See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can't Handle

PART I

SUPPRESSING DISSENT

CHAPTER 1

THE LEFT’S WAR ON TRUTHINESS—AND TRUTH

THE LIE: The Left speaks truth to power.

Examples:

Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don’t mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don’t know whether it’s a new thing, but it’s certainly a current thing, in that it doesn’t seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty.

—Stephen Colbert, interview with the Onion, January 25, 2006

An essential truth of human nature is that frames trump facts. When presented with facts that are inconsistent with the frame through which people view the world, the frame will generally win, and inconsistent facts will be discarded or discounted.

That’s why our top priority has to be the relentless, proud, self-confident repetition of our frame, our values, and our vision for the future. We have to activate the progressive value frame that exists in the minds of swing voters. We have to set the frame for political debate in America. It’s our job to shape the voters’ unconscious understanding of what constitutes political ‘common sense.’

—Left-wing organizer and Chicago political veteran Robert Creamer, 2007¹

THE TRUTH: The Left suppresses the truth to frame the debate for its own political purposes.

Once, the American Left told itself that it spoke truth to power. Today it cannot even speak the truth to itself.

On November 14, 2015, a day after Paris, France, suffered brutal terror attacks that claimed 129 lives, the three remaining Democratic Party candidates for president stood on a debate stage in Iowa and refused, one after the other, to say that radical Islam was responsible.

The perpetrators of the attacks had been identified, leaving no doubt that the so-called Islamic State, a radical terror group that had arisen in swaths of territory amidst the ruins of Iraq and Syria, had carried out the attacks as part of an effort to project its power worldwide.

And yet these candidates, who wished to lead America against that threat, refused to call it by its name, to state the truth about what had motivated young men to blow themselves up at soccer stadiums, gun down innocent civilians at restaurants, and murder scores more at a rock ’n’ roll concert.

Looking back at the year in late December 2015, the economist Thomas Sowell wrote, Lying, by itself, is obviously not new. What is new is the growing acceptance of lying as ‘no big deal’ by smug sophisticates, so long as these are lies that advance their political causes. He noted, for example, that when Democratic presidential contender and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been caught by a congressional committee misleading the nation about the cause of the Benghazi terror attacks of September 11, 2012, even as she told the truth to her own family, she won praise instead of condemnation: Many in the media greeted the exposure of Hillary Clinton’s lies by admiring how well she handled herself.²

We are witnessing a state of denial in left-wing American politics that is almost terminal. Increasingly, the American Left rejects the truth—not just about the threat of radical Islam, but also about nearly every issue facing our society.

How did it come to this? Especially when the Left prided itself, until recently, on being the reality-based community?

The comedian Stephen Colbert mocked conservatives by introducing the term truthiness in the opening monologue of the first episode of The Colbert Report, his spoof on Fox News and conservatism in general, in 2005.³

Colbert said:

Cause you’re looking at a straight-shooter, America. I tell it like it is. I calls ’em like I sees ’em. I will speak to you in plain, simple English.

And that brings us to tonight’s word: truthiness.

Now I’m sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster’s, are gonna say, Hey, that’s not a word. Well, anybody who knows me know [sic] that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true, or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart. . . .

We are divided between those who think with their head, and those who know with their heart. (Laughter)⁴

The term caught on quickly among left-wing critics of President George W. Bush, who had just led the country to war in Iraq to stop Saddam Hussein’s regime from producing weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

Colbert explained the term at length the following year in an interview with the satirical newspaper the Onion, noting that truthiness was an appeal to authority and emotion, rather than to reason. "Truthiness is ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality."⁵

Truth was a rallying cry on the Left, where critics of the Bush administration convinced themselves that their opponents cared less for the concept. And truthiness soon joined the term reality-based community in the left-wing lexicon. That term was taken from a quotation from an unnamed Bush adviser who spoke to Ron Suskind for a 2004 New York Times article: The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’

Apparently intended as a pejorative, the term reality-based community became a badge of honor. The Left saw conservatives as opposed to science and truth—and motivated instead by power, greed, tradition, prejudice, and emotion. Psychologists have found that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism, wrote Katy Waldman at Slate.com, citing science to argue that right-wing political beliefs arise from a need to manage uncertainty and threat. That did not mean conservatives were stupid, she noted carefully, but it did mean that conservatism appealed to the primitive, reptilian part of the human brain. The Left, she implied, aimed far higher.⁶

The Left applies the same conceit to conservative views on specific issues. For example, it is common for liberal politicians to use the term denialist to describe conservatives who reject the consensus view on climate change, which is ostensibly based in science (though there is nothing scientific in argument by majority rule).

And yet much of the intellectual energy on the American Left today is devoted to suppressing dissent, denying basic facts, and avoiding the truth.

That is not something many on the Left will admit openly, but it is something many know to be the case—especially since the rise of Barack Obama from political obscurity to charismatic leadership.

In his 2009 book Bloggers on the Bus, Eric Boehlert, one of the main bloggers at the left-wing Media Matters for America, noted that left-wing bloggers who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 election raised a cautionary flag about the rush to crown Obama and demonize Clinton in online forums.

Being reality-based was one of the things I thought we prided ourselves on, that we were the rational ones, said blogger Todd Beeton. We had the facts and therefore we should win.⁷

But Obama brought with him a cohort of community organizers, like Robert Creamer, who were trained and inspried by the radical Saul Alinsky in the 1960s, and who are prepared to violate the truth—to treat it, at best, as a means to an end. And that end is total political power. They believe that if they can frame an issue in a way favorable to their candidate or their cause, they can win, regardless of truth. And winning is everything to them—as Clinton was soon to find out.

Once, the term liberal suggested open-mindedness, intellectual courage, a willingness to break with dogma in favor of new insight. But today there are, strikingly, two entirely different definitions of liberal in our dictionaries.

The Oxford American dictionary, for example, defines liberal as favoring maximum individual liberty in political and social reform.⁸

Merriam-Webster, however, defines liberal as believing that government should be active in supporting social and political change.⁹

These meanings are exact opposites. One favors the individual, the other favors the state. And over time the second definition has become the dominant one among American liberals, who are impatient for progressive change.

Some of the increasingly shrill voices on the Left have even given up on liberal democracy itself. The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, for example, wrote that the United States should become China for a day, using authoritarian powers to impose environmental policies our democratic process is too combative or too corrupt to embrace on its own.¹⁰

While it is true that dictatorships can achieve great things quickly, it is equally true that they can commit great wrongs irreversibly—as China’s damaged environment and smog-filled cities show. Constitutional democracies, with their divided government and checks and balances, may delay action, but they avoid catastrophe. In societies where individuals are free to think and say what they wish, truth—not arbitrary authority—is the standard against which their views are judged.

Today, however, liberals increasingly insist that in the service of greater goals, truth is a secondary value at best. To achieve utopian visions of social and political change, liberals are willing to punish disagreement, to shut down debate, and, ultimately, to convince themselves of things that are simply untrue.

As the 2016 presidential election unfolded and billionaire Donald Trump mounted an improbable but ultimately successful outsider campaign for the Republican nomination, critics—both left and right—complained that Trump had only a loose respect for truth, at best.

For example, on the day of the Indiana primary, the decisive contest between Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, Trump accused Cruz’s father, a Cuban emigré with a youthful enthusiasm for Fidel Castro, of being involved with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He was basing his claim on a story in the National Enquirer, which had concluded, rather dubiously, that a man photographed near Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was the elder Cruz.¹¹ Few believed Trump or the Enquirer, but the debate seized cable news on a day when Cruz desperately needed to turn out his vote. He fell short, losing every congressional district in Indiana to Trump.

To those who wondered how Trump could run with such a farcical story without losing support, the Wall Street Journal’s L. Gordon Crovitz noted that the Obama administration had long since removed the taboo on brazen dishonesty. Obama officials, such as Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, for example, openly admitted to the New York Times that they had deceived the public about key details of the Iran deal.¹² Crovitz concluded, As more details such as the role of Mr. Rhodes emerge about how the Obama administration operates, there may be more voters who see Mr. Trump simply as an equal and opposite reaction to Mr. Obama. False narratives and media manipulation worked for Mr. Obama and have empowered Mr. Trump, making him seem to many voters just another flavor of politics as usual.¹³ The Iran deal was not the sole example: again and again, from health care to immigration, the Obama administration deceived the public, then congratulated itself for having done so. Those were the new rules of the game—a game Trump was determined to win.

There are still liberals who embrace the essence of the classical liberal political tradition: reason, openness, and individual freedom. But they are a weakened force and a dwindling number.

Few are even willing to engage in rational debate. The abortion issue is the archetypal case. The Left largely refuses even to consider the idea that an unborn baby might actually be a living human being, at any point. The reason is obvious: if a fetus is a live human being, then disposing of uterine contents is not a mere medical procedure, but an act of violence—even, perhaps, of premeditated murder. So those on the Left do everything they can to avoid the question of when human life begins. When they are forced to address it, they find themselves defending an absurd position: that the baby deserves no protection under the law until the moment of birth—or even until the mother takes it home from the hospital—and then suddenly acquires the full complement of human rights. (And, worse, in an attempt to remedy the obvious inconsistency in this leftist position, some philosophers on the Left have even argued for a right to kill babies after they are born.)

In February 2014, journalist Jorge Ramos of the Fusion network asked Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, to say when life begins. She said, It is not something that I feel like is really part of this conversation. . . . I think every woman needs to make her own decision. What we do at Planned Parenthood is make sure that women have all their options. . . . Ramos pressed her. Why would it be so controversial for you to say when do you think life starts? he asked. Richards replied, For me—I’m the mother of three children—for me, life began when I delivered them . . . but that was my own personal decision.

In another infamous exchange, Republican Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania sparred with California Democrat Barbara Boxer on the floor of the Senate in 1999. At one point Boxer suggested that a child was only a human being once it was completely outside of the mother, and perhaps once it had left the hospital. Santorum allowed her to walk back the claim—perhaps a gaffe—that a newborn only has rights when you bring your baby home. But he was unsuccessful in urging Boxer to identify when, precisely, a fetus becomes a human being. I don’t want to engage in this, she said.¹⁴

But others did. In February 2012, philosophers Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva published an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics arguing that it should be permissible to perform after-birth abortion. A newborn baby, they argued, is morally indistinguishable from a fetus: neither can be considered a ‘person’ in a morally relevant sense—because, essentially, neither would notice if it did not exist. And since we allow fetuses to be aborted, the same should hold for newborns: Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life.¹⁵

That may seem outrageous, but it is not easy to distinguish in its underlying principles from Boxer’s remark that life begins when you bring your baby home—that abortion should be legal up to the point when the mother decides to integrate her newborn into her household.

It is also similar to President Barack Obama’s personal position on the issue. During the 2008 presidential campaign, when then-Senator Obama was asked when life begins, he famously said that the answer was above my pay grade. Yet in the Illinois State Senate, Obama was the most vocal opponent of legislation known as the Born Alive bill, to protect babies that happened to survive abortions. In the course of explaining his opposition to the legislation—as the only member of the state Senate to speak against it on the floor of that chamber—Obama referred to a fetus, or child, however you want to describe it, is now outside of the mother’s womb—as if a child that had survived an abortion might still not be a human being.

That is an extreme position, but it is no great distance from the position of his party, which is to oppose any restriction on abortion whatsoever. If after-birth abortions were declared legal by the Supreme Court, Democrats would probably support it.

They would, however, prefer not to discuss the issue at all. In September 2015, Vice President Joe Biden—then considering a run for the White House—repeated Obama’s above my pay grade line. The Left will not engage in rational debate. They will not acknowledge even the possibility of prenatal life. In fact, they will do everything they can to avoid even addressing the arguments on the other side.

The crisis in liberalism is at its most dramatic on college campuses across the nation, which are becoming increasingly intolerant of free speech.

In 2014, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reported that disinvitations of speakers from college campuses have been steadily increasing over the past 15 years, and that they had risen dramatically in the most recent years studied.

Nine of the ten most-disinvited speakers were conservatives. (The only liberal was the unrepentant former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.)¹⁶

In addition, universities have begun to provide trigger warnings to notify students when they are about to hear or read a controversial idea, or even a word that may have potential associations with race, gender, sexuality, and so forth. Students at the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges demand safe spaces to which they can retreat in the increasingly unlikely event that someone with contrarian views appears on campus to defend them.

That safety is often one way. At protests on the University of Missouri campus in 2015, students and faculty—including an assistant professor of media studies—assaulted a photojournalist who attempted to photograph their safe space on a public lawn. His rights, and his safety, were unimportant. At Yale, left-wing students tried to shut down a free speech event held on campus by a conservative group, which was able to proceed only with additional police protection—for which the group holding the event had to pay.¹⁷

If Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living,¹⁸ today’s universities seem to regard the mildest intellectual challenge as a mortal threat, to be evaded if possible and stamped out if necessary.

The intolerance of the Left is not confined to campus life. It has crept into American political discourse and even our social habits. Ever more boldly, liberals are attempting to suppress opinions and facts that might tend to lead the public to conservative conclusions—or that, at the very least, would lead to open debate on equal footing.

In May 2016, the Gizmodo technology blog reported that Facebook had been suppressing stories from conservative news websites in its trending news section, which appeared in a prominent position within users’ interfaces when they logged onto their accounts.¹⁹

Employees responsible for curating the section would regularly avoid sites like World Star Hip Hop, The Blaze, and Breitbart. Though the orders to do so were never explicit, former employees accused Facebook—which had rapidly become one of the most important news portals in the world—of downplaying conservative-oriented stories, even when they were being widely shared by Facebook users, and promoting stories that management preferred, such as coverage of the Black Lives Matter protest movement. Facebook denied the accusations, but its trending news section was exposed as operating less like a computer algorithm and more like a traditional newsroom—with a traditional newsroom’s liberal bias.

The result was that Facebook’s audience was spoon-fed a skewed perception of what was happening in the world and what was important to others. Reality, as defined by the new elites of Silicon Valley, increasingly reflected their own left-wing political monoculture.

The partisans of the Left know, or suspect, that their ideas would be broadly rejected by the American public. They may believe that ordinary people are simply too stupid to know what is good for them. Regardless, for them, the goal of public debate is not to convince Americans of the truth of left-wing ideas, but to poison the well of public opinion so that the alternatives seem unthinkable, and so that those who openly embrace conservative views are marginalized. They suppress the truth to create a frame that excludes dissenting views from public debate. Then the Left can push its own agenda with less resistance.

The Left’s rejection of truth goes beyond mere deceit for tactical, political purposes. To lie, as most politicians do (at least occasionally) is one thing. To refuse to distinguish between lies and truth is a very different sin.

In 2004, for example, when CBS News’s Dan Rather was caught using forged documents to accuse Bush of dodging military service, the New York Times described the documents as fake but accurate.²⁰

After Rather was fired, some liberals continued to defend him, insisting his story could have been true despite the forgery. Robert Redford even made a film, Truth, casting Rather in a heroic light.

Often, the Left accepts false stories as long as they tell a larger truth. For example, in 2010, members of the Congressional Black Congress claimed that they had heard the N-word as they walked through a Tea Party demonstration on Capitol Hill.

Andrew Breitbart, my friend and later colleague, offered a $10,000 and then a $100,000 donation to charity if anyone could produce video proof. In fact, video recordings taken from multiple angles showed no racial epithets whatsoever. For the Left, however, the debunking of the N-word story still left the larger truth of the Tea Party’s alleged racism intact.

Similar examples abound, including a false Rolling Stone story about rape at the University of Virginia that some on the Left defended because it attempted to expose a broader culture of male sexual entitlement.²¹

The larger truth is always more important than truth itself—even though lies in service of a larger truth may have serious, even deadly consequences.

In 2014, for example, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed a black teenager, Michael Brown, in broad daylight. The teenager’s family, and community leaders who rallied to their side, claimed that the policeman had shot Brown in the back as he raised his hands and cried, Don’t shoot!

None of that turned out to be true. In fact, forensic analysis suggested that Brown had been charging the officer. Moments earlier, he had reached into the officer’s patrol car and wrestled for his gun, shooting himself in the thumb in the process. Brown had also just robbed a nearby convenience store, and was found to have marijuana in his system.

But the myth of Hands up, don’t shoot! triggered nationwide riots and a movement called Black Lives Matter, which frightened many police away from patrolling black neighborhoods, lest they be accused of racism—or targeted for retribution.

In many cities, crime spiked. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel lamented that police have pulled back from the ability to interdict . . . they don’t want to be a news story themselves . . . it’s having an impact.²²

The Left’s suppression of truth is not just a danger to conservatives, but to the stability of our society itself.

George Orwell recognized truth as the distinguishing virtue of western democracy. He was a socialist, but one who believed—unlike leftists briefly entranced by the Soviet pact with Hitler—that Britain would have to go to war against Nazi Germany to preserve its independence.

Against those who said that imperial Britain was just as bad, or that fighting fascism would require Britain to adopt fascist methods, Orwell offered a moral claim that, in his view, decided the matter: In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell less lies about it than our adversaries.²³

What worried Orwell most about totalitarianism—fascist or communist—was not its brutality but its assault on objective truth, especially about history. He warned about a nightmare world in which the Leader, or the ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.²⁴

That passage from Orwell’s Looking Back on the Spanish War struck a chord with me when I first read it.

At the time I was living in Cape Town, South Africa, working as a freelance journalist. I was born in Johannesburg in 1977, just as my parents were about to leave, having decided they did not want to raise children in an unstable racist society. I returned in 2000 as a Rotary scholar, eager to experience dramatic changes that had come to the country in the intervening years. The new South African Constitution was the world’s most liberal, with wide guarantees of socioeconomic rights. From my youthful, left-wing perspective, I hoped to gain political insights I could bring home to America.

But I landed in the midst of the HIV/Aids controversy, when the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, was denying that a virus caused the disease. Then the second Palestinian intifada started in the Middle East, and I heard South African leaders making outrageous accusations about Israel that I knew, from my studies and travels, to be lies. I covered the Durban racism conference for an American magazine and was shocked when my left-wing colleagues at the conference denied the obvious antisemitism staring them in the face. That experience sped my transition from Left to Right.

Later I had the privilege of working for several people steeped in the finest traditions of liberalism. I worked for Tony Leon, the leader of the opposition in the South African parliament, who believed that individual freedom was the best way to fulfill the promise of South Africa’s new democracy, and the best hope for that country’s desperately poor millions. Tony spoke out often against what he called the curse of the forked tongue, by which he meant the contrast between the country’s professed commitment to constitutional democracy on the one hand and the corrupt, race-obsessed, illiberal behavior of the post-apartheid government on the other.

At Harvard Law School I worked for Alan Dershowitz, the defense lawyer, civil libertarian, and loyal Democrat, who made a point throughout his career of supporting the free speech rights of people with whom he disagreed vehemently. On one occasion, Dershowitz helped anti-Israel students fight for their right to raise the Palestinian flag on Harvard’s campus—then turned up the day they did so to hand out leaflets denouncing their cause. Dershowitz taught that in a free society, the answer to hateful, ignorant, and offensive speech was more speech, not less.

The best hope for America’s future is that classical, muscular liberal tradition—not the liberalism that places the state before the