Race Baiting as a Silencing Strategy
“Barack Obama is from Chicago.”
Did you catch the racial subtext of that sentence? You didn’t? Nice try; claiming not to hear racially charged “dog whistles” is one of the oldest tricks in the book. For the uninitiated, let’s flag the infractions: (1) referring to Obama without the word president in front of his surname is disrespectful and quite possibly racist,1 and (2) the word Chicago is quite plainly racist—at least in the eyes of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and friends.
Political dog whistles are coded messages that are intended for a narrow, discrete audience, while passing unnoticed by everyone else. This is how literal dog whistles work; they’re so high pitched that only dogs can hear them. Racially coded appeals have a long, dishonorable, and bipartisan history in U.S. politics, but that’s not the point the Left seeks to make these days. The way they tell it, conservatives are currently and constantly slipping secret codes into their rhetoric as a means of conveying ugly, race-based messages about a person or subject without coming out and articulating it explicitly. By claiming to hear dog whistles at every turn, liberals use racial bullying to suppress and delegitimize political criticisms that are unhelpful to their cause.
Which brings us back to the kings of race baiting at MSNBC. During the network’s coverage of the 2012 Republican National Convention, Matthews and a panel of guests spelled out the dirty business of dog whistles:
Eugene Robinson (Washington Post columnist): It’s all part of this Barack Obama as “other” sort of blanket campaign that has been waged by the Republican Party for some time now. It may be gaining some traction now, though I wonder why now, as opposed to a bit closer to election day?
Matthews: Yeah, let me ask you about that, John. Is this constant barrage of assault…they keep saying “Chicago,” by the way, have you noticed? They keep saying “Chicago.” It sends that message, this guy’s helping the poor people in the bad neighborhoods, and screwing us in the ’burbs.
John Heilemann (New York magazine): There’s a lot of black people in Chicago.
Matthews: Yeah, I think that may have something to do with it.
Matthews and his crew have routinely accused the Right of hurling covert racial invective at the first African American president. The use of “Chicago” is just the beginning. A partial list of phrases lefties have identified as subtly demeaning to Obama, based on the color of his skin: “Golf” (MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell), “Kitchen Cabinet” (radio host Mark Thompson), “Constitution” (Fox News’s Juan Williams), “professor” (er, law professor Charles Ogletree), and “Obamacare,” which was decried as “race baiting” by columnist Michael Tomasky and equated to the N-word by MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry. Things became rather nuanced when the White House openly embraced the latter term, plastering it on OFA (Organizing for Action) bumper stickers. “Once it’s working well, I guarantee you they will not call it Obamacare,” the president himself told a crowd in Maryland, taunting the GOP just days before the law’s October 2013 rollout.2
Dog whistles are everywhere. Writing at the Huffington Post in 2014, Ian Moss informed readers that employing the word arrogant to describe Barack Obama3 is a new spin on uppity, a term with obvious racial connotations. “Recognizing the political incorrectness and well-deserved criticisms which accompany the use of ‘uppity,’ a more palatable, less provocative adjective was needed,” Moss explained. “Enter arrogant. Arrogant is an opportune surrogate for uppity.”
So scratch that one off the ever-shortening list of words you’re allowed to use in describing your president. This encroachment on language is problematic unto itself. What’s the next “arrogant” going to be? What word might you say tomorrow, or next week, or next year, that has suddenly been stricken from the realm of acceptability? You won’t even know that you’ve erred until it’s thrown in your face. Your denials will be sneered at. And you’ll probably end up talking more “carefully” in the future, even if it’s a subconscious shift. Mission accomplished.
Before being fired for declaring—in a scripted, on-air segment—that someone ought to defecate in Sarah Palin’s mouth (it was supposed to sound more erudite in his clipped British accent), MSNBC’s Martin Bashir thought he had the IRS targeting affair all figured out. The real scandal wasn’t that a government agency had been abusing ideological opponents of the ruling party for years, “losing” the relevant evidence, and lying about it. No sir. “The IRS is being used in exactly the same way as they tried to use the president’s birth certificate,” Bashir told his handful of viewers in June 2013.
After reading a decades-old quote from former Republican strategist Lee Atwater describing some actual racial code words from the Southern Strategy era, which included several invocations of the N-word, Bashir revved up for this big finish, in a segment entitled “Clear the Air”: “So this afternoon, we welcome the latest phrase in the lexicon of Republican attacks on this president: the IRS. Three letters that sound so innocent, but we know what you mean.”
The “secret dog whistle” construct is an ingenious and tendentious creature: If conservatives hear the coded message, they’re racist. If they say they don’t hear it, or reject the premise altogether, they’re covering up their racism. And the people most attuned to this form of encryption—liberals—are allowed to identify them around every corner with blanket immunity.
We hate to keep picking on the Lean Forward network, but they’re the center ring of this perverse circus. To wit, Guy appeared on MSNBC’s The Ed Show in July 2012, with network contributor Michael Eric Dyson filling in for the vacationing Ed Shultz.4 Here’s what went down:
The panel was stacked: You had the leftist guest host, the leftist MSNBC contributor Jimmy Williams, your leftist “political comedian” John Fugelsang…and me, the designated villain. Based on guidance provided in the production email I’d received, I was prepared to discuss Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital in the first of a two-segment panel discussion. Instead, when the exchange began, I found myself on live television in the middle of a conspiratorial frenzy over racist Republican “dog whistles.”
The GOP’s sin in this particular case was criticizing President Obama’s revealing “you didn’t build that” expression of collectivism, which the MSNBC crew naturally declared to have been taken “out of context.” Former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu had blasted Obama on a Romney campaign conference call, at one point straying off script, ad-libbing that the president needed to “learn how to be an American.” The Obama campaign and its myriad outrage appendages went ballistic, prompting Sununu to apologize within a matter of hours. (The Obama campaign never apologized, incidentally, for falsely calling Romney a felon, but whatever.)
In spite of Sununu’s mea culpa, his original comments served as “proof” that sinister Republicans were trying to “paint [Obama] as un-American,” Dyson intoned. “It’s code,” Williams breathlessly agreed. “Ask the Birthers…this isn’t 1963,” he added, apropos of nothing. Up next was Fugelsang, whose “comedic wit” instantly lightened the mood: “The use of the word un-American is un-American in itself. Only fascist societies or fascist people use that kind of language.” Charming. The conversation had achieved unanimous agreement—an MSNBC staple—until I chimed in with a simple question:
[Candidate] Obama called President Bush ‘unpatriotic’ for the debt that he racked up over eight years—which, by the way is less than this president has racked up over three-and-a-half years. Was that a dog whistle of some sort?
The panel exploded. “That was unpatriotic!” Williams thundered, his face contorted with fury. “If you don’t like deficits, you’re morally obliged to unlike the Ronald Reagan administration,” Fugelsang averred, again showcasing an allergy to relevant arguments. Williams wasn’t quite through. He (wrongly) implied that Bush was primarily responsible for our nation’s then–$16 trillion deficit (he meant debt), obliviously doubling down on Obama’s 2008 attack. “Do you like the wars that got us half those deficits? Because I actually think that was remarkably unpatriotic,” he sneered.
Let’s be generous and set aside the accuracy of these “rebuttals,” which no doubt merit a hefty fact-check. These guys were proving my point. The irony was both glorious and completely lost on them. After Dyson tried to pin me down on the use of “wolf whistles” (dear God, the dogs had grown into wolves!), I gently tried to note for the home audience how my fellow panelists had huffed and puffed and toppled the segment’s entire premise. “You guys say, ‘well, Bush was unpatriotic for the policies that we don’t like…but if a Republican says President Obama is ‘un-American’ for [his] bad policies—which they immediately retract—that’s all of a sudden some sort of really nasty, insidious ‘code word.’ ” I mistakenly thought they would see how silly they’d made themselves look. Wrong. Their surreal response:
Fugelsang: No one was ever calling President Bush’s policies un-American or unpatriotic.
Williams: Or him! (meaning Bush personally).
Me (visibly incredulous): Yes. President Obama did.
Nobody ever said those sorts of things about Bush…except, you know, both of them—literally 30 seconds earlier. Not to mention Barack Obama, whose comments I’d deliberately recapitulated for the purpose of puncturing their moronic argument. They would either take the bait or realize how hacktastic they sounded and back off. They did the former, springing the trap, blissfully unaware of what had just happened.
Soon we were off to a commercial break, after which they turned their attention to some other outrage du jour featuring Rep. Michele Bachmann, which was at least one of the issues I was asked to prepare for. Shockingly, Dyson was very angry at Ms. Bachmann. Without a trace of self-awareness, he denounced her as (ta-da!) “un-American.”
Behold, the Outrage Circus in full throat. Guy’s MSNBC adventures once again demonstrated the purpose of the “dog whistles!” nonsense: to disqualify criticisms of President Obama as motivated by racial animus, thus rendering them beyond the pale.5 As we’ve discussed, alleging racism is one of the heaviest charges one can level in American life, so dropping that bomb is a particularly effective way of kneecapping a debate. Most people will do just about anything to avoid being slapped with that designation, including keeping their mouths shut. Inventing dog whistles and casually tossing about the “R-word” as a means of bludgeoning political opponents and stifling debate through intimidation hampers important and worthwhile efforts to combat real racism, which still exists and probably always will, sadly. It cheapens the seriousness of the subject and fosters a boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome. It jades the public’s outrage palate toward genuine racism. This is toxic.
But for the Outrage Circus, playing the race card is a hell of a substitute for engaging in a rational debate, and it almost certainly contributes to Republicans’ (very real6) problems among nonwhite voters at the margins. Republicans’ tarnished image on race isn’t entirely unearned, by the way, but that doesn’t give critics free license to endlessly recycle attacks that no longer apply, or never did.
“UNPRECEDENTED!”
A kissing cousin to the dog-whistle preoccupation is the Left’s frequent claim that opposition to Barack Obama is somehow “unprecedented” in nature. The objective here is to establish anti-Obama sentiment as wholly unusual in our body politic and derived primarily from racial animosity, subconscious or otherwise. This tactic (which requires brushing aside Democrats’ own sordid racial history) reached new lows during the 2008 campaign and has been carried on ever since, being most ruthlessly deployed against the Tea Party. The tactic’s adherents are too numerous to name, so here are a handful of representative statements:
I’ll be able to dig up some emails…from people who made up their mind that they don’t want the [Affordable Care Act] to work because they don’t like the president. Maybe he’s of the wrong color, something of that sort. I’ve seen a lot of that and I know a lot of that to be true. It’s not something you’re meant to talk about in public but it’s something I’m talking about in public because that is very true. —Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)
I’ve been in Washington. I saw three presidents now. I never saw George Bush treated like this. I never saw Bill Clinton treated like this with such disrespect…That Mitch McConnell would have the audacity to tell the president of the United States—not the chief executive, but the commander-in-chief—that “I don’t care what you come up with we’re going to be against it.” Now if that’s not a racist statement I don’t know what is. —Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS)
[Obama] has had a very difficult opposition out there…who from the very beginning wanted to destroy this presidency…and some of it is ethnic, and some is good old ideology. But the way they treated this guy is unusual in our history…Al Gore accepted the fact, even though he won by 600,000 votes, that W. was president. And the Democrats accepted the legitimacy of George W. Bush 100 percent…There is an asymmetry here between the hard right and the Democratic center, there is a real asymmetry…There really is. And to say that they are both the same is not true. —MSNBC’s Chris Matthews
These people are trying to convince you (and perhaps themselves) that opposition to this president is unlike anything the country has ever witnessed, due to the color of his skin. Period. If they can convince their audience of that premise, there is no need to address any of the specific objections, since they’re presumed to be fundamentally tainted. This is a cynical, lazy cop-out of the worst kind.
Senator Rockefeller’s inflammatory statement came months before he retired from public life; he bravely insulted his constituents after he was through needing their support. In his defense, aside from rank bigotry, why would anyone dislike Obamacare?7 He cites as evidence undisclosed e-mails from unnamed correspondents. We’re confident that Mr. Rockefeller could produce some highly unpleasant e-mails from ignorant haters. But here’s why his argument is specious: virtually everyone in public life, ourselves included, receives appalling nasty-grams (also see: Twitter), but random assholes do not a movement make.8 It’s also undoubtedly true that some number of American voters explicitly oppose Obama because of his race. Some people support him for that explicit reason. But Barack Obama’s political fortunes aren’t dictated by these small pockets of voters. To pretend as if they do gives little agency to the president himself, despite his significant, documented political skills, and gives no credit to the country for truly making racial strides from the dark and unjust elements of its past.
According to CNN’s exit polls, Obama carried independent voters by eight percentage points in 2008; he essentially tied John McCain among white independents (47/49). Six years on, many of those white and/or independent voters had fled the Obama coalition. A survey of battleground states conducted by NPR ahead of the 2014 midterm elections measured Obama’s job approval underwater by nearly a two-to-one margin (33/63) among independents, a growing portion of the electorate. A Fox News poll released around the same time asked whether people were glad Obamacare passed, or if they wished it had never happened. Among political independents, regret outpaced contentment by a resounding 27 percentage points. So unless these swing voters suddenly embraced racism in droves after sweeping Obama into office, Rockefeller and his ilk are going to have to try harder.
But thoughtfulness wasn’t the point of his remark, was it? The point was to use the repellent specter of racism to silence people. To his credit, one of Rockefeller’s Commerce Committee colleagues who was present in the hearing room for the slander (yes, Rockefeller spun his theory during formal Senate proceedings) pointedly declined to play along.
An uncharacteristically irate Senator Ron Johnson, a mild-mannered Republican businessman from Wisconsin, teed off, challenging Rockefeller’s insulting premise to his face: “I didn’t object to this because of the race of the president. I objected to this because it is an assault on our freedom. And Mr. Chairman…I found it very offensive that you would basically imply that I’m a racist because I oppose this health care law. That is outrageous,” Johnson seethed. When Rockefeller denied that he’d played the race card and accused Johnson of supporting a bad-old-days health-care policy, Johnson shot back, “You are assuming the wrong thing, Mr. Chairman. You’ve implied that I’m a racist. Now you’re saying [I want] to go back to a failed health-care system? Please don’t assume. Don’t make implications of what I’m thinking and what I would really support. You have no idea.”
Rockefeller, evidently unaccustomed to getting called out,9 had his dander up. “I actually do [know]. And, you know, God help you,” he retorted, drawing another impassioned counterpunch from Johnson: “No, Senator, God help you for implying I’m a racist because I oppose this health-care [law]. I was called a racist. I think most people would lose their temper, Mr. Chairman.” Indeed they would, and so he did. Bravo.
But we digress. (We do that sometimes.) The quotes from Representative Thompson and Chris Matthews are even more emblematic of the “unprecedented opposition” canard. Matthews insists that Democrats accepted Bush’s legitimacy “100 percent,” which he says illustrates the “asymmetry” between the “hard right” and the “Democratic center.” We looked into it, and discovered that Hardball was, in fact, on the air during and after the 2000 election. Maybe it was a sports show or something back then, in which case Matthews might be forgiven for having no recollection of the “stolen election” hysteria, replete with hot slogans like “Not my president!” and “Selected, not elected!” Matthews is willfully suffering from political amnesia, which is the only way he can advance these arguments with a straight face.
But Mary Katharine and Guy, skeptics might say, some liberal activists may have lodged those sorts of allegations, but not elected Democrats. There’s a difference. To which we respond, conduct a LexisNexis search and look up what congressional Democrats had to say about President Bush’s victory in 2000. “Official” Democrats still can’t let it go. Thirteen years after the fact, Vice President Joe Biden was still suggesting that Bush wasn’t legitimately elected, introducing Al Gore as “the man who was elected president” at a Democratic fund-raiser. Jimmy Carter—who, believe it or not, was actually president of the United States for several years in the 1970s—has become a self-stylized international elections expert in his postpresidency. He was asked about Republicans cheating to win elections in a 2014 interview with left-wing radio jockey Thom Hartmann. The host overtly implied that no Republican had been legitimately elected president since Dwight Eisenhower, which may give you a sense of the tenor of this discussion. Though the ex-president didn’t fully embrace Hartmann’s bizarre conspiracy, he allowed, “I don’t think that George W. Bush won the election in 2000 against Al Gore because I think he probably lost Florida.”
Over to you, FactCheck.org: “According to a massive months-long study commissioned by eight news organizations in 2001, George W. Bush probably still would have won even if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a limited statewide recount to go forward as ordered by Florida’s highest court. Bush also probably would have won had the state conducted the limited recount of only four heavily Democratic counties that Al Gore asked for, the study found.” Sorry, guys. Mr. Matthews and friends have remarkably selective memories.
The same can be said of Congressman Thompson, who swears he can’t recall Presidents Bush or Clinton ever being subjected to such shoddy treatment as has befallen our first black president. Conservative writers and bloggers have done excellent work refuting the revisionist theory that Bush was treated with dignity and respect by liberals over his eight years in office. The list of counterexamples is basically endless—from the ubiquitous BusHitler placards at antiwar protests, to Senator Harry Reid calling the president “a loser,” to the acclaimed independent film depicting Bush’s assassination, to the parade of Bush effigies hung and/or burned.10 But nothing quite exemplifies Democrats’ febrile “Bush Derangement Syndrome”11 like a very special game of make-believe undertaken by House Democrats in June 2005. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reported:
[Assembled Democrats] pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-MI) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him “Mr. Chairman.” He liked that so much that he started calling himself “the chairman” and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as “unanimous consent” and “without objection so ordered.” The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more Democrats came downstairs to play along. The session was a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war. As luck would have it, all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied to the nation and was guilty of high crimes—and that a British memo on “fixed” intelligence that surfaced last month was the smoking gun equivalent to the Watergate tapes…
At Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the hearing on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations—that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that there was an “insider trading scam” on 9/11—that previously has been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks. The event organizer, Democrats.com, distributed stickers saying “Bush lied/100,000 people died.” One man’s T-shirt proclaimed, “Whether you like Bush or not, he’s still an incompetent liar,” while a large poster of Uncle Sam announced: “Got kids? I want yours for cannon fodder.” Conyers’s firm hand on the gavel could not prevent something of a free-for-all; at one point, a former State Department worker rose from the audience to propose criminal charges against Bush officials. Early in the hearing, somebody accidentally turned off the lights; later, a witness knocked down a flag. Matters were even worse at Democratic headquarters, where the C-SPAN feed ended after just an hour, causing the activists to groan and one to shout “Conspiracy!”
That’s right, dozens of elected Democrats held fake impeachment hearings in the basement of the Capitol, while a motley crew of “9/11 truth” nutters watched the “proceedings” with rapt attention in an overflow room at DNC headquarters.
Those who cling to the “unprecedented” talking point must also have ignored the five-alarm shinola storm that took place in Wisconsin in 2011 over Governor Scott Walker’s budget reform proposals.12 Democratic senators literally fled the state and holed up in an Illinois Best Western for weeks in a futile effort to obstruct a vote by denying quorum. Indiana Democrats attempted a similar maneuver that year, as did Texas Democrats in 2003. But the media only reached for the smelling salts when a South Carolina backbencher lost his cool and shouted “You lie!” at President Obama during a health-care speech. (For the record, Obama did lie throughout that 2009 address to a joint session of Congress, but Representative Joe Wilson’s outburst was still rude and wrong.)
Patriot Games
Dick Cheney is not a fan of Barack Obama. The feeling, we’d imagine, is mutual. When Iraq descended into deadly chaos in the spring and summer of 2014, Cheney upbraided the Obama administration in a series of media appearances for recklessly abandoning the country without a residual force, which created an opening for the ISIS savages to seize large swaths of the country. Liberal journalist Jonathan Alter couldn’t abide Darth Vader’s criticisms, firing off an angry Twitter pronouncement: “What kind of former VP trashes president on EVERYTHING. Total break with long tradition. Totally unpatriotic.” In fewer than 140 characters, Alter achieves a rare self-unawareness trifecta. He displays an amusingly selective and short memory, clumsily plays the “unprecedented!” card, then sticks the landing with a violation of the Left’s patriotism taboo. Indeed, Cheney’s actions marked a distressing departure from a lengthy tradition that by our calculations dated all the way back to January 20, 2009.
Guy dispensed with Alter’s premise by tweeting two video clips in response. The first excerpted a 2004 speech in which Al Gore bellowed that President Bush had “betrayed this country!” (What kind of former vice president would do such a thing?) The second featured a delicious rebuttal on patriotism, courtesy of a 2003 Hillary Clinton screed: “I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic, and we should stand up and say, We are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration!”13 Well said, Hillary. During the Bush years, we were frequently lectured, dissent was “the highest form of patriotism.” When Obama took over, dissent suddenly became the lowest form of racist anti-Americanism.
This speech-chilling “dissent” about-face descended into self parody in March 2015 when hundreds of thousands of Americans signed a petition—on the White House website, by the way—calling for the jailing of forty-seven Republican senators. A number of supposedly respectable pundits, including Donna Brazile, talked up the idea; Chris Matthews sputtered about “sedition.” The duly-elected senators’ alleged infraction: penning an open letter to Iran’s regime, warning that an Obama-arranged nuclear deal would carry no legal weight after the current administration leaves office, absent congressional approval. The missive entailed a prosaic recitation of constitutional fact, and represented an entirely legitimate effort to remind both Tehran and the White House that the federal government’s coequal legislative branch must have a say in the formation of United States foreign policy. This exercise was denounced as an unacceptable attempt to undermine an Obama legacy project (which richly deserved undermining, in our view), and was therefore a crime—based upon a truly ludicrous misreading of something called the Logan Act, which bars unauthorized Americans from engaging in freelance diplomacy.14 Out: the “highest form of patriotism.” In: a basis for imprisonment, you despicable traitors.
No matter how many counterexamples we provide, the “unprecedented opposition, rooted in racism” story will persist. It’s been such a lazy staple of Obama defenders’ diet that it has trickled down to shield other members of his administration, as well. National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s tenure at the White House has been less than stellar, punctuated by two high-profile flops on national television. She infamously repeated false administration talking points about the Benghazi attacks on all five Sunday chat shows in 2012, then declared that accused army deserter Bowe Bergdahl had served the military he’d allegedly abandoned with “honor and distinction.”15 Battling a renewed outcry over his boss’s incompetence, an aide to Rice served up this quote to Time’s Michael Crowley: “I’m not here to suggest it’s because she’s a woman or a minority…but other principals in the national-security team don’t come under this kind of attack.” Right. In that same spirit, we’re not here to suggest that this anonymous aide is a craven race-baiting moron.
One last point on this: The “unprecedented!” crowd is aware that Republicans impeached Bill Clinton, yes? You know, Bill Clinton—that paunchy, white, southern dude. Why, it’s almost as if acrimonious political feuds are fueled by something other than any of the major players’ melanin levels. Like—and we’re just brainstorming here—passionate ideological disagreements. How very…precedented.
NOBODY’S SAFE
Though they most frequently target conservatives with their “silence, racist!” strategy, the Left does not hesitate to eat its own when the moment demands it. Bill Clinton, once dubbed “the first black president” by adoring supporters, briefly morphed into a race-baiting neo-Klansman in 2008. His pointed criticism of Barack Obama on the campaign trail was deemed to be an unacceptable roadblock to liberals’ latest ideological crush, and thus the outrage machine on which Clinton had relied for much of his political career was unleashed against him. “Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” Clinton said of the public image Obama had cultivated. Startled by the resulting outcry, Clinton was forced to call into Al Sharpton’s radio show16 to genuflect and explain how his remarks had been taken out of context.
Two months later, the former president was in hot water again. When asked about Obama’s blowout victory in the South Carolina primary, Clinton uncorked a non sequitur history lesson: “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here,” he said, roping Jackson into the discussion unprovoked. Furious Obama backers denounced Clinton’s racial subtext,17 prompting yet another clarification and apology. Team Clinton suffered a related blow at around the same time when former vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro, a Hillary surrogate, inflamed Obama allies with a candid assessment quoted in a California newspaper:
“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”
Ferraro’s untouchable status as a Democratic trailblazer was immediately discarded, as Obama backers pummeled her with the “R-word.” She angrily responded to her critics in an interview with the New York Times. “Every time [Obama’s] campaign is upset about something, they call it racist,” she said. “I will not be discriminated against because I’m white. If they think they’re going to shut up Geraldine Ferraro with that kind of stuff, they don’t know me.” Within hours of her defiant self-defense, Ferraro was put out to pasture by the Clinton campaign; she quietly stepped down from her fund-raising role. They did, in fact, “shut up Geraldine Ferraro with that kind of stuff.”
Racism Rorschach
Attorney General Eric Holder—July 13, 2013: “There’s a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that’s directed at me—directed at the president. Um, you know, people talk about ‘taking their country back.’ There’s a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is a main driver, but for some, there’s a racial animus.”
Vice President Joe Biden—September 1, 2014: “So folks, it’s time to take back America!”
Mary Katharine’s weekly O’Reilly Factor sparring partner—aside from Bill, of course18—is Fox News analyst Juan Williams, who for years served as a National Public Radio host and correspondent. He is a black Democrat—generally liberal, but occasionally unpredictable—who joyfully wept on-air when Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009. He’s also a bona fide scholar of the civil rights movement, author of Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954–1965, a companion tome to a seminal fourteen-hour PBS documentary of the same name. His employment at NPR was abruptly terminated in 2010 after he offered a bit of controversial analysis during a Fox News segment on the “clash of civilizations” between Islamists and the West. Note well his up-front admonition about the paralysis of political correctness, which proved to be demoralizingly prophetic:
I think political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don’t address reality. I mean, look, Bill. I’m not a bigot. You know the sort of books I’ve written on the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I’ve got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.
Williams spent much of the balance of the segment arguing with Bill O’Reilly about the importance of routinely distinguishing between radical Islamists and moderate, peaceable Muslims. But his frank admission that he sometimes feels anxiety when he sees fellow airline passengers dressed in “Muslim garb” sealed his fate. Realities and personal feelings that violate liberal orthodoxy (and offend a community whose thought enforcers are particularly aggressive and litigious) are not to be addressed in public. You are not to articulate your thoughts, no matter how obvious they may seem, or how many people would agree with you.
In truth, NPR had been casting about for a pretext to expel Williams from its warm cocoon of liberalism for some time. When he made an unflattering remark about Michelle Obama on Fox in 2009, the radio network instructed him to cease associating himself with their precious brand in future Fox News appearances. NPR’s ombudsperson disclosed that she’d received…fifty-six complaints from listeners about the incident. Fifty-six. That’s roughly equivalent to the number of hate tweets Ted Cruz receives between two and three a.m. on any given Tuesday. Those dozens of negative comments made Williams a “lightning rod” among NPR’s listeners, the ombudsperson explained, noting that she’d been inundated with 378 e-mails objecting to Williams’s Fox segments in 2008 alone—or approximately one whole gripe per day. The long knives were out for Juan Williams; his politically insensitive comments about Muslims were merely the turnkey excuse to can him that the NPR brass had been waiting for.
Upon Williams’s departure, NPR’s president and CEO, Vivian Schiller, sniped that her erstwhile employee’s feelings about Muslims should have remained between him and “his psychiatrist or his publicist—take your pick.” Ellen Weiss, the executive who actually did the firing, reportedly denied Williams the courtesy of a face-to-face meeting, telling him, “There’s nothing you can say that will change my mind.” Ain’t that the truth.
When we spoke with Williams about the incident, he said that the trend toward punishing “deviant” thoughts and crushing open debate is accelerating, and agreed that it’s primarily a phenomenon of the Left:
The polarization of our politics has become a source of identity. To be a good liberal, all of a sudden, you speak this way, think this way. Previously, we had political correctness in our society, which was curse enough. But people were speaking out about that, especially conservatives, back in the ’80s and ’90s. But what we’ve got now is beyond PC. It’s not, “Well, we hear you, but let’s try to be polite to each other.” Now we’ve got a situation with a lot of people just saying, “We don’t want to hear you. We don’t want to hear the other side.”
I can open my shirt and show you scars. I’ve been skewered, from the Left, remember—and I would say that it was one of the shocks of my life that this knife came from the Left of me—say, “we don’t want to hear what you have to say because it’s unacceptable and evidence that you’re a bigot.”
There’s something about the way these sort of people view themselves; there’s a certain arrogance and self-righteousness that feeds into this intolerance. That they know what’s right, and when they see somebody who challenges their orthodoxy, they aren’t intellectually curious and wanting to engage. In the old days it used to be called joining the debate. Their reaction, to the contrary, is to pull out the knives to kill the messenger. They do not want anybody from the other side.
It’s not the case that I am a voice of extremism in American debate. Without sounding self-aggrandizing, I think most people would say, “Yeah he makes mistakes, but I don’t think that he’s an insincere guy.” And my background, having worked at the Washington Post for 20 years, CNN, seven books, I could go on. I thought that people would think, “Well let’s hear what he has to say.” But that wasn’t their response. Their response was, “This is the pretext, the opportunity we’ve been waiting for, to knife this son of a bitch.”
I’m sixty years old this year, and one of the biggest surprises of my life has been that intolerance for free thought, it seems to me, has now become the property of the Left, much more so than it is the property of the Right. Just think about my circumstance: I was fired by the Left—NPR—but the Right, Fox, continues to allow me to say what I want to say. They may think I’m crazy a lot of the time, but I’m there. And there’s nobody telling me what to say, or sanctioning me for my thoughts.
Williams detailed the circumstances of his ouster after more than a decade at NPR in a 2011 book entitled Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate.19
#FIREDFORATWEET
One need not be a former vice presidential nominee or a prominent media figure to have one’s life turned upside down or livelihood threatened by the knee-jerk muzzlers. One young man learned the hard way that merely commenting on a national controversy in a manner that offends a certain crowd’s sensibilities can cost you your job. The hubbub in question was the Donald Sterling affair, in which the former Los Angeles Clippers owner found himself in hot water when audio emerged of a phone conversation in which Sterling insisted that his girlfriend stop “broadcast[ing] that you’re associating with black people.” He requested that she stop posting photos to Instagram featuring her black friends, and that she not “bring them to my games.” This, for the record, is actual racism. Sterling was roundly denounced and banned for life by the NBA. We shed no tears for him. But given that his incriminating statements came in a private conversation that was surreptitiously recorded by his lover, then leaked to the media, we do harbor some concerns about how his racism was exposed to the world.
“Racist!” Shot/Reality Chaser
“Silence!” Shot, via Gawker: “Crain’s reports on SketchFactor, a racist app made for avoiding ‘sketchy’ neighborhoods, which is the term young white people use to describe places where they don’t feel safe because they watched all five seasons of The Wire…With firsthand experience living in Washington, D.C., where white terror is as ubiquitous as tucked-in polo shirts, [the] grinning Caucasian [creators] should be unstoppable in the field of smartphone race-baiting…But don’t worry: they’re not racist.” [Our note: The post’s title is “Smiling Young White People Make App for Avoiding Black Neighborhoods.” We’ll just point out that it was Gawker’s writer who made the leap from “sketchy” to “black” all by himself, while in the process of slamming other people’s alleged racism.]
Reality Chaser, via Raw Story: “A District of Columbia news crew reporting on an app that identifies ‘sketchy’ neighborhoods had their van burglarized while they were interviewing individuals who lived in a neighborhood the app identified as ‘sketchy.’…[the WUSA9 intern] had her iPhone stolen, but the crew was able to use the Find my iPhone application to track its location, eventually finding it—and much of the crew’s other gear—in a raccoon-infested Dumpster in a different part of DC.” Racism.
So did Josh Olin, a community manager for a gaming company. He expressed his reservations on his personal Twitter account: “Here’s an unpopular opinion,” he wrote. “Donald Sterling has the right as an American to be an old bigot in the security of his own home. He’s a victim.” This kicked up a small tempest online, and within hours, Olin’s employer (Turtle Rock) tweeted out an apology, repudiating Olin’s views and referring to him as a “former” employee. He’d been let go for mounting a qualified, principled defense of an unpopular figure on his own time, from his personal social media platform. After being sacked for his thoughts, he issued the following statement to the popular video-game blog Kotaku:
Anyone who follows me knows my tweets were not in support of Sterling’s actions. Rather, they were promoting three core tenets I believe in: 1) The harm sensational media presents to society. 2) The importance and sanctity of your privacy within your own home. And 3) The right to be whatever you want to be as an American, as long as it isn’t hurting anyone else. That last point not to be confused with condoning Sterling’s actions, which I don’t.
That said, it’s disappointing to see that a select few in Turtle Rock and 2K Games management bought into this hysteria without even having a conversation with me—or even thoroughly reviewing the context of the tweets themselves. Ironically, it serves as a great example of why I hold tenet #1 above so close to heart.
He went on to encourage gamers to purchase his ex-company’s product, which we confess is a classier gesture than we’d have been capable of if we were in his shoes. Turtle Rock management caved to the shouters and handed Olin his walking papers without even talking to him. In the blink of an eye, the outrage meter shot from zero to eleven, and an entirely defensible tweet about a national controversy cost a young man his job. Gaping onlookers may well have quietly wondered whether they should refrain from wading into sensitive debates in the future. That’s the whole idea. We reached out to Olin, who initially entertained the possibility of talking with us, then decided against it. It turns out he’s a tad mistrustful of the media. In light of what he went through, can you really blame him for going the “no comment” route?
Olin wasn’t alone in his views. First Amendment attorney Marc Randazza penned a column for CNN lamenting the circumstances of Sterling’s downfall, while taking care not to endorse the man himself. Randazza’s conclusion: “As you applaud Stiviano [Sterling’s girlfriend] for bringing the racist old man’s views to light, consider if it were you speaking to a woman friend in what you thought was a private conversation. Do we now live in a world where we can trust nobody? Where there is no privacy? In this story, there are two villains. Sterling represents the bad old days. But Stiviano’s behavior represents the horrifying future.”
And now it’s time for us to approvingly cite Bill Maher20 for the second time in this book. (We’re as surprised as anyone, trust us.) The anti-Sterling mob mentality didn’t sit well with the HBO host, who devoted a protracted monologue to the subject. He asked his audience if Americans really want “to live in a world where the only privacy you have is inside your head.” A few highlights from Maher’s righteous rant:
Even at home, [do we] have to talk like a White House press spokesman? Let me get this straight: We should concede that there’s no such thing anymore as a private conversation, so therefore remember to “lawyer” everything you say before you say it—and hey, speaking your mind is overrated anyway, so you won’t miss it. Well, I’ll miss it. I’ll miss it a lot…Does anyone really want there to be no place where we can let our hair down and not worry if the bad angel in our head occasionally grabs the mic?…If I want to sit in the privacy of my living room and say, “I think the Little Mermaid is hot and I want to bang her, or I don’t like watching two men kiss, or I think tattoos look terrible on black people,” I should be able to. Even if you think that makes me an asshole. Now, do I really believe those things? I’m not telling you, ’cause you’re not in my living room.
If Maher sounds a bit sensitive on this subject, perhaps it’s because he’s been in the crosshairs himself, albeit on a subject other than race. Shortly after 9/11, Maher ignited a major controversy by making politically incorrect comments on the ABC show he hosted, called, um, Politically Incorrect. Maher disagreed with President Bush’s characterization of the hijackers as “cowards,” noting that it took real conviction and dedication to follow through on their horrific acts. He went further, suggesting that by comparison, U.S. missile strikes launched from a safe distance more closely fit Bush’s description. Maher clarified that the degree of bravery or cowardice of a given act was by no means a commentary on its morality. In light of the segment’s proximity to the terrorist attacks, many Americans were offended by what he said. Advertisers pulled out of the show, which was suspended by ABC and ultimately canceled, ending the discussion. Ahem. We say again: outrage and scalp collecting is by no means limited to the political Left; they’re just more skilled practitioners of the silencing arts. Just ask Josh Olin.
ESTRADA V. SOTOMAYOR
Much ink has been spilled on the subject of how viciously conservative minorities are attacked for daring to think critically and coming to the “wrong” political conclusions, so we won’t retread much of that ground here. One telling juxtaposition, however, is worth exploring because it demonstrates the Left’s capacity to both enforce pungent double standards and steer media narratives as they see fit.
On May 26, 2009, President Obama announced the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace retiring justice David Souter on the United States Supreme Court. We’ll note just two major factors of the low-decibel confirmation fight: First, in a 2001 speech at Berkeley, Sotomayor expressed the opinion that her immutable identity—her race and womanhood—equipped her to reach legal judgments that were superior to those of white male colleagues. “I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she told the audience. If a white male, particularly a conservative white male, had offered a similar self-assessment, that transgression alone would likely have rendered him unconfirmable. Second, as a lower court judge, Sotomayor had issued a controversial decision in a racially charged case upholding New Haven, Connecticut’s decision to invalidate the results of an exam taken by firefighters seeking a promotion because too few black officers had passed. Sotomayor’s decision was ultimately overturned by the Supreme Court 5–4, with her controversial reasoning being rejected 9–0.
Those flashpoints served as the backdrop to the administration’s PR push on behalf of the president’s nominee. Much emphasis was placed on her potential historic status as the high court’s first-ever Hispanic member. CNN published a story headlined “Latinos Rejoice in Sotomayor Nomination,” packed with quotes from jubilant Hispanic leaders. A Latino law student was quoted as being “almost numb” with excitement. Representative Nydia Velázquez, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus chairwoman at the time, warned Republicans against opposing Sotomayor’s nomination too vociferously. Her message wasn’t subtle: “The Republicans are looking at ways they can make inroads in the Latino community…they need to be very cautious and careful” in critiquing this “wise Latina,” she said. A White House memo emphasized Sotomayor’s extraordinary life story: She was raised in a public housing project in the Bronx and lost her father at the tender age of nine. She applied herself in her studies and proved to be an outstanding student, eventually earning a scholarship to Princeton. After graduating from that august institution summa cum laude, Sotomayor enrolled at Yale Law School, where she received her legal training. Her undeniably impressive résumé, coupled with heavy attention on her compelling personal narrative and a heavy dash of ethnic politics, paved the way for a smooth confirmation process. Within a few months, she was confirmed rather easily by the Senate, 68–31, and has been on the bench ever since.
Which brings us to Miguel Estrada, a man of whom most Americans have never heard, and whose name may be only vaguely familiar to even some devoted politicos. In 2001, Estrada was nominated by President Bush to the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. As CNN reported at the time Estrada stood to be “the first Hispanic to sit on that court, which sometimes serves as a stepping stone to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Guy wrote a piece at National Review Online in 2009 that ran through the highlights of Estrada’s personal and academic biography, which revealed a glaring parallel in hindsight:
[Estrada] was born in Honduras and moved to the United States as a teenager from a broken family who couldn’t speak fluent English. Despite these obstacles, Estrada put his nose to the grindstone and managed to graduate magna cum laude from both Columbia University and Harvard Law. After a series of exceptional clerkships, Estrada served in the Department of Justice, including a stint as an assistant to the solicitor general under the Clinton administration.
His story may sound familiar. Both Miguel Estrada and Sonia Sotomayor spent many of their formative years living with only one parent. Both emerged from difficult life circumstances to attend and thrive at multiple Ivy League institutions. Each developed impressive records, accumulating reams of serious—and varied—legal experience prior to their nominations. Both were deemed so talented that presidents from both parties sought their services. And, of course, both are Hispanic.
But Mr. Estrada was the wrong sort of Hispanic because his political worldview failed to hew to liberal expectations. Some compelling personal narratives, it turns out, are more compelling than others. He was torpedoed by Senate Democrats, who used the since-jettisoned (by Senate Democrats) judicial filibuster to keep his nomination in limbo for two years.
Miguel Estrada’s Latino identity, hardscrabble upbringing, and top-flight credentials meant nothing to the very same people who experienced identity politics orgasms over Sonia Sotomayor. But there was a more sinister chapter to his story: an internal strategy memo spelled out the reasons why Senate Democrats went to the mat to block Estrada’s nomination, one of which was expressly racial. The document from Senator Dick Durbin’s office fingered Estrada “as especially dangerous, because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.” That’s right, they explicitly stated that the well-qualified nominee was “especially dangerous” because “he is Latino,” and was possibly being groomed for a spot on the high court. Just imagine the five-alarm racial-political firestorm that would have exploded if the parties involved were reversed.
So despite enjoying the support of a majority of upper chamber members, Democrats’ maneuvering ensured that Estrada was never afforded an up-or-down vote. Stymied, he finally withdrew his name in 2003, citing the need to make long-term plans for his family. Democrats declared victory. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York vowed to continue obstructing Bush nominees who were “beyond the mainstream,” in his view, with the late Senator Ted Kennedy crowing that Estrada’s withdrawal was “a victory for the Constitution.” More specifically, he said, the development “reflects a clear recognition…that under the Constitution the Senate has shared power over judicial appointments.” Just over a decade later, Senate Democrats—by then the majority party—changed the Senate rules to banish the very sort of filibuster they’d pioneered to thwart Bush.
Oh, and there actually was a tempest over Durbin’s disgusting racial memo. Senate Democrats, rather than being humiliated by their strategy, released their well-trained outrage hounds, demanding to know how Republicans had obtained the memos in question. Kennedy spokesman David Smith angrily accused Republicans of dirty tricks. “These are thefts of Democratic memos,” he said, telegraphing to the media who the true culprits were. Democrats paid no price for their racial tactics, nor was much attention paid to the revelation that they were colluding with outside left-wing groups to target and defeat judicial nominations. In a piece of political jujitsu, which required media complicity, the Left turned a humiliating exposé into a whodunit over the source of the leaked memos. They got their man: Manuel Miranda, an aide to then Senate majority leader Bill Frist.
Miranda, himself a Latino immigrant, had discovered Democrats’ strategy memos were easily accessible on a shared server. He and several colleagues exploited this availability, eventually passing along some of the most incriminating details to the press. After he was fingered as the leak, Democrats insisted that Miranda lose his job and face a criminal investigation. Miranda was forced to resign in 2004, along with another staffer. He spoke with us, recalling how rapidly a story about Democrats’ external coordination and racial targeting boomeranged around and took him down:
One of the reasons I was so interested in promoting Miguel Estrada, and why I was the leader of his nomination process for seven votes on the Senate floor, is because I am—like Miguel—an immigrant.
As an aide to Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois put it, [Estrada’s] being Hispanic was a ‘negative positive’…they knew Miguel Estrada was a prime Hispanic nominee for a Republican president. And also Janice Rogers Brown, who was an African American judge that they targeted because she was African American. And others, especially women. Women were the most hard hit by Democrats’ opposition, and many women judges were opposed, delayed, and obstructed during those years.
There was no hacking. I was never called for any criminal investigation and was certainly never charged. In fact, I was so certain that we hadn’t broken any laws—that this was all a huge smoke screen by Durbin and others—that I actually filed a lawsuit in federal court asking them to get on with it. If they were going to charge me, to charge me. And of course, they didn’t.
I was surprised at the media that didn’t go after the real story—not how the documents were obtained, but what they said. The documents showed that the Democrat Senators on the judiciary committee were wholly owned subsidiaries of George Soros’s [one of the most prominent and activist left-wing billionaires on the planet] coalition of organizations. One memo actually indicated that the organizations would get together and vote as to which nominees could go forward in the committee.
Judging Sotomayor positively because she is Hispanic was hypocritical and ludicrous considering the fact that media had not equally defended and protected and applauded Miguel Estrada—who had a much more difficult life story to tell. A man who was not only Hispanic, and poor, and an immigrant, but he also has a speech impediment, for God’s sake. His is an incredible story of achievement, and it was halted and silenced by Democrats’ obstruction.
Today, Sonia Sotomayor is one of the nine most powerful legal figures in the United States, who will shape American jurisprudence for generations to come. Miguel Estrada, far removed from the national spotlight, serves as a private sector attorney. He has argued before the Supreme Court on twenty-two occasions, including a handful of appearances since the political process chewed him up and spat him out. Perhaps he’s stood before those nine robed justices and privately wondered what might have been. When we contacted him, Mr. Estrada politely declined to discuss his treatment by hypocritical, calculating partisans more than a decade ago. Miranda isn’t surprised: “Miguel is a very quiet, unassuming man. He suffered a great deal because of that nomination; more than anyone knows. During that nomination, they had to change their home telephone numbers because they were getting so many threatening and hateful calls. It was very upsetting to his wife,” he recounted. We can’t quarrel with Mr. Estrada’s decision to opt out of rehashing that ugly chapter in his life, in which a “wise Latino” was sidelined because he didn’t think the way he was “supposed to.”
The Estrada affair highlights an infuriating reality: when the Left scurrilously accuses conservatives of opposing people like Barack Obama because of his race, they rarely have to answer for what they do to people like Miguel Estrada—whom they explicitly targeted for defeat because of his skin color.
EVERYONE’S A LITTLE BIT RACIST
“It is undeniably the case that racist Americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other,” proclaimed MSNBC host Chris Hayes21 during the 2012 election cycle. He was, in his view, stating the obvious: the center-right Republican coalition is home to most of the country’s racists. The Outrage Circus seems to possess an uncanny ability to manufacture “useful truths.”
To his credit, Hayes later tweeted some data that exploded his thesis. Here’s what he discovered: Economist Alex Tabarrok culled a 2002 study on politics and race conducted by the University of California at Berkeley, which will never be mistaken for a conservative bastion. More important, the survey was conducted years before Barack Obama entered the national picture. One of the questions Tabarrok flagged asked respondents whether they would hypothetically vote for a black presidential candidate.
Among self-described “strong Democrats,” 92.4 percent said yes, with 7.6 percent answering in the negative. Among “strong Republicans,” the breakdown was 94.7 percent to 5.3 percent. Zero partisan gap, with hard-core Republicans holding a statistically insignificant nonracist edge. Another question asked whether respondents favored laws banning interracial marriage. This, too, produced zero partisan gap, with Democrats and Republicans equally opposed. A 2013 Gallup poll showed that fully 87 percent of Americans approve of interracial marriage, including vast majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. When Gallup first began asking that question in 1958, support for mixed-race unions stood at an appalling 4 percent.
We’re not perfect, and there’s progress still to be made. But we’ve come a long way, America. Willfully ignoring all such progress for partisan gain isn’t a healthy or accurate lens through which to view the news. And pretending that one side of the spectrum has a near monopoly on racism as a means of impugning all conservatives’ motives isn’t just a mean-spirited conversation-squelching maneuver, it’s factually false.
We’re especially encouraged by the trend among younger voters to downplay race and disdain affirmative action. A 2014 national poll of millennials conducted by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics asked respondents to rank a series of statements on a scale of one to five—one signifying strong agreement, and five strong disagreement. Young voters were presented with this proposition: “Qualified minorities should be given special preferences in hiring and education.” This was the only domestic policy statement against which a majority of young Republicans and Democrats stood united in disagreement. Content of character, color of skin, and so on.
WHAT NOT TO DO
Winning the long fight against the thought censors frequently entails rejecting their faulty premises and denying them even the smallest of victories. We are great admirers of our friend John Podhoretz’s inimitable writing style and occasionally ornery sense of humor, but we’re afraid he did precisely the opposite of what one should do when caught in the center of a phony outrage dustup. During the 2014 Gaza War, musical artist John Legend fired off a volley of anti-Israel tweets, prompting Podhoretz to tweet back, “Shut up and play the piano.” This was a slight variation on the conservative “shut up and sing” meme, crystallized in Laura Ingraham’s 2003 book by that title. We’re not necessarily big fans of the “shut up” part of this quip, for reasons that should be made clear by glancing at the cover of this book. Nevertheless, the intended message of that phrase is less about actually silencing the celebrity set, and more about reminding people that entertainers are often not experts on the various public affairs topics about which they are wont to spout off. Yet their ignorant, sanctimonious, or loony tunes pontifications tend to attract undue attention thanks to their fame. The spirit of Podhoretz’s snarky put-down of Legend was, Dude, you’re a singer—you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, so stick with singing.
The Left decided that J-Pod, as he’s affectionately known, had committed an act of racism because Legend is black. The tone and ferocity of this pop-up furor made it seem as if Podhoretz had used the N-word while telling a slave to go pick some more cotton. It was ridiculous. The Democracy Alliance hit squad at ThinkProgress wrote the incident up in a blog post, which quickly zoomed around the lefty Twit-terverse. “Angry” liberals flooded into J-Pod’s timeline, spitting profane invective and calling him a racist. No one bothered to check that “shut up and sing” is a long-established phrase that’s been directed at lily white entertainers like Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, and the Dixie Chicks. The calculus was simpleminded: white conservative + black liberal singer + terse online tell-off = RACISM.
The point of this rigged firestorm was to cow Podhoretz into silence. It worked. Panicked about being called a racist over a color-blind insult, Podhoretz disappeared from Twitter for hours, going so far as to delete his account. The mob did virtual victory cartwheels. The fact that he restored his account and resumed tweeting within twenty-four hours was lost in the shuffle—the Outrage Circus had already skipped town, in search of its next victim. Podhoretz was successfully bullied, and his overreactive retreat was interpreted as a tacit admission of guilt. With due respect to John, the correct response in this situation is to straight-up reject the premise of the attack. No, that tweet was not racial in any way, shape, or form. No, I won’t slink away because of your faux outrage. Yes, you are bad people for trying to racialize this. Flip them the bird. And let others have your back, too. Many of us strongly defended him on Twitter in his absence (which made it harder), leading ThinkProgress’s original character assassin to mock the push-back with a self-unaware, racialized follow-up tweet. Guy was rather pleased with this retort:
@guypbenson: Tweets area white dude/racism expert RT @JuddLegum: BREAKING: Conservative white dudes on Twitter are experts on what is and is not racist
1 An NPR ombudsman felt compelled to write a column in 2011 pleading with complaining listeners to understand that declining to refer to “President Obama” on every mention was not a sign of disrespect. Shifting to “Mr. Obama” on second mention was, in fact, official NPR style, dating back many years. How many of those who objected also smirkingly referred to President Bush as “shrub,” or some such witticism?
2 Strangely, the White House returned to calling it the “Affordable Care Act” the following month. It’s unclear why. Kathleen Sebelius could not be reached for comment.
3 Quote: “I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”—Barack Obama, to The New Yorker in 2008.
4 Fun fact: Once upon a time, Big Ed was a failed conservative talk-show host. He switched sides to revive his career, ultimately landing his own program on MSNBC. His nuanced commentaries include such gems as this classic pronouncement during the Obamacare debate: “Republicans lie! They want to see you dead! They’d rather make money off of your dead corpse! They kind of like it when that woman has cancer and they don’t have anything for her!” Though producers told Guy that Ed was on holiday, he’s always suspected that it may have been a physician-mandated regimen of bed rest, given that particular episode’s proximity to Governor Scott Walker’s recall election victory.
5 #DogWhistle
6 Mitt Romney won the white vote by 20 percentage points, the same margin among that group that propelled Ronald Reagan to a blowout win in 1980. But the composition of the electorate has shifted considerably since then. The 2012 Republican ticket lost blacks (93/6), Latinos (71/27), and Asians (73/26), and the candidates were defeated by nearly four million popular votes. The party and its supporters ignore demographic trends, and their own message and rhetoric, at their peril. But that’s for another book.
7 Beyond its broken promises, individual mandate tax, rising premiums, high out-of-pocket costs, canceled policies, dropped doctors, access obstacles, economic harm, increased federal costs, shoddy implementation, massive sums wasted on failed exchanges, data security concerns, expansion of failing Medicaid, and raiding of cash-strapped Medicare, that is.
8 Exceptions exist. Google “Bronies.”
9 MKH, in beast mode, slammed Rockefeller on Fox at the time: “If he were an adult and a real person instead of an entitled senator and scion of a robber baron, he would apologize.”
10 According to a glowing New Yorker profile, New York Times columnist and former Enron adviser Paul Krugman hosted a 2008 Election Night party, at which guests burned effigies of politicians they detested—including Senator John McCain. Krugman has since penned multiple shrill screeds against the Right’s dangerous “climate of hate” and “eliminationist” rhetoric, to which we’ll return in a later chapter.
11 A joking psychological “condition” in which sufferers’ hatred of President Bush clouded all reason and judgment, coined by the inimitable Charles Krauthammer, a trained psychiatrist. And for which his good-humored colleagues actually tried to have him expelled from the American Psychiatric Association. It seems Dr. K hit a bit too close to home with that one.
12 More in chapter 10.
13 The written word cannot adequately capture the shrillness of this tirade.
14 An irate pro-Obama Internet commenter (who, no doubt, “loves science”) informs us that merely reading this sentence is likely a violation of the Logan Act as well. Prepare for your frog march.
15 An often-overlooked Susan Rice classic came during the 2008 Democratic primary. Rice, then an Obama surrogate, was dispatched to respond to Hillary Clinton’s “3 a.m. phone call” attack ad, which suggested that an untested Obama would be ill-equipped to respond to an international crisis. Rice’s stellar comeback, speaking of Hillary and Obama: “They’re both not ready.” An epic flub. And hauntingly prescient in light of the Benghazi affair, with which she would one day be indelibly associated.
16 Mystifyingly, instead of getting himself ejected from polite society after years of despicable conduct, Sharpton has somehow become President Obama’s “go-to” man on issues of race, according to a 2014 Politico story.
17 As far as dog whistles go, this one strikes us as more legitimate than, say, “golf.”
18 She kids! We’re all laughing together!
19 This was going to be the title of our book until we were informed it had already been taken.
20 Just add it to our RINO rap sheet.
21 Guy here. I’ve been friends with Chris for years. He truly is the nicest socialist you’ll ever meet. But occasionally he advances empirically unsupportable and/or intellectually lazy caricatures of conservatives, and I call him out in public. When that happens, some of my readers scold me for befriending such a person and urge me to disassociate myself with him—which is exactly the wrong solution. Living a “siloed” existence is boring and polarizing. It’s exactly the sort of thing we’re arguing against in this book.