OPINION:
As the United States prepared to celebrate its Independence Day under the dueling shadows of COVID-19 and social unrest caused by the unnecessary death of George Floyd, one news outlet declared that President Trump would be giving a speech while “standing in front of a monument of two slave owners.”
Those two slave owners are more commonly known as Presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, flawed men to be sure, but giants in the founding of our country. But this is now where we seem to be heading. Any fault, any flaw, any failure to single-handedly change or end oppression will be used against you by a small, dedicated and vocal minority that uses Facebook to publicly shame, a mainstream media that has debased itself to a club of well-branded social media accounts and a corporate culture desperate to appease in the name of its bottom-line profits.
What happened next was a paragraph in Mr. Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech that generated some coverage, but not enough:
“In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us.”
While he was certainly mocked by the well-branded social media accounts and the left (as this opinion piece will certainly be as well), there is a dangerous tide in this country that draws on one of the most devastating tenets of fascism — the suppression of opposition and criticism.
In present-day America, however, this suppression comes not from brutal dictators, but from the people who use social media and other platforms to crowdsource their performative activism to suppress other points of view, pressure businesses into compliance and to publicly humiliate their neighbors for expressing a different point of view.
In fact, it has gotten so out of control over the past few weeks that even Ricky Gervais, no fan of Mr. Trump, has compared this bottom-up oppression of thought and speech to “Fascism.”
The Gervais interview was the same day as New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss resigned from the social media account formerly known as the “Gray Lady” for a culture of bullying and oppression of opinions that don’t meet the editorial standards of the woke mob. She cited complaints of a “new McCarthyism” at the Times; a description that is apropos of our current battle against the thought fascists.
But the examples of thought fascism are not limited to the past week. Last month, advertisers began to boycott the Tucker Carlson show because he dared to challenge the narrative that all cops are racist and that all protests were “mostly peaceful.” The New York Times had to bow to a triggered woke mob when it failed to consider everyone’s feelings by publishing an op-ed by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton. The response from The New York Times was swift and the purge of enablers of different points of view began with the forced resignation of editorial page editor James Bennet and later played a part in Ms. Weiss’ resignation.
But fear not, while books like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Huckleberry Finn” are being banned from schools with nary a whisper from the national mainstream media, it won’t be long until corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” is required reading in our schools and the only acceptable thought. If you aren’t frightened by that, take a minute to read this passage on Ms. DiAngelo’s book from Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi:
“DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices.”
If, like me, you grew up thinking Jackie Robinson was basically a superhero, Ms. DiAngelo wants to cancel his accomplishments by changing the narrative to this: “Jackie Robinson, the first black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.”
Writers of the past — George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley — saw a dystopian future coming and warned us of it. That future is closer than ever and this virulent strain of “thought fascism” is bringing us there faster than you can read “1984.”
So, how can we stop it?
Read. Write. Speak up. Consider all points of view, come to your own conclusions, and respect the rights of others to do the same. Do not let others bully you into abandoning your points of view. And always be a fierce defender of the freedom of thought and speech.
• Ian Prior was the principal deputy director of public affairs for the Trump Justice Department and current CEO of Headwaters Media.
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