forming their breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun.2 They claim to preach tolerance but outwardly practice bigotry against Christians and conservatives.3
They have long since seized control of Hollywood, which serves a steady diet of leftist insanity in the guise of entertainment while actors who express any conservative sentiments get shamed and blackballed. It’s hard for the left to resist jamming their politics in our faces, even in entertainment venues with no logical connection to politics—because for the left, everything is political. Everything. It’s hard to find a television series free of leftist preaching, let alone any of Hollywood’s self-congratulatory awards shows. During the 2020 Golden Globes, even after host Ricky Gervais preemptively mocked the celebrities’ hypocritical political preaching and obliviousness to the concerns of everyday Americans, they still proved his point by droning on with self-righteous political speeches before jumping into their limos and returning to their gated palaces.
Progressives control social media as well—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, etc.—and are censoring conservatives. These giant corporations wield enormous power over speech on their respective platforms, where First Amendment protections do not apply. It’s arguable that these social media giants—not the government—now pose the biggest threat to free expression.4
Progressives are often guilty of the very thing they accuse conservatives of doing. Take the New York Times’ Adam Liptak, for example, who paints conservatives as the real enemies of free expression. He claims the conservative Supreme Court has weaponized the First Amendment to “justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals and guns.” He points to the Court’s ruling prohibiting the state of California from forcing faith-based crisis pregnancy centers to provide pregnant women with information about obtaining an abortion. Of course, far from weaponizing the First Amendment, the ruling affirmed it, by preventing the government from forcing people to advocate for things they don’t believe in. Progressives, in fact, are the ones “weaponizing” free speech, such as when campus radicals claim a First Amendment right to disrupt and shut down speakers with dissenting views.5
Liptak’s distorted argument is hardly shocking as leftists routinely corrupt language, twisting words into the opposite of their true meaning. They use the term “inclusion,” for example, to mean “exclusion.” “Inclusion is merely the new soft, cottony term for marginalizing, shutting down, and kicking out the disfavored,” writes National Review’s Kyle Smith. “Look at Harvard, which brought the hammer down on all single-gender groups in the name of inclusion, then exempted female groups, saying it was okay for them to be ‘gender-focused.’ ” Smith cites other examples of this leftist hypocrisy, such as a Catholic high school removing statues of Jesus and Mary to be “inclusive”—wholly ignoring those who liked the statues.6
The left is also increasingly dogmatic on gender. If you dare to state there are only two genders, you are a bigot. At last count there are more than seventy possibilities. Jon Caldara, a Denver Post columnist, learned this the hard way. In a Facebook post he said he “supports gay rights” and is “strongly pro–gay marriage,” but that wasn’t enough—he was fired after insisting on the biological fact that there are only two sexes. “There was a time when the liberals in the press fought hard to protect free speech,” wrote Caldara. “Now they fight hard to mandate speech because, heaven forbid, someone be offended or have their feelings hurt. [It’s] okay people get offended. In fact, I encourage it. It means we are being challenged. It’s not hate speech. It’s speech. It used to be [what] the press was all about.”7
The left is willing to criminalize certain expressions, even those that a substantial percentage of people—perhaps even a majority—find harmless. The New York Commission on Human Rights, for instance, adopted guidelines that allow government authorities to impose fines up to $250,000 on people who “misgender” a person, meaning to refer to a person by something other than their chosen pronoun. You violate the guidelines if you call someone “he” or “she” instead of using their preferred gender-neutral terms, such as ze/hir.8 To many people this sounds insane, but that’s not the point. The point is that the left will use the force of government to compel you to pay homage to their ideas, even the obviously crazy ones.
Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren showed an Orwellian urge for censorship by signing a letter to the Federal Communications Commission requesting it to “investigate Sinclair Broadcasting’s news activities to determine if it conforms to the public interest.” The senators claim Sinclair had forced its local news anchors to read scripts warning of “one-sided news stories plaguing our country.” “As strong defenders of the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and freedom of the press, we are alarmed by such practices…. Must-run dictates from Sinclair harm the freedom of the press guaranteed in the First Amendment by turning local journalists into mouthpieces for a corporate and political agenda,” the letter read.9 So in the name of free speech, they asked the government to investigate the content of private news broadcasts.
Can you believe this? What do they think CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, MSNBC, CNN, and the rest of the leftist media are, if not mouthpieces for a political agenda? FCC chairman Ajit Pai declined the request, saying the agency has no authority to revoke licenses based on the content of a particular newscast. “I understand that you disliked or disagreed with the content of particular broadcasts, but I can hardly think of an action more chilling of free speech than the federal government investigating a broadcast station because of disagreement with its news coverage or promotion of that coverage,” said Pai.10
I can’t emphasize strongly enough how dangerous the suppression of free speech is to our republic. We must never forget that liberty is what makes America unique. The framers placed free expression at the beginning of the Bill of Rights because it’s central to all our other liberties. But the left is so focused on imposing their grand socialist schemes that freedom takes a backseat. They either do not see or do not care that their quest to muzzle the expression of certain ideas, even abhorrent ones, is more dangerous than the ideas themselves.
Who but the radically intolerant left could even come up with such a heartless and unforgiving idea as “cancel culture”? The term is defined by dictionary.com as “The popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after that they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming.” It’s kind of like saying, “If you say something politically incorrect, you’re dead to us—forever.” Such sweethearts, these leftists. The term, says author and commentator Roger Simon, is “used by the self-anointed ‘woke’ for boycotting—essentially turning into non-persons and erasing from public life—people (usually celebrities, but plebes aren’t exempt) who have exhibited what they deem questionable behavior or written something untoward on social media.” Simon notes that the cancelers went after Ellen DeGeneres just for having a friendly chat with former president George W. Bush, and actor Vince Vaughn was targeted for talking and shaking hands with President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump at a football game.11
Cancel culture is one negative consequence of the wonderful explosion of free expression the internet affords. While the Web has allowed ordinary people a public voice, it has also created an opportunity for social media mobs to destroy people and ruin their livelihoods. It can play to our darkest side because the cancelers have nothing to gain except pleasure in hurting others—they used to call that sadism. T. J. Roberts disputes claims that cancel culture makes people accountable for their misconduct and offensive statements. If it “implied accountability, then there would be an avenue for redemption,” says Roberts. “When the mob controls justice, there is no means by which you can gain their respect.”12 That’s right. It’s not about accountability, it’s about empowering virtue-signaling scolds to project themselves as morally superior, which, come to think about it, is pretty much what leftists always do.
Even progressives are not exempt if they stray from leftist orthodoxy. Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling objected to the firing of a British woman from a think tank for saying that there are two sexes and no one can really change their sex. Rowling would have to be canceled, as would her fictional characters Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Hagrid.13 You’ll notice, though, that not many people get canceled for offending conservatives—because we aren’t totalitarian censors.
Columnist Douglas Murray doesn’t just blame the bullies for this climate but the people who allow them to get away with it. “The problem is not that the sacrificial victim is selected,” writes Murray. “The problem is that the people who destroy his reputation are permitted to do so by the complicity, silence and slinking away of everybody else.”14 I agree, and I’ve been pretty outspoken in calling for a second chance even for people who’ve said stupid things. We’ve all made mistakes—even the cancelers themselves.
Universities, which mainly seem to produce speech-suppressing leftists, regularly betray their stated commitment to academic freedom and free expression. Instead, they promote a radical closing of the mind and hostility to all dissenting ideas. And they do it deceptively, publicly championing the very principles they systematically abuse. Columbia University president Lee Bollinger unwittingly makes my point in his piece denying the obvious truth that university campuses are bastions of selective censorship. Bollinger ridiculed President Trump’s executive order withholding federal funding to colleges and universities that deny speech protections as “a transparent exercise in politics. Its intent was to validate the collective antipathy that many Trump boosters feel toward institutions of higher learning.”15
Notice the little dig there, echoing Obama’s previous disparaging comments about conservatives—Trump supporters are bitter, Bible-clinging, pickup-driving, education-hating lamebrains whose concerns about free speech are really a front for their hatred for institutions of higher learning themselves. Bollinger then incoherently defends academic censorship on the grounds that Americans have long “been grappling with basic questions about offensive speech for decades… [and] exchanges over the boundaries of campus speech should therefore be welcomed rather than reviled when they take place.”16 In other words, the fact that universities allow discussions of their censorship policies proves that they cherish free speech.
Bollinger protests too much. Polls show that 73 percent of Americans support free speech assurances on university campuses, yet according to the National Association of Scholars (NAS), more than 90 percent of colleges “substantially restrict freedom of speech and association.” “Higher education is the special place in society set aside for the freedom to seek the truth—but that freedom is under assault,” said the organization in a statement signed by more than 440 professors, scholars, writers, and representatives of civil and academic organizations. “We call on Congress to cease subsidizing unlawful behavior by public colleges and universities, and to protect freedom of speech on college campuses.”17
Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration made matters much worse. Just as Obama’s Education Department had conditioned federal funding on schools stripping students and staff of due process protections in sexual misconduct cases,18 his Justice Department conspired with the University of Montana in settling a case to redefine sexual harassment to limit protected speech. Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), argued that the administration mandated a definition of sexual harassment so broad that it exposes all students to harassment claims and effectively imposes unconstitutional speech codes at universities throughout America.19
The government imposed these new rules on all campuses by decreeing that the Montana findings should serve as a “blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country.” Henceforth, said Lukianoff, “only a stunningly broad definition of sexual harassment—‘unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature’—will now satisfy federal statutory requirements. This explicitly includes ‘verbal conduct,’ otherwise known as speech.” Campuses would now have “an obligation to respond to student-on-student harassment” even when it occurs off campus. “In some circumstances… universities may take ‘disciplinary action against the harasser’ ” before the case is completed. “In plain English: Students can be punished before they are found guilty of harassment.”20
The Obama administration further sought to deny the accused the right to question the accuser in sexual harassment cases—because the accuser might find it traumatic or intimidating. As liberal George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley observed, “Notably, the Supreme Court stated in 2004 that ‘dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with a jury trial because the defendant is obviously guilty.’ ”21
When U.S. education secretary Betsy DeVos reversed Obama’s unconstitutional policy, Texas attorney Rob Ranco said he’d “be okay” if DeVos were sexually assaulted. Charming. That’s the thanks conservatives get from progressives for, to quote Turley again, “restoring minimal rules of due process for the investigation of sexual misconduct.”22 Turley notes that liberals are imposing a false choice between due process for students accused of sexual harassment and full protection for their alleged victims.
Leftist professors have infected their students, including journalism students, with an alarming tolerance for censorship. When violent leftist protesters at Middlebury College in Vermont silenced visiting speaker Charles Murray, a conservative thinker, and pulled the hair and injured the neck of the professor trying to shield him, the school’s paper, the Middlebury Campus, refused to denounce the protestors, and most of the opinions solicited and printed by the paper defended them. When another violent mob at the University of California, Berkeley blocked Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking, the Daily Californian’s student journalists defended the mob, claiming that the university had “invited chaos” by giving a platform to “someone who never belonged here.”23 Twelve of the university’s professors had sent a letter asking the administration to cancel the speaking event before it occurred, with nearly ninety more professors later signing on. In an email to the paper, one of the letter’s authors, David Landreth, argued the professors “wholeheartedly” support free speech but Yiannopoulos engages in “personal harassment,” so he should be silenced.24
Progressives frequently justify their censorship by labeling certain opinions “hate speech.” “Free speech is no longer sacred among young journalists who have absorbed the campus lessons about ‘hate speech’—defined more broadly—and they’re breaking long-standing taboos as they bring ‘cancel culture’ into professional newsrooms,” writes New York journalist John Tierney. They are “terrified of seeming insufficiently ‘woke.’ Most professional journalists, young and old, still pay lip service to the First Amendment, and they certainly believe it protects their own work, but they’re increasingly eager for others to be ‘de-platformed’ or ‘no-platformed,’ as today’s censors like to put it—effectively silenced.”25
Tierney is right about these “younger progressive journalists” who try to get their conservative counterparts fired and banned from social media platforms, lobby Amazon to ban conservative books, and organize advertising boycotts against conservatives, which we Fox prime-time hosts are routinely subjected to. Tierney makes a point I often make: “They equate conservatives’ speech with violence and rationalize leftists’ actual violence as… speech.”26 These virtue-signaling liberals are ever more dangerous to free expression in this country, blissfully unaware that eviscerating free speech for conservatives will inevitably, someday, boomerang back against the left.
Discrimination against campus conservative groups is another leftist ploy to suppress speech. Trinity University’s student government denied funding to bring conservative author Heather Mac Donald to campus because she has been an outspoken critic of universities’ diversity mania. One student senator commented that if Mac Donald was “going to come to our campus and tell us that, like campus rape culture isn’t a thing, I think that would make a lot of people on this campus feel unsafe.” Another said that inviting her would be “the equivalent of inviting a climate change denier.”27 You got that? It endangers students if someone denies leftists’ claims that rape is a common and socially acceptable occurrence on campuses, and allowing that kind of speech is just as bad as allowing someone to deny that we’re all going to die from global warming.
Often led by extremely high-salaried bureaucrats, university “diversity” programs are a colossal waste of resources that drive up tuition rates. But hearing that is simply unbearable on many campuses. There is only one acceptable opinion. This is the type of leftist intolerance that courses through the Democratic Party and threatens our First Amendment freedoms.
It’s no wonder campus thought police resent Mac Donald, a leading critic of campus censorship. In City Journal, she cited numerous outrageous examples. At Claremont McKenna College, in October 2015, a Hispanic student complained in an op-ed about the school’s “western, white, cisheteronormative upper to upper-middle class values” that make minority students feel out of place. In response, the dean of students attempted to accommodate the student, asking her to meet with administrators to assist them to “better serve students, especially those that don’t fit our CMC mold.” Boy, did that backfire—though minority students had themselves used the phrase “not fitting the mold,” they launched protests, hunger strikes, and marches demanding that the dean resign for supposedly insulting them. Unable to appease them despite an hour’s worth of apologizing, the dean quit.28 Mission accomplished! Leftist hate vindicated!
I’ve covered a few examples of this kind of student tyranny on my show, including Mac Donald’s own experience with Claremont McKenna, where agitators cut short her speech using what she called “brute totalitarian force.” I also told you about a student group protesting a proposed Chick-fil-A restaurant at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, claiming it could jeopardize the school’s “safe spaces.” There are endless other examples.
At Emory University, in March 2016, minority students demanded that the university’s president protect them from “Trump 2016” slogans written in chalk on sidewalks, which made them “afraid.” Groveling university president James Wagner said, “I learn from every conversation like the one that took place yesterday and know that further conversations are necessary.” Wagner announced a plan to “honor” the students’ complaints, to include reviewing the sidewalk Trump slogans. Like a good leftist, he invoked the language of inclusion to announce exclusionary measures. “As an academic community, we must value… the expression of ideas… [But] at the same time, our commitment to respect, civility, and inclusion calls us to provide a safe environment that inspires and supports courageous inquiry.” “ ‘Safety,’ ” Mac Donald comments, “is a code word for suppression.”29
Do schools even question the merits of such complaints anymore? Think about the supposed offense here—advocating the election of someone who was promising to improve living conditions for minorities (and the president has kept that promise). That anyone, let alone the administration of an institution of higher learning, would treat this as threatening is appalling and alarming. Since we’re talking about safety, who is attending to the safety of Trump-supporting students? Wouldn’t they have more reason to feel unsafe on campus, being surrounded by intolerant leftist students, professors, and administrators?
At Evergreen State College, in May 2017, students screamed obscenities at biology professor Bret Weinstein for refusing to comply with an order from the school’s director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services that all white professors must cancel their courses for a day and not enter the campus. The students shouted, “F--- you, you piece of s---.” “Get the f--- out of here.” “F--- what you have to say.” “This is not a discussion.” Weinstein, notes Mac Donald, is a lifelong progressive.
The radical students also cursed out the university’s president, who then praised the students’ misbehavior. “Let me reiterate my gratitude for the passion and courage you have shown me and others,” said President George Bridges. “I want every one of you to feel safe on this campus and be able to learn in a supportive environment free from discrimination or intimidation…. For a long time, we’ve been working on the concerns you’ve raised and acknowledge that our results have fallen short…. This week, you are inviting us into the struggle you have taken up.” Mac Donald informs us that “Weinstein and his biologist wife, Heather Heying, were eventually hounded out of Evergreen.” This, my friends, is leftism at work. This is the future if we don’t fight and win. Our universities are molding a generation of Stalinist leftists and enabling their fanatical behavior.30
Abortion is another hot-button issue for campus leftists. Colorado State University denied a “diversity grant” for its Students for Life chapter “to educate students on the differing perspectives surrounding the abortion argument and encourage students to take a stand on the issue.” But as you well know, “diversity” doesn’t mean diversity of ideas. Campus Activities Program coordinator Tyrell Allen informed the group that the Diversity Grant Committee denied the request because the “speaker’s content doesn’t appear entirely unbiased as it addresses the topic of abortion,” and the “committee worries that folks from varying sides of the issue won’t necessarily feel affirmed in attending the event.”31
So a university denied a voice to a conservative group because the mere expression of a contrary view might make leftist students feel uncomfortable, unsafe, or unaffirmed. Welcome to our world! Conservative students feel unaffirmed and uncomfortable every day at their close-minded leftist universities. Take for instance a Purdue University employee who denounced Purdue Students for Life as “vile, racist idiots” on Facebook for distributing pro-life brochures on campus with the slogan “Hands up, don’t abort”—a takeoff on a Black Lives Matter slogan. How’s that for unaffirming? The students said they found the comments disturbing and were concerned for their safety on campus.32 For once, it seems students had legitimate safety concerns as opposed to using such concerns as a smoke screen for silencing opposing viewpoints.
Progressive students are dutifully learning the ways of their leftist mentors. For example, the University of Scranton student government refused to recognize a chapter of Turning Point USA, a conservative group. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) asked the university’s president to recognize the group in accordance with its commitment to free expression or to provide a viewpoint-neutral reason for its refusal. According to FIRE, the university sent an unsatisfactory response and has not provided clarification despite further requests.33
The student government president seemed hell-bent on denying recognition to the group. He insisted the student government has the right to consider a prospective group and say, “Yikes, nope, denied.” He added that “in the slim chance” the student senate does approve the group, he has the power to veto that decision.34 I can honestly say that conservatives don’t think like this. While we strongly disagree with leftists—obviously—we wouldn’t deny their right to form a student group even if we had the power to do it. But many leftists who doubtlessly consider themselves progressive, enlightened, and tolerant have no qualms denying conservatives a voice, even if those rights are guaranteed by the university to the students.
While liberals downplay this disturbing trend, there were more than fifty attempts to disinvite speakers from college campuses in 2018 and 2019.35 Possibly even more egregious, more than 120 colleges and universities have campus speech codes that restrict what students may say,36 even though courts have consistently held these to be unconstitutional.37 Some of the examples are almost too bizarre to believe. At Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Michigan, three students were arrested and jailed for distributing pocket copies of the United States Constitution in the process of forming a campus chapter of Young Americans for Liberty. It seems that the conservative students had ventured outside the university’s “speech zone” and were violating the school’s Speech Permit Policy by “engaging [students] in conversation on their way to education places” without a permit.38
Can you believe they pay adults to spend their time harassing students like this? At this school, officials have total discretion to deny students permission to speak on campus if the content of their speech doesn’t “support the mission of the school or the mission of a recognized college entity or activity,” said Travis Barham, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, the law firm that represented the aggrieved students after they sued the university. Barham said the school’s policy is so restrictive that it prohibits spontaneous conversations anywhere on campus.39 The lawsuit was eventually settled, with the college agreeing to change the policies that led to the students’ arrest—after a federal judge indicated he believed the school’s policies were unconstitutional.
FIRE defines speech codes as “any university regulation or policy that prohibits expression that would be protected by the First Amendment in society at large. Any policy—such as a harassment policy—can be a speech code if it prohibits protected speech or expression.” FIRE points out—chillingly—that “if universities applied these rules to the letter, major voices of public criticism, satire, and commentary would be silenced on American campuses, and some of our greatest authors, artists, and filmmakers would be banned.” These codes harm some students through censorship, and they lead other students to believe they can go through life free of being offended, embarrassed, or made to feel uncomfortable. Our universities are desensitizing students to our liberties, and as FIRE notes, “A nation that does not educate in freedom will not survive in freedom, and will not even know when it has lost it.”40
It is particularly dangerous that universities, which are supposed to be bastions of academic inquiry and free expression, are leading the charge against free speech. In Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, author Keith Whittington sounds the alarm. “The current crisis of free speech on college campuses,” writes Whittington, “is both symptom and cause of a larger threat to the maintenance of liberal democracy itself.” Free speech is intrinsically part of what universities are about. “Likewise, free speech is bred into the bones of a modern university, and any institution that sets those principles aside can no longer be meaningfully regarded as a proper institution of higher education.”
Unfortunately, Whittington argues, many universities have abandoned their responsibilities and become “mere facades that camouflage a campus culture that has rejected liberal tolerance and free inquiry in favor of dogma and indoctrination.” Universities, he notes, are essential to the communication of ideas in our society and so must honor free expression. “Sacrificing speech subverts the very rationale for having a university and hampers the ability of universities to achieve their most basic goals.”41 But to honor their mission, universities must “preserve the college campus as a sanctuary for serious debate of unorthodox ideas and avoid succumbing to the temptation to make” universities “echo chambers of orthodox creeds.”42
Thankfully, most speech codes that have been challenged in court have been struck down.43 But as I’ve told you, leftists never rest. Instead of tucking their tails between their legs, they double down. George Mason law professor Jon Gould observes that “hate speech policies not only persist, but they have actually increased in number following a series of court decisions that ostensibly found many to be unconstitutional.”44 Enterprising progressives simply began to craft their speech codes more narrowly. “Many of the provisions that used to be called speech codes are now being wrapped into anti-harassment policies,” according to University of Pennsylvania law professor Robert Richards.45
Campus speech codes arose during the 1980s and early 1990s supposedly to address discrimination and harassment, with more than 350 public colleges and universities adopting codes to regulate “hate speech” by 1995. In typical Orwellian fashion, far-left professors argued that these assaults on free speech were needed to protect free expression, particularly of minorities, who they said were made unsafe by exposure to hate speech.
Naturally, it didn’t take long for a wide range of conservative advocacy to be classified as hate speech, which it turns out is just another term leftists distort to muzzle conservatives. Simply expressing support for President Trump—as noted earlier—is now grounds for accusations of hate speech and threatening students’ safety.
The opposition to free speech has jumped from academic misfits to the Democratic Party. For example, in a Washington Post column former Obama official Richard Stengel advocated a federal ban on hate speech, citing dismay among Arab diplomats that Americans are not arrested for burning the Koran. Stengel bemoans that American jurisprudence even protects hateful speech that can lead to violence, calling it a “design flaw” in the First Amendment. Law professor Jonathan Turley responded that this so-called design flaw is free speech itself. Noting that the Democratic Party has “abandoned its historic fealty to free speech,” Turley fears the willingness of leftist politicians like AOC to coerce social media companies into regulating speech—“to do what the government cannot do under our Constitution.” “It seems Democrats have fallen out of love with free speech and lost all tolerance for opposing views,” wrote Turley.46
In light of the left’s growing intolerance, it was predictable that leftists would begin a campaign to harass and intimidate conservatives in public. Kirstjen Nielsen, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Ted Cruz, among many other prominent conservatives, have been verbally abused and run out of restaurants. In years past Democrats would have denounced this thuggery, but after each of these incidents you hardly heard a peep of condemnation out of them.
All this fanaticism reaches its natural endpoint in Antifa. On my show I covered the despicable tactics of Antifa in Portland, where they blocked traffic, assaulted pedestrians, and threatened commuters. According to USA Today, Antifa’s “primary goal is to stop neo-Nazis and white supremacists from gaining a platform.”47 In plain English, this means Antifa aims to use violence to stop their political opponents—including conservatives and Trump supporters, all of whom Antifa labels as neo-Nazis—from speaking publicly. Once again, the Orwellian element is undeniable here—in the name of opposing fascism, Antifa acts exactly like fascists do, violently attacking their political opponents in the street in order to deny them any means of expressing their beliefs.
Antifa already has a long, sick record of violent assaults. In fact, the group managed to get one of its own killed in Tacoma, Washington, on July 13, 2019, after one of their supporters set fire to a car outside an ICE detention facility for illegal immigrants. The attacker, Willem Van Spronsen, then opened fire on the building with an AR-15, hurled Molotov cocktails, and attempted to blow up a propane tank. Police shot Van Spronsen when he aimed his rifle at them and ignored their commands.48
The most recent (and egregious) example of Antifa’s incitement was the plague of riots following the death of George Floyd. The president tweeted that moving forward, Antifa will be recognized as a terrorist organization.
There can be little doubt Antifa will be responsible for more casualties unless authorities take a much stronger approach to their violent acts and adopt a much more proactive policy of defending the free speech rights of the group’s targets.
America’s social media giants are mostly owned and run by leftists, and it’s common knowledge, except among leftists who deny common knowledge, that they are discriminating against conservatives on their platforms. Actually, I find it amusing that leftists deny they discriminate against conservatives on social media while simultaneously defending their right and even their duty to do it—supposedly to protect users from hate and misinformation. They’ll make up some pretext or another for suspending or suppressing conservatives—violation of terms of service, using “manipulated” images, etc.—but everyone understands what’s really going on here. When conservatives, like Daily Caller reporter Chuck Ross, get suspended from Twitter for tweeting “learn to code” at liberal journalists—meant to point out the heartlessness of leftists who say laid-off workers in disfavored industries should simply learn a new trade—it’s obvious social media is cracking down on one political camp and protecting the other.49
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey adamantly denied that Twitter bases its decisions to rank content or enforce its rules on political ideology. “We believe strongly in being impartial, and we strive to enforce our rules impartially,” Dorsey told Congress.50 But the facts show otherwise. Richard Hanania, a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University, assembled a database of prominent, politically active Twitter users who were temporarily or permanently suspended. “My results make it difficult to take claims of political neutrality seriously,” wrote Hanania. “Of 22 prominent, politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 21 supported Donald Trump.”51
Hanania also notes that conservatives are often punished for certain types of speech that liberals engage in with impunity. He cites Sarah Jeong, an editorial writer for the New York Times, who posted many tweets expressing her contempt for white people. Twitter had no problem with those tweets, but it suspended conservative Candace Owens when she copied some of Jeong’s tweets and changed “white” to “Jewish” to make a point. And it’s not just Twitter, Hanania points out. He noted that if you type “Sarah Jeong” in a Google search box, it will not provide auto-complete suggestions that refer to her controversial tweets, whereas Bing and Yahoo both suggest “Sarah Jeong racist.” (As I write this, Bing no longer suggests “Sarah Jeong racist,” though it does suggest “Sarah Jeong Jews.”) “While one could argue that individuals’ worst moments shouldn’t follow them around forever, it is difficult to imagine a big tech company suppressing unflattering information about a conservative in a similar manner,” said Hanania.52
At Facebook, company officers don’t go to particularly great lengths to disguise their political preferences. In fact, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election right on her platform. “Tonight, I am hopeful thinking about what it means for my children to watch Hillary Clinton accept the Democratic nomination for president of the United States and for me to be able to tell them #ImWithHer,” Sandberg posted on Facebook.53 Oops—guess that was a little premature. But Sandberg’s announcement was especially brazen given that Facebook had just recently been accused of suppressing conservative stories, and several of their executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Sandberg herself, had met with conservative commentators to try to convince them of Facebook’s political neutrality.54
At Google, a window opened into the company’s culture when a software engineer, James Damore, sent around a memo proposing that biological differences between men and women could explain the gender gap in tech companies, since women are more prone to “empathizing” and men to “systematizing.” In response, Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent a memo to employees beginning with his assurance that “we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves”—and then he completely undermined that guarantee by whining about how Damore’s memo made his snowflake employees feel “under threat” and unsure whether they can “safely” express their views. Soon after that, Damore was fired.55
Similarly, in 2014, before “Cancel Culture” was even a thing, Brendan Eich was hounded into resigning as CEO of Mozilla when it became known that years before, he’d contributed to California’s Proposition 8, affirming that marriage is between one man and one woman. There was no tolerance, no mercy, and no forgiveness for Eich, just naming, shaming, and unceasing harassment until he could no longer continue in his job.56
I’ve often featured James O’Keefe on my show to highlight his incredible investigative reporting of abominable leftist behavior. His Project Veritas organization interviewed whistle-blowers from Pinterest and Google, revealing that these companies intentionally suppress conservative content in an effort to promote the left’s agenda and prevent another “Trump situation” in 2020.57 Proving O’Keefe’s point, YouTube and Vimeo blocked access to the interviews.58
Even Ravelry, a presumably apolitical knitting website, banned pro-Trump messages and users from its site, claiming Trump’s message is racist.59 Notice the telltale nod to inclusiveness as Ravelry drummed out political dissidents from their knitting club: “We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy.”60 Why would a knitting site take such a polarizing political stance? The answer, as I’ve told you, is that the left politicizes everything. Leftism is their religion. It is their constitution. It is their be-all and end-all. You’d think they’d enjoy bringing people of various political views together to share their common hobby, but no, everything is subservient to left-wing politics.61
Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s digital guru, explains that “Democrats view free speech as a threat to their political ambitions.”62 They “are extremely concerned about the power of social media to circumvent the standard media channels they control. Legacy media outlets such as CNN and The New York Times are vital to the Democrats’ political power, using their influence to create an ‘echo chamber’ in support of liberal viewpoints,” said Parscale, referring to Ben Rhodes’s media manipulations, as I detailed earlier.
The left has employed this strategy often during Trump’s term, with their media mob acting in unison to undermine Trump and his agenda, such as their despicable smearing of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh. “Today’s mainstream media act more like public relations firms on the payroll of the Democratic Party than independent seekers of truth,” Parscale explains. But President Trump counters the Fake News attacks through his “revolutionary use of social media.” This has terrified Democrats, who aren’t used to competing on a level playing field, “so they want social media companies, especially Twitter and Facebook, to carry water for them just like the legacy press has done for so long,” says Parscale.
Oftentimes, these social media giants do just that. For example, Twitter used fake-news CNN and the Washington Post, of all newspapers, as their fact checkers, which is laughable.
Parscale notes that Democrat presidential candidates urged Twitter to ban Trump permanently, and congressional Democrats are trying to intimidate Facebook into policing “hate speech,” meaning conservative speech. Democrats support Twitter’s decision to ban political advertising, says Parscale, “because social media executives are in bed with the Democrats and most of their employees are far-left ideological zealots” who use their power “to undermine conservatives and advance a radical liberal agenda” while claiming they are promoting “fairness.”63 The Democrats have no real regard for fairness or free speech protections, which are just platitudes they invoke when it helps promote their agenda or stifle conservative policies.
Several remedies have been proposed to curtail the unfair treatment of conservatives. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields certain internet platforms from liability for posts their users publish. The law’s rationale is that these social media platforms are like phone companies—neutral platforms, not content providers, and they allow people to post regardless of their political views. But some Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz, argue these companies censor conservative content, so their status should be revoked. Senator Josh Hawley introduced the “Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act,” which would amend Section 230 to provide that social media companies will lose their immunity from liability unless they submit to an external audit to show that their content removal practices are politically neutral.64
President Trump has suggested looking into antitrust action against these companies by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. After all, the reason a few Silicon Valley firms have been able to suppress the conservative message is that they have near-monopolies. “No one cares who gets kicked off MySpace,” writes Peter Van Buren. “If you end the monopolies, you defang deplatforming.”65
Liberals have been outraged at the prospect of losing their media monopoly since the birth of the alternative media. And the advent of social media, even with its current biases, is particularly threatening to the media mob, empowering any old Dick or Jane to post alongside the “professionals” and possibly see their contribution go viral. The hate-Trump media mob has reacted by calling for more speech suppression—they want filters, more censoring of “hate speech,” and the positioning of media outfits as arbiters to rule on the truthfulness of users’ posts.
It particularly frosts Democrats that Republicans oppose campaign finance reform on free speech grounds and that the Supreme Court’s 2009 Citizens United decision vindicated that view, holding that the First Amendment protects political speech, which includes corporations spending money on political advocacy. At issue in the case was whether the Federal Election Commission could ban a movie criticizing Hillary Clinton, then running for president in the Democratic primaries, from distribution by a nonprofit company.66
The reasoning is that freedom of speech is meaningless in elections if Congress can prevent you from spending money to communicate your message. “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion. “The government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker’s corporate identity.” The Court made clear that “it is our law and our tradition that more speech, not less, is the governing rule.”67
What part of “Congress shall make no law” do people not understand? The Democrats tried and failed to secure a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and narrow the First Amendment by empowering Congress to limit fund-raising and spending on election campaigns and independent political speech.68 Gaining the support of fifty-four Democrat senators,69 the proposed amendment, instead of “leveling the playing field,” as Democrats falsely claimed, would hurt candidates trying to unseat incumbent congressmen and limit ordinary Americans’ expression of their views about candidates. By an amazing coincidence, it would also benefit Democrats, who have a built-in advantage with the liberal media. So under the amendment, the media mob could continue dedicating their huge resources to promoting Democrats, while spending would be constricted for conservatives trying to counter those messages.70
But the left never gives up. Our friend Adam Schiff has proposed another constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.71 And the Democrats have launched a separate attack through H.R. 1, a bill deceptively called the “For the People Act” but more accurately described by Senator Mitch McConnell as the “Democrat Politician Protection Act.”72 The bill would encroach on free speech rights by empowering Congress to “regulate the raising and spending of political money.” Ted Cruz noted that the legislation would give “Congress power to regulate—and ban—speech by everybody.”73 Even the left-wing American Civil Liberties Union warned the bill would “unconstitutionally infringe the freedoms of speech and association” and “silenc[e] necessary voices that would otherwise speak out about the public issues of the day.”74 Yes, exactly—that’s the point of the bill, and that’s the aim of the Democratic Party.
Let’s now turn our attention to the left’s assault on religious liberty. Many leftists are outwardly anti-Christian. The left denies they’re antireligious, and I don’t challenge the sincerity of progressives who are professing Christians. But there is no disputing that liberalism by and large today is hostile to Christian values and religious liberties. They oppose homeschooling and can’t seem to tolerate Christian-based symbols like Christmas trees or even candy canes on public property. They revile Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, for their Christian faith.
The Democrats showed their true colors when they booed God at their 2012 convention. That was no one-off incident—it’s part of a deliberate effort to diminish Christianity and champion atheism. In August 2019, the Democratic National Committee unanimously passed a resolution celebrating the religiously unaffiliated, noting—nonsensically—that they’re the “largest religious group” among Democrats. The resolution also affirmed that they “overwhelmingly share the Democratic Party’s values” and “have often been subjected to unfair bias and exclusion in American society.” The Secular Coalition of America, a lobbying group for atheists, agnostics, and humanists on public policy, praised the resolution as the first time a major party “embraced American nonbelievers.”75 Sarah Levin, director of affairs from the Secular Coalition of America, said the resolution would help “to ensure that policy is driven by science and evidence, not sectarian beliefs,” implying that one must choose between one’s religious beliefs on the one hand, and science and evidence on the other.76 Annie Laurie Gaylor, copresident of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, touted the resolution as a “political landmark” that is “long overdue.”77
The resolution maligns believers and denounces their alleged abuse of religious liberty to infringe on certain groups’ civil rights. “Those most loudly claiming that morals, values, and patriotism must be defined by their particular religious views have used those religious views, with misplaced claims of ‘religious liberty,’ to justify public policy that has threatened the civil rights and liberties of many Americans, including but not limited to the LGBT community, women, and ethnic and religious/nonreligious minorities,” the resolution reads.78
What conservatives have long understood is that the left is not just trying to convince people of their arguments but to suppress opposing views. We saw that in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, in which a gay couple sued the owner, Jack Phillips, not because he refused to serve gays in general but because he refused, based on his religious beliefs, to make a cake celebrating a same-sex wedding. We saw the same impetus in Beto O’Rourke’s demands to strip Christian educational institutions, churches, and other charities of their tax-exempt status unless they recognize same-sex marriage.
The Obama administration targeted Christian adoption agencies for trying to place orphans with Christian parents and sought to compel Catholic nuns to comply with an Obamacare mandate to provide access to contraceptives and abortifacients as part of their health-care package.79 Obamacare enforcers also came after Hobby Lobby, which refused to comply with the mandate because of its founders’ religious convictions. NARAL, a pro-abortion group that supports Democratic candidates, opposes conscience laws that permit medical doctors and other providers to opt out of activities, such as abortion or euthanasia, that violate their religious convictions.80
The Democrats are also trying to advance this agenda through the Equality Act, which was introduced in the House in March 2019 and would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “This would essentially remove any legal protections that small business owners, nonprofits, churches, schools, and private individuals currently enjoy to live and operate according to traditional and deeply held religious beliefs about sex, the human family, and human dignity,” writes Rev. Joseph D’Souza, founder of Dignity Freedom Network.81 “This is not a good-faith attempt to reconcile competing interests,” said University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock. “It is an attempt by one side to grab all the disputed territory and to crush the other side.”82
Fortunately President Trump strongly defends America’s religious liberty. “On every front, the ultra-left is waging war on the values shared by everyone in this room,” he said at the 2019 Values Voter Summit. “They are trying to silence and punish the speech of Christians and religious believers of all faiths…. They are trying to use the courts to rewrite the laws, undermine democracy, and force through an agenda they can’t pass at the ballot box. They are trying to hound you from the workplace, expel you from the public square and weaken the American family and indoctrinate our children. They resent and disdain faithful Americans who hold fast to our nation’s historic values. And, if given the chance, they would use every instrument of government power, including the IRS, to try to shut you down…. We know that families and churches, not government officials, know best how to create strong and loving communities…. And above all else, we know this: in America, we don’t worship government, we worship God.”83
Trump haters accuse the president of cynically promoting religious liberty to pander to Christian voters, but has any president since Ronald Reagan been such an outspoken proponent of Christian liberties? Would a fair-weather supporter of Christianity have taken this message to the United Nations as President Trump did, declaring that religious liberty is not just an American constitutional right but a God-given right that should be respected by all nations?
Just a month after Trump’s remarks at the UN, Attorney General William Barr delivered an impassioned speech in support of religious liberty at the University of Notre Dame.84 Barr argued that we are witnessing much more than merely a pendulum swing against religious liberty in America. “First is the force, fervor and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion we are experiencing today. This is not decay, it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives’, have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values,” said Barr. “These instruments are used not only to affirmatively promote secular orthodoxy, but also drown out and silence opposing voices, and to attack viciously and hold up to ridicule any dissenters.” Barr also noted the irony that the “secular project has itself become a religion, pursued with religious fervor. It is taking on all the trappings of a religion, including inquisitions and excommunication.”85
In light of the left’s antagonism to Christianity, it’s unsurprising that leftist academics are increasingly questioning the need for religious liberty itself. University of Chicago Law School professor Brian Leiter’s Why Tolerate Religion? asks why religion is singled out for preferential treatment in both law and public discourse.86 Micah Schwartzman, University of Virginia School of Law professor, argues in his piece “What If Religion Is Not So Special” that “[l]eading accounts of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses fail to provide a coherent and morally attractive position on whether religion warrants special treatment as compared with secular ethical and moral doctrines.”87
As we’ve seen with the Democrats’ full embrace of identity politics, what begins as bizarre left-wing theorizing on college campuses often makes its way into the Democratic Party. Rejecting the very concept of religious liberty may be a fringe position now, but time will tell how long that remains the case.