It’s Getting Dangerous to Disagree in America By Karin McQuillan
https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/27/it-is-dangerous-to-be-
This weekend, Sarah Sanders Huckabee and her family were thrown out of a Virginia restaurant after a vote by the staff.
Do not trivialize this as a failure of civility, or a small incident in the soap opera of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Victor Davis Hanson says it will pass. It is not passing. It is growing. This is more than an assault on the Trump Administration; it is an assault on all of us.
Everywhere, in city, town, and country, Republicans keep their mouths shut among their neighbors, at dinner parties, at community gatherings, at their workplaces. To be openly Republican is to lose old friends, to alienate neighbors, to risk losing your job or career. Everyone on the Right has experienced this.
President Trump is adept at protecting himself. His policy successes speak louder than the hysteria. What about the rest of us? Ordinary people are vulnerable.
If a highly qualified job candidate votes Republican, his or her chance of employment shrinks to 7 percent in journalism, 3 percent in Ivy League colleges, 7 percent in Hollywood, and 10 percent in Silicon Valley.
Fields that create our educational, cultural, and technological world are deprived of the talent pool of roughly half the country. It also means the country is subjected to political thought control in precisely the fields that determine people’s cultural norms and values and shape their politics.
Private citizens are a soft target. Papa John’s Pizza founder and CEO John Schnatter was forced out of his own company for making an innocuous statement during a call with analysts about the NFL kneelers hurting their sales. Exemplary Google employee James Damore made one politically incorrect statement and was thrown out on his ear.
Apple’s diversity chief, a black woman, thought she could praise the importance of diverse viewpoints instead of diversity based on race—and found herself the target of outrage and controversy that led to her termination.“Diversity is the human experience,” she said, “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.” That lovely and tolerant comment got her fired.
The threat of losing your job extends beyond your behavior at work. If you express right of center opinions outside of work, progressive activists can get you fired, as happened to Dr. Frank Turek. He lost jobs with Cisco and Bank of America for writing a book in defense of traditional marriage. A homosexual manager didn’t like Turek’s beliefs, and that was that.
Stop the jokes about social justice snowflakes living in their parents’ basement. They are not the losers you imagine. They are actively recruited by powerful nonprofits and corporations into diversity jobs required by our federal government. In academia, they become the all-powerful diversity bureaucrats, before whom college presidents quake. These very adult and effective social justice warriors can earn over a quarter of a million dollars and hire huge staffs.
Corporate human resource departments hire them from the hordes of graduates churned out by feminist, black studies, and Chicano studies departments (28such departments on one UC campus alone), with titles like “Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Integrity, and Governance.”
Diversity hires are often the Thought Police in corporations across America. They are paid to ensure conformity with government regs, originally to fight racial discrimination, now interpreted as requiring progressive discrimination.
President Obama really did transform America. Thirty-thousand community organizers were trained by President Obama while in office, through his personal non-profit Organizing for America. Barack and Michelle are fundraising as we speak to train 1 million mini-me agitators.
In a well-publicized scam, not halted by Attorney General Jeff Sessions until this year, Obama’s Justice Department illegally hit up our major banks for $1 billion (yes, billion) in lieu of fines and redirected the money to left-wing nonprofits.
The core of progressive training is demonizing normal Americans as deplorables. Once you tar opponents as evil racist-sexist-homophobes, you are justified in any mode of attack, from blacklisting to physical violence.
Professionally trained agitators apply community organizing techniques amplified by social media. They target vulnerable businesses’ advertisers. Large businesses cave before the accusations of racism, homophobia, sexism, or transphobia. They know they can’t sustain the bad publicity and well-financed boycott, however unfair. Mom and Pop businesses may not cave—they’ll just go bankrupt under the onslaught.
In high prestige fields, the beautiful people are frank and complacent about blacklisting Republicans. They justify it by saying Republicans are too stupid to be college professors, or that they would create an unpleasant work environment for blacks, women, and gays. Or simply that they can’t abide people with different political views. In past generations, the Beautiful People couldn’t abide blacks or Jews or Catholics. It is naked bigotry against people different from oneself.
The impact on America has been profound and tragic. Schooling, starting in kindergarten, has turned into political indoctrination that harms children psychologically with their gender and race-obsessed identity politics. Small children are forced to learn the details of homosexual sexual practices against their parents’ wishes. Two generations of our kids have been taught racial guilt and grievance instead of America’s inspiring history of individual rights, rule of law, and freedom. The media and Hollywood function as a propaganda ministry, swaying the minds of the young and the ignorant with their politically correct messages devaluing American, religious and family values.
Activists have successfully targeted the publishing industry. Manuscripts, even by well known, award-winning authors, are vetted by committees of trans, gay, people of color, and feminists. This sounds like a spoof, but it is gallows humor indeed, killing freedom to write and publish without enforced conformity to what progressives allow.
A friend recently confided in me that he is glad that his two grown sons are knee-jerk liberals, even though they vote for candidates he thinks are destroying our country. One is a doctor at Harvard Medical School and the other a well-paid federal bureaucrat.
“They’re not interested in politics,” he said. “They’re busy working and just go along with what everyone around them thinks. It’s better that way.”
Why is it better? “It would end their careers to be conservative.”
His sons—along with most other Americans—live in an unforgiving politically correct world.
This is the ugly reality of progressives’ growing aggression. When Hollywood created the blacklist for Communists in the 1950s, it became a byword for evil. Now it is done by the Superior People in the name of virtue. No place, no setting is safe. Not your private life, not your workplace, not a family dinner at a local restaurant.
Shunning and harassing Trump’s voters is socially acceptable to a growing cohort of Democrats. They enjoy it. They believe in it. They justify it.
What happens from here depends on normal Americans speaking up for decency and freedom. We can’t give up the right to disagree. All of us have to take a page from President Trump’s book and refuse to be intimidated.
Trump can’t do all the winning for us. We have to fight some battles ourselves. The attacks on conservatives go beyond the political arena. Our parents and grandparents in the Greatest Generation fought fascism in Europe. We have to fight it here.
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