In a stunning slap at her team, liberal pundit Kirsten Powers is charging in a new book that the left is so intolerant of alternative views that it will use sexist and even racist language to shout down women and blacks who don’t champion Democratic causes.
Kirsten Powers, a USA Today and Daily Beast columnist and designated “liberal” on Fox, confessed in her new book that the left aggressively tries to “silence people” who don’t fall into the liberal line.
In The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech, she calls out the lefty tactics, especially how they belittle conservative women and African-Americans. She said the goal is to silence the right and its outlets.
“Conservative women are treated as dimwitted, self loathing puppets of the patriarchy, or nefarious gender traitors,” she writes in the book from Regnery Publishing provided to Secrets.
Ditto for blacks. “Raffi Williams, a young black conservative who works as the deputy press secretary for the Republican National Committee, told me he regularly gets Facebook comments or tweets from supposed liberals calling him an ‘Uncle Tom,’ ‘house n-word,’ race traitor, and sellout,” she added.
Powers is sure to get slapped herself as a sellout for hitting what she views as hypocrisy by liberals, as former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson did before her.
Powers grew up in a liberal family but said that interacting with conservatives, and finding God, has given her a new perspective.
“Two experiences unexpectedly put me in a regular relationship with conservatives: working as a contributor at Fox News and a later in life conversion to Christianity. The more I got to know actual conservative and religious people, the harder it was to justify the stereotypes I had so carelessly embraced. In my early days at Fox, I can remember trying to convince a conservative there that George Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court didn’t really count as a female appointment because she was conservative and an evangelical Christian. He was horrified. I was confused as to why he would be horrified. I’m now embarrassed that I ever thought such a thing, let alone said it aloud. Such a prejudiced view was only able to take root because of the lack of ideological, political, and religious diversity,” she wrote.
Powers added: “This intolerance is not a passive matter of opinion. It’s an aggressive, illiberal impulse to silence people. This conduct has become an existential threat to those who hold orthodox religious beliefs. But increasingly I hear from people across the political spectrum who are fearful not only of expressing their views, but also as to where all of this is heading. I’ve followed this trend closely as a columnist with growing concern. It’s become clear that the attempts—too often successful—to silence dissent from the liberal worldview aren’t isolated outbursts. They are part of a bigger story. This book is that story.”
Some key excerpts:
• Delegitimizing and “Silencing” Tactics by “Illiberals.” With no sense of irony or shame, the illiberal left will engage in racist, sexist, misogynist, and homophobic attacks of their own in an effort to delegitimize people who dissent from the “already decided” worldview. Non-white conservatives are called sellouts and race traitors. Conservative women are treated as dimwitted,self-loathing puppets of the patriarchy, or nefarious gender traitors. Men who express the wrong political or ideological view are demonized as hostile interlopers into the public debate. The illiberal left sees its bullying and squelching of free speech as a righteous act.
• A Who’s Who of the Illiberal Left. The people who are prosecuting many of these delegitimization campaigns are not fringe characters. They include Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, senior White House aides, administrators and professors of major public and private universities, and the president of the United States. Major media figures and major liberal activist groups consistently carry water for the illiberal left. These are all people who call themselves liberal, and who claim to believe in tolerance, while behaving in the most illiberal manner imaginable.
• The Illiberal Left’s War on Fox Women. So pervasive is the smear that all the female commentators and anchors on Fox are dumb blonde chicks that it was actually fact-checked by PolitiFact. That’s not a joke. They analyzed the female hosts’ and anchors’ hair color and found the assertion “mostly false,” because Fox had its fair share of black-haired and brunette women.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
