In her latest video interview for The Daily Caller News Foundation, this time with the Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberly Strassel, our friend Ginni Thomas asks readers to imagine if conservatives were using government agencies to bully or silence their opponents in America’s public square in 2016.
Strassel says the media and the public would be outraged, but in “Dem Bullies Are Using Tactics To ‘Scare, Threaten And Harass’ Americans Out Of Free Speech” and her book The Intimidation Game: How the Left is Silencing Free Speech, Strassel exposes a dangerous trend of two different sets of rules corrupting our politics.
One for conservatives who are harassed and intimidated, and one for the Left, who use the government and “public disclosure” laws to silence their opponents and critics.
In the interview Strassel condemns her media colleagues for failing to expose the snowballing use of these egregious tactics. Poor media coverage allows the “people peddling false narratives to win,” such as what happened with the now-discredited blaming of the IRS scandal on a “few people in Cincinnati,” Strassel points out.
Strassel, a respected columnist for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, endeavored to find the equivalency of using bullying tactics with governmental power. With only one exception, her deep-dive reporting demonstrates a cascading set of examples of the left increasingly using governmental power to suppress dissent.
For years, notes Thomas, Strassel has reported on the IRS targeting of President Barack Obama dissidents, the John Doe investigation of 30 groups who supported Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin, the left’s war on the American Legislative Exchange Council, the “Prop. 8” fight for traditional marriage in California and many other examples of individual harassment by the government or activists.
Strassel’s jarring book documents a sweeping effort “to scare, threaten and harass the other side out of speaking.” The tactics include siccing government agencies on opponents, reputational warfare and sometimes walking neighborhoods of mere donors to scare, intimate or destroy property of those who challenge the liberal orthodoxy.
“It all fit together,” Strassel told Thomas in the exclusive interview for The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Strassel was especially critical of the hypocrisy of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and elected Democrats who lament “dark money” in politics.
“They have no issue with big money in politics because they deal in big money in politics. They have no issue with dark money in politics because they use dark money in politics. …When you hear Hillary Clinton say ‘we need to get rid of dark money in politics and change the first amendment,’ they are positioning for an advantage, not fairness,” Strassel told Thomas.
“They love campaign finance laws and speech laws because it allows them to control who gets to speak” and it shuts down their opponents Ms. Strassel concluded.
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