MAKE AMERICA TALK AGAIN
Donald Trump is president1 and Berkeley is burning. Maybe it’s time for us to revisit our subject. Let’s start by setting a scene:
On June 16, 2015, sitting in a Manhattan hotel room, we took a break from our national book tour promoting End of Discussion to watch an unusual spectacle unfold on cable news.
Over the course of our tour, we had discussed our thesis that weaponized political correctness is crushing Americans’ ability to engage in empathic and reasoned debate. We argued that demonization of the opposing side and phony outrage are making our country less free (and fun), and the political Left is the primary culprit in silencing alternative viewpoints and trying to “win” debates by preventing them from happening. (There’s a lot more to it than that, so please do keep reading.)
Time and again on tour we found ourselves admonishing the silencers that convincing people to shut up is not the same thing as actually convincing people. We warned that if you bully folks hard enough and long enough, a backlash will build, even as we were unsure of what that backlash might look like.
It turned out the backlash took the form of a single man: a brash, famous-for-being-rich real estate mogul turned reality television star. On that Tuesday afternoon, we watched Donald J. Trump dramatically descend the escalator at Trump Tower and uncork a presidential announcement the likes of which America’s political class has never seen. It wasn’t a speech so much as a disjointed, grievance-laden stream of consciousness.2 The themes he raised that day would soon become familiar: The United States was getting screwed over by various enemies and adversaries, and our leaders were letting it happen. The time had come, he intoned, for him to make the country “great again,” and he was willing to ruffle any feather and take out any sacred cow in that pursuit.
The reaction of the political press and establishment was nearly universal: mildly amused revulsion, coupled with certitude that this man would never even sniff the nomination of his hastily-adopted political party, let alone make any sort of serious run at the presidency. Seventeen months later, he was elected the 45th president of the United States.
The reasons Trump won are myriad, and many fall well outside the scope of this book. But the Left’s arrogant cultural ascendancy and efforts to demean traditionally right-of-center views as “hateful” and “bigoted” were a large part of it.
The media’s immediate pile-on of ridicule was a signal to millions that maybe Trump was onto something. They started paying attention—and defending him. He emerged unscathed, even bolstered, by a string of “outrages”—both frivolous and genuinely distasteful—that would have doomed any other politician’s campaign. By flooding the airwaves with “outrages” on a sometimes hourly basis, Trump fried the media’s circuits. His critics couldn’t focus on any given flare-up without getting sidetracked by the next one. We are outraged by Donald Trump’s latest attack on…wait, oh my God, did you see what he literally just said?
The Trump train began to fill up with a growing number of citizens who’d grown exasperated by smothering political correctness and its enforcers. Legions of Republican primary voters ultimately chose to put aside concerns about character (and conservative values) to boost a man who represented a giant middle finger to the bipartisan political establishment, particularly the you-can’t-say-that tut-tutters in the mainstream press. When asked why voters were willing to make such moral and ideological compromises on his behalf, many Trump supporters offered some variant of the same answer: Because at least he’s willing to fight. After years of feeling culturally bullied by liberal tastemakers for believing the “wrong” things, many voters had concluded that it was time to hire a bully of their own.
THE BACKLASH TO THE BACKLASH
Fortunately, the left-wing outrage brigade has taken Trump’s surprise victory in stride, engaging in constructive self-reflection and working hard to mitigate some of their most self-destructive impulses. Just kidding; they’ve lost their damn minds.
To be fair, after Trump was elected president, there was a brief discussion of how the Left should react. Columbia professor Mark Lilla suggested the formerly unspeakable in the New York Times: “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing. One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end.”
MSNBC host Krystal Ball, ahem, crystallized3 the phenomenon this way the day after the election: “They said they were facing an economic apocalypse, we offered ‘retraining’ and complained about their white privilege. Is it any wonder we lost?” But most, certainly those on college campuses and in activist circles, decided more moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity was the answer. More lectures on white privilege would do the trick, and anyone who suggested different should, well, shut up.
Rather than acknowledge the destructive climate that created an opening for someone like Trump to win the presidency, the Resistance is tripling down on their exact same tactics. Sometimes it truly feels like they’re deep cover pro-Trump agents, working tirelessly for his re-election. Perhaps some of them will finally reveal their secret roles in all of this when Trump coasts into his fifth term, each receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a special ceremony at Mar-a-Lago—which by that point will be designated the eighth, and most terrific, wonder of the world.
How bad has it gotten? As we outlined in this book two years ago, the phenomenon is not just on college campuses; it’s not just in political races; and it’s not just reserved for public figures. That’s why private citizens reacted with their votes, and why they’ll continue to react as long as stuff like this keeps happening.
One particularly depressing incident played out in the spring of 2017 when left-wing agitators announced their intention to physically assault Republican participants in the Avenue of Roses Parade in East Portland, Oregon. Yep, it’s just an annual parade kicking off a festival that celebrates flowers. “We will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade…and drag and push these people out,” a local “anti-fascist” warned organizers in an e-mail, adding that his followers would shut down roads if they didn’t get their way. And they got their way, sort of. The parade was canceled. The Republicans, who had always participated peacefully in the parade, were no doubt planning to intimidate with only the most foreboding kinds of flowers, hydrangeas and the like.
The cancellation upset the goons, who complained that they didn’t want to ruin the experience for everyone, just for the so-called fascists. “We intended to stand between [the Republicans] and those who they wanted to intimidate….We intended to block out their hate and shut down their violence,” a mob leader said in a statement to local media. How deeply, creepily Orwellian. The end-of-discussion culture is getting worse.
TRUMP: PART DISEASE, PART CURE
One of the ways the outrage industry operates is to seize upon harmless or awkwardly-stated comments from conservative politicians in order to contrive tempests of feigned horror and indignation. They select a target, “controversialize” his or her statement, and kick up a firestorm that consumes a news cycle or two, forcing the opposition into a defensive crouch. Donald Trump took this playbook, doused it in Tremendous Trump Vodka, and torched it.4 Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but in the final chapter of this book we implore public figures not to grovel and apologize for things about which they’re not truly sorry. Trump takes this approach to an extreme, rarely apologizing for anything, including for things he obviously should.
On some level, watching America’s practiced political hit men flail and fail in the face of this one-man rhetorical Roman candle was entertaining and gratifying. Trump’s contempt for “the rules,” which had so often been applied unevenly to members of the two major parties, allowed him to strike back aggressively and immediately. Sometimes he was clumsy. Sometimes he was cringeworthy. But his pushback against slights was always as swift and forceful as it was inevitable. Watching the high priests of political correctness squirm and gnash their teeth was like a drug to many voters. Trump was fighting for them, and playing dirty.
The media showered Trump with $2 billion in “earned” (i.e., unpaid) airtime and column inches during the GOP primary, according to a study by SMG Delta. The Trump show was big business for the press, attracting millions of eyeballs and clicks every single day. Many news editors, producers, and executives assumed he was bound to lose anyway, so it was safe to help promote an “unelectable” rodeo clown, lining their pockets in the process. A win-win. But by the time the tone of their coverage shifted from “wow, look at this fascinating phenomenon!” to “this neo-fascist is a threat to our very republic!” (roughly coinciding with Trump’s effective clinching of the Republican nomination, not coincidentally), the horse was out of the barn. One of two human beings was going to become the next president. One of them was Donald Trump, and luckily for him, the other one was the almost supernaturally charmless and inauthentic Hillary Clinton.
Trump broke virtually every political rule in existence. He rode the electorate’s desire for change despite being outspent by his opponent two-to-one. (Bear in mind that statistic when we address the Democrats’ money in politics duplicity in a subsequent chapter.) The Left’s outrage mongers and cultural floppers threw everything they had at Donald Trump, and they lost. Trump seemed to thrive in this chaotic, target-rich environment, leading the media around by its nose with his endless stunts and tweets. He beat them.
We are confident that none of this would have been possible outside of the stifling, toxic end-of-discussion atmosphere that the Left had fostered for years. They laid a foundation of division and resentment that eventually led to the stunning counterpunch Trump embodied and delivered. Come to think of it, we could probably just retitle this book This Is How You Got Trump, and call it a day.
But even as loathers of political correctness, we have not welcomed the era of Trump with unbridled enthusiasm. We fear that too much of the Right now festishizes anti-PC to such an extent that a politician’s ability to annoy or inflame the Left is prized above foundational conservative values, including decency, personal responsibility, and ideological coherence. It doesn’t speak highly of a political movement if its members embrace justifications, such as, sure, he may be an ignorant amoral narcissist and a lifelong liberal until very recently, but at least he’s ** pissing off the Washington Post!
In our day jobs, we’ve both settled into the reality of a Trump presidency—surreal as it feels at times5—by adopting this approach: Calling ’em as we see ’em, issue by issue. We hand out praise and criticism as earned. This stance seems to befuddle some of our more reflectively tribal Twitter followers, but it strikes us as sensible and fair. Applauding President Trump for, say, nominating Justice Gorsuch to the Supreme Court doesn’t mean that we’re obliged to flush candidate Trump’s appalling racial attacks on a Hispanic federal judge, or his deeply unseemly treatment of a Muslim Gold Star family, down the memory hole. It’s all part of the equation. No airbrushing.
Expecting political figures, no matter how nontraditional they are, to behave like adults and to treat critics with some modicum of restraint and respect is not weakness or caving to the Left. The outrage mob’s grotesque overapplication of various -isms and -phobias (much more on that to come) for the purpose of crowding out good-faith dissent does not mean that racism or misogyny are myths. We fear that Trump’s cartoonish carelessness and nastiness only empowers those who seek to sanitize our discourse for their own self-serving political purposes.
The age group most opposed to Donald Trump is the Millennial generation, of which we are senior members.6 For better and sometimes worse, our generation has been conditioned to view inclusivity as a religious tenet. Trump’s statements over the years about different groups of people—especially women—have rendered him anathema to most Millennial voters, now the largest age bloc in the country. He carried barely more than one-third of voters age eighteen to twenty-nine last November. Responding to the age of identity politics, Trump is redefining conservatism in the eyes of many young people to mean something that is quite different from the ideas and principles we cherish.
Then there are Trump’s blatant attacks on free speech. He has made it clear he has no real understanding of the First Amendment’s protections when it comes to language he doesn’t like. And, no, we don’t mean his heckling of the press corps during press conferences. We’re talking about is his musings about changing libel laws, “so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money,” as Trump said in February 2016. Trump’s Chief of Staff Reince Priebus recently noted this change is something the new administration has “looked at.”
Once in office, again showing no understanding of free speech and how he might discourage it, Trump tweeted, “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag—if they do, there must be consequences—perhaps loss of citizenship or a year in jail!” First Amendment doctrine, of course, says the opposite. No matter how unlikely the possibility of Trump acting on these impulses is—and we think it’s very unlikely—the threats themselves are chilling to free speech and damaging to the American people’s understanding of it.
Trump is sometimes as unfriendly to speech as the Left, and his powerful position makes it a problem. His worst excesses, nonbogus controversies, may play directly into the silencers’ hands. See? This is why political correctness is necessary, they’ll argue. And a lot of people might be inclined to agree. We, therefore, see Trump’s tactics and antics as equal parts antidote and fuel to the virus we address in this book.
LESS FREE, LESS FUN—AND LESS SAFE
As we’ll detail further in chapter five, academia is the cauldron of intolerance from which much of America’s silencing flows, and it’s growing more close-minded. Since Trump’s election, we’ve watched with alarm as more student activists conflate words with physical violence, suppressing the former with the latter. The tactics of yesteryear, like pressuring weak administrators to disinvite “problematic” commencement speakers, feel almost quaint compared to some of the harrowing incidents that took place on campuses within the first few months of 2017 alone. We’ve witnessed threats of violent disruption and bona fide assaults shut down speeches by right-leaning figures, wherein callow advocates of “safe spaces” protect themselves from scary ideas by literally7 depriving others of actual safety. The Left’s outrage mob is making America less free, less fun, and now less safe.
At Claremont McKenna College in California in April, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Heather Mac Donald was forced to deliver remarks via Internet live stream after left-wing students physically blocked their peers, faculty, and other community members from entering the venue where she was scheduled to speak. Having successfully blockaded people from attending, the mob banged on windows and chanted in an effort to disrupt her makeshift online webcast, according to The Daily Signal. The school’s student newspaper reported that students chanted, “How do you spell fascism? C-M-C!”8 to drown out Mac Donald’s comments, after which a question-and-answer session had to be conducted by e-mail. “Fascism,” huh? To paraphrase Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride,9 “you guys keep using that word. We do not think it means what you think it means.”
An even more chaotic and violent scene played out at Vermont’s Middlebury College, where controversial conservative scholar Charles Murray was hounded out of an on-campus venue by shrieking hyenas dressed as undergraduates. When a liberal female professor attempted to reason with them from the stage, pledging to challenge Murray with tough, probing questions, she was shouted down, too. In the ensuing melee, the professor was injured as she tried to escort the university’s guest out of the building. Her sterling liberal credentials were not enough to quell the uprising or to avoid a trip to the hospital with a concussion, where she was put in a neck brace after students rocked and pelted an administrator’s vehicle as Murray tried to flee the scene. The university pledged to investigate the debacle and hold students accountable for their violations of school policies and possible crimes. As of this writing, the only reported repercussions have been temporary letters of reprimand placed in offending students’ files, subject to be expunged from the record after a single semester. Yeah, that’ll show ’em.
BERZERKLEY
Worst of all was the disgraceful episodes at the University of California, Berkeley, where three separate events featuring right-wing speakers were shut down by violent rioting or threatened violent rioting over the span of three months. A speech by pro-Trump provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was canceled after a mob burned property, smashed windows, and assaulted Trump supporters, resulting in…one arrest. Weeks later, Cal officials feared a reprise of the Milo meltdown when hard-edged conservative writer David Horowitz came to town. They insisted that the address be moved off campus, held in the middle of the day (inevitably limiting student attendance), and buttressed by extra security—for which the sponsoring student groups were to be held financially responsible. An irate Horowitz pulled out. The heckler’s veto worked, and the precedent was fortified that nonliberal speech would be literally less free than other speech, and organizations that invited nonconformist speakers would be punished for the violent threats of others.
Surprise, surprise: The mob triumphed again shortly thereafter, when self-styled “anti-fascists” forced the cancellation of a talk by polemicist Ann Coulter by promising to tear the place apart if the event went ahead. Coulter, who’s managed to speak at universities across the country without serious incident for years, refused to back down at first—but as threats of criminal assaults increased, and student sponsors decided to sue rather than risk a riot, she relented, calling it “a sad day for free speech” in a New York Times interview. It’s almost as if when you allow mob rule to prevail through criminality and intimidation, it incentivizes more mob rule, criminality, and intimidation. Go figure.
Let’s be as clear as possible: First, citing controversial speakers’ reputations in even a half-assed quasi-justification of anti-speech zealots’ thuggery is victim-blaming, pure and simple. Second, all institutions of higher learning have an obligation to protect the rights and safety of guests invited on campus. Public universities must defend First Amendment rights, and private universities should. Third, if government-funded universities are unable or unwilling to uphold fundamental constitutional rights, they should not be able to take taxpayer dollars for granted. We’re skeptical of Republican-led efforts in some state legislatures to micromanage state colleges’ disciplinary regimes regarding the safeguarding of free speech and expression. But if administrators will not do their jobs by standing up to the miniature tyrants who are infringing on others’ rights, perhaps a serious conversation about funding might focus their minds a bit.
While much of the upheaval on campus is a case of the proverbial inmates running the asylum (we’re looking at you, Yale and Mizzou), in some cases, outside agitators exploit the situations by showing up to scratch their itch for destruction and skull-thumping. For instance, Berkeley’s aforementioned “anti-fascists”—a misnomer if there ever was one—included a group called By Any Means Necessary. One of its leaders appeared on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight to tout their big success after they contributed to the civil unrest that shut down the Yiannopoulos event. Yvette Felarca boasted that her organization’s actions were appropriate to protect “this campus and our community” from words that she believes could lead to “rape,” “mass murder,” or “genocide.” Rioting against violence, or something! She sneered at the “abstraction” of the First Amendment, defending BAMN’s coercive methods as necessary to stop words that might recruit new devotees, and muttering about Trump advisor Steve Bannon throughout the exchange. Her calculus is frighteningly simple: Speech that she personally thinks might promote fascism isn’t protected and should be squelched—by any means necessary. In case you were curious, by day, this woman is a public school teacher. Oh, good.
MARGINAL OR MAINSTREAM?
We can hear the objections now: Why are we tarring the entire Left over the actions of some fringe nutters and petulant, immature college brats?10 Well, we’re not attributing this to the Left as a whole, and we’ll make that point even more explicit shortly. That said, these attitudes and tactics are not entirely confined to marginal players.
The embarrassingly persistent anti-speech ramblings of former Democratic presidential candidate, multiterm governor, and DNC chairman Howard Dean aren’t marginal. As the Berkeley mess was unfolding, Dean mused that perhaps colleges should censor wrong-thinking viewpoints from people like Ann Coulter. After all, he asserted, the constitution doesn’t protect hate speech, a term of art that is subjective by its very nature.
The main problem with this analysis is that the constitution absolutely does11 protect hate speech.
One might think that in an age of President Trump and Attorney General Sessions, liberals might rally to the cause of protecting dissent deemed hateful by the powers-that-be. But free speech appears to take a backseat to the ongoing emergency of conservatives trying to speak to college students. Rather than issuing our own version of a “be careful what you wish for” warning to the Howard Deans of the world, we’ll let our irreverent and hilarious Twitter pal @IowaHawkBlog distill things down rather succinctly: “I’ll let you ban hate speech when you let me define hate speech.” Precisely.
The underbelly of the Democratic party has a sordid role in this, too. A sting-style investigation by Project Veritas captured two DNC-contracted operatives bragging about fomenting chaos at Trump rallies in the summer of 2016. Press reports from across the country documented Trump supporters getting bloodied, punched, pepper-sprayed, and spat on by “protesters.” One especially ugly incident in Chicago led to a campaign event being cancelled amid fears of violent clashes. In an undercover video, a man calling himself “Aaron Black” and identifying himself as a deputy rapid response director for the DNC acknowledged that his operation was behind the near riot in the Windy City. “The Chicago protest where they shut all that, that was us,” he said, adding, “none of this is supposed to come back to us.” One of his coconspirators, an operative contracted by the DNC and Clinton campaign, named Scott Foval cheered, “We’re starting anarchy here.”
It was the October surprise you probably never heard about, though it came on the heels of the firebombing of a Republican party office in Charlotte, North Carolina. This episode attracted precious little attention in the mainstream press, perhaps because most reporters were too busy focusing on the narrative that Trump was the pro-violence actor. Trump made their jobs easier, of course, by recklessly and indefensibly egging on his fans to rough up hecklers at several of his rallies. But to our knowledge, no Trump backers forced the cancellation of a Clinton rally at any point of the campaign, certainly not with the assistance of RNC-linked agents. We suspect that if any such thing had occurred, we’d have heard about it. A lot.
THINK PROGRESS
Take heart—there’s some good news, too. One of the reasons we wrote this book two years ago was to try to enlist some nonconservatives in this fight. Preserving Americans’ ability to openly exchange ideas will require principled actors—right, left, and center—to link arms and hold the line. There have been promising signs on this front. After the mess at Middlebury, dozens of faculty members produced and endorsed a clear-eyed statement of principles on these matters. An excerpt:
Exposure to controversial points of view does not constitute violence. Students have the right to challenge and even to protest non-disruptively the views of their professors and guest speakers. A protest that prevents campus speakers from communicating with their audience is a coercive act. No group of professors or students has the right to act as final arbiter of the opinions that students may entertain. No group of professors or students has the right to determine for the entire community that a question is closed for discussion. The purpose of college is not to make faculty or students comfortable in their opinions and prejudices.
Amen and amen. Murray has spoken without major incident on several elite college campuses since his trip to Middlebury, suggesting at least a momentary recognition of wrong in some quarters. And as Berkeley was shaming itself, some of Congress’ most liberal Democrats upbraided members of the student body and surrounding community for their conduct. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (to whom we’ll return to in a future chapter) chided those who torpedoed the Coulter event. “Let her speak. If you don’t like it, don’t show up,” she said, stating what should be the obvious. Sen. Bernie Sanders went further, disdaining the practice of “booing people down, or intimidating people, or shutting down events” as a sign of “intellectual weakness.” To this we say, without a shred of hesitation or hedging, “Thank you, senators.” You’ve made important contributions on behalf of an open and healthy society here. This is what real progress looks like. (That said, don’t get us started on your profoundly end-of-discussion-y rhetoric on other fronts, like Obamacare repeal. Yikes. We’ve got a long way to go.)
There are also areas of American life where the backlash against outrage is just plain fun,12 such as the return of comedy’s prodigal prodigy, Dave Chappelle, to the stage. He released two specials on Netflix in early 2017 after a ten-year absence from the public eye. The stand-up’s return seemed perfectly timed to confront the country with the kind of free-wheeling observations on the ordinary and off-limits that is the best of what a less censorious society has to offer. Here’s a talented man with comic and cultural cred framing an hour of insight on life with O. J. Simpson and Bill Cosby jokes. Can you handle it, America? We’ll all be better off if you can.
And with that, we now return you to your regularly-scheduled reading experience. The material you’re about to read could very easily have been written in the last few weeks. Our topic is more relevant than ever, and as we’ve explained in this supplementary bonus passage, the state of our national conversation is deteriorating, not improving. Regardless of where you may fall on the political spectrum, we hope that our arguments might help you to see these issues with fresh eyes. We’re not asking you to agree with us on every point or policy. We’re asking you to keep an open mind and consider the larger principles at stake.
Enjoy!
1 Either that or congratulations, President Pence!
2 Trump’s remarks were so uniquely unstructured that at one point his own audio-visual team mistakenly cued his walk-off music, assuming he was finished. Annoyed, he gestured at them to cut the music, then continued speaking for an additional thirty minutes.
3 Irresistible. Sorry.
4 Many people are saying it was the greatest, hottest, most incredible fire they’ve ever seen—believe us.
5 At a Rose Garden ceremony this past spring, Trump himself marveled, “I’m president! Can you believe it?” For us, it really depends on the day.
6 One might make the case that Mary Katharine is an Xer, but she insists that she’s the “grandma of Millennials,” which mostly checks out.
7 We mean this literally-literally, not Joe Biden–literally.
8 This is not how you spell fascism.
9 Did we mention we’re very old Millennials?
10 If you’re really jonesin’ for an extra headache, feel free to look up an essay published by the editorial board of Wellesley College’s student paper in mid-April. It’s called “Free speech Is Not Violated at Wellesley,” openly calling for the reeducation of wrong-thinkers who may warrant “hostility” for future failures to comply. It’s actually worse than it sounds.
11 We’d direct you to law professor Eugene Volokh’s online Washington Post column entitled, “No, Gov. Dean, there is no ‘hate speech’ exception to the First Amendment.” This was a 2017 follow-up to a 2015 post called, “No, there’s no ‘hate speech’ exception to the First Amendment.” Because lefties trot out this stinker every few years, it would seem.
12 (And fun!) is, after all, part of our subtitle. As you’re aware, under federal law, conservative books are legally required to have a snappy title, then a lengthy subtitle. You can ask Ann Coulter more about this if she’s ever able to hold a civil Q&A session again.