With the election over, we need to discuss one of the most troubling developments this election cycle – the demonization of those who lawfully participate in the political debate that is the foundation of our system. This demonization is part of a wider effort to discourage people from participating in the political process.
Questioning who supports politicians has a long, rich history in American politics. 2010 saw this tactic taken in a different direction at the federal and state levels. On the national level, President Obama used his State of the Union address to attack the Supreme Court for its ruling in the “Citizens United” case which ruled the First Amendment allowed US corporations to exercise free speech rights and support or oppose political candidates, a ruling which doesn’t allow corporations to directly donate to candidates.
The president didn’t stop there, but continued the attack and had his senior staff join the effort, even going as far as alleging criminal violations by the US Chamber of Commerce. Even more egregious was the attack leveled against brothers Charles and David Koch for funding conservative groups. One attack possibly involved the use of private IRS information by senior White House personnel. This sort of personal attack, potentially involving private information, is reminiscent of the worst of Nixon era politics.
It would be one thing if these attacks were just part of the rough and tumble political dialogue that occur every campaign season, but unfortunately they appear to be part of a larger effort to silence debate. During the 2010 campaign, media exposé articles appeared on the very same Koch brother attacked by the White House. Media outlets publishing exposé pieces and columns included the New Yorker magazine, NPR and the New York Times, as well as online. These pieces coincided with preceded or White House attacks on the Koch brothers and Koch industries, the second largest privately held company in the country.
By attacking groups like the US Chamber and individuals like the Koch’s, the White House was not just targeting them, it was sending a message to other groups or individuals – don’t participate in the political dialogue in opposition to us; we will attack and demonize you if you do. When the President of the United States and his senior aides assail individuals and groups who are lawfully exercising their First Amendment free speech rights it has a chilling effect on free speech. Lurking in the background are the excesses of the Nixon era and things like an “enemies list” and the implied threat that the resources of the federal government can be turned against you.
There are very few individuals, businesses or groups willing to engage in a public fight with the President and the federal government. Equally troubling is how these attack tactics made their way from the national stage to the state level. States across the country saw coordinated attacks on businesses and individuals who supported Republican candidates.
In North Carolina they targeted a member of the Civitas Board of Directors, Art Pope. Art is a member of our board and through the Pope Family Foundation a major benefactor of our educational non-profit and numerous other charitable organizations such as Hospice, the Boy Scouts and the NC Theater. Unfortunately for Art and his business, Variety Stores, Inc, they became targets of the same vicious political attacks we saw used at the national level. Left leaning organizations released exposé hit pieces and those attacks made it into the mainstream media. Their complaint – he used his money to lawfully support causes and candidates he believed in.
Not content to stop there, the North Carolina Democratic Party and elected democratic politicians, in the closing days of the 2010 election, launched a public effort to boycott stores operated by Variety Stores and attacked Art personally. Variety, a regional retail chain, operates hundreds of stores, including such well known names as Roses and Maxway, employs thousands and pays millions in taxes to government.
Why, in the middle of a recession and plunging tax revenue, would a political party spend the final days of an election attacking an individual not on the ballot and a major employer? Was this a strategy to win the 2010 election? No, it is a strategy to intimidate others who might choose to use the freedoms guaranteed in the US Constitution to express their opinion. For the sake of free speech and healthy political debate I trust the effort will fail.
Demonization of the “enemy” is a tactic used by the Left as a substitute for the less emotionally appealing dissemination of the facts, an outline of the alternate view and the arguments that support that view. When, as is often the case, those arguments are weak or non-existent then defamation is all that’s available; discredit the opponent in emotional terms.
To increase the effectiveness of this approach it is often necessary to first create an odious atmosphere or invent a global disaster. The wealthy become the “filthy rich.” The Wall Street bankers, brokers and market makers become the “Wall Street Fat Cats.” Conservatives become the “Extreme Right Wing” or “Wing Nuts” or “Conspiracy theorists.” Middle America become those that “cling to their bibles and guns” to compensate for their “ignorance,” their inability to comprehend the nuances of the “modern, intellectual, enlightened views” of the Left.
The Global disaster scenario has been the favorite of the environmental movement since its inception and rise to prominence with the publication and release of Rachael Carson’s book, “Silent Spring” and continuing through the most recent fiasco, “Anthropogenic Global Warming.” Both of these were launched based on emotion. The world was on a path to self imposed destruction. DDT was poisoning the earth and killing innocent, non threatening wild and plant life and AGW was poisoning the atmosphere, melting polar ice, causing the seas to rise over 20 feet, and threatening the extinction of the Polar Bear. We must act immediately; ban DDT stop the harvesting and use of all fossil fuels, impose strict limits and reduction targets on CO2 emissions and impose severe economic penalties on offenders. The results? Millions of people, mostly children, die from Malaria, a disease born by Mosquitoes that the pesticide, DDT was designed to eradicate, a pesticide later shown in extensive studies to be harmless in concentrations exceeding that recommended for the intended purpose. The global warming controversy rages on but has been severely discredited by recent evidence of data manipulation and tampering intentionally designed to support the catastrophic scenario and by the “revelation” that among the so called “Deniers” were a very large number of equally credentialed scientists with very sound counter arguments based on analysis of all the relevant data, very often the same data used by the AGW proponents. Not surprisingly all of these scientists and climate experts were very successfully vilified by simply labeling them as the “Deniers” and members of the “Flat Earth Society.”
At the same time, the Left uses the opposite tactic to curry favor among the electorate. Their favorites, those that are equally indoctrinated in their ideological views, can do no wrong. All that Obama has had to deal with were the result of the previous, “totally incompetent” Republican George W. Bush during whose tenure the average unemployment level was around 5 1/2% while the current 9+% unemployment would have been “much, much worse” if Obama had not emerged from the ashes to “save” the day. Same goes for every one of the Left’s budget busting entitlement initiatives all grounded in emotionally charged terms, “for the children,” for “the old and infirm,” for “the needy and less fortunate among us,” for the “middle class,” for “the working man,” the “fairness doctrine,” the “DREAM” act, the “Employee ‘Free Choice’ act (Card Check),” for the Homeless, etc., etc., etc. This seemingly always and forever leaves the opposition no option but to be portrayed as the “Heartless, evil, Bad Guy,” the “Party of the Rich;” the Left leaning media immediately oblige, Republicans are ensnared in the trap and the Left cap the whole charade by screaming about “Media Bias” and the need for limitations on allowable speech, code words for shutting down all the opposition.
The Left, which have now become dominant within and synonymous with, the Democratic party have turned these tactics into an art form used very successfully to demonize George W. Bush and the Republican Party and to “gen up” the “dire need” for Cap & Trade and get their current Socialist President elected in 2008 and they will continue with this modus operandi until the electorate are taught to recognize it for what it is; a strategy designed to appeal to their emotions rather than their intellect and will only continue to work if they allow themselves to be manipulated like children; duped, hoodwinked, conned, guilty of dependent, self centered behavior they do not tolerate in their teenage off spring.
America is rapidly approaching a tipping point. The Socialists are on the march, have been for decades and determined to sucker a majority of Americans and illegal immigrants into becoming dependent on Government handouts, ultimately creating a permanent power base from which they can fully implement their Socialist, “Utopian” agenda. Americans need to be made to understand that the consequences of submissive, selfish behavior will not make America what they’re being indoctrinated to believe. The “evil rich” will leave this country in droves, foreign investment will dry up, the economy will eventually go in the toilet and there will be no one left to pay the enormous tax burden required to allow them to continue to feed at the entitlement troth; third world status, a plunge from the top of the heap; a beacon of hopelessness; a place not to go but to be from; a failure of what was once the most free most successful social order ever to grace the planet, a land of unprecedented freedom and opportunity that our ancestors, courageous, patriotic men and women all, fought and died to defend and perpetuate. What a tragic waste of human life if this is allowed to happen.