Who would have believed that our Hollywood actors and late-night comedians could be counted on to be canaries in the mine? Their incessant chirping now warns us of the poison gases of hate wafting in on the nightly news reports of riots and blood-letting. These celebrity canaries are so concerned, they devote precious airtime, otherwise used to award each other prizes for being wonderful (and radically relevant), to sound the alarm.
These celebrity cherubs and their sycophantic pols see Nazis everywhere and shudder at their resurgence. So do I.
As a matter of fact, I have seen them with my own eyes. I saw them on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where, as an invited speaker a few years ago, I had to have police swat teams provide a protective barrier to get into the lecture hall. Then the real party started.
At Chapel Hill, the screaming brown shirts (led by several “professors”) were so loud inside that the cacophony was deafening. After a few minutes, bricks started coming through the window and a panic ensued while everyone scrambled for the doors. I was spirited away by two policemen as another nail was put in the coffin of free speech by a fascist mob hell-bent on protecting the campus from purveyors of heretical ideas.
So much for our halls of academe leading to the free marketplace of ideas! The war on free speech has now reached epidemic proportions on college campuses nationwide. One brave scholar, Stanley Kurtz, has recently chronicled this firestorm of intolerance, which is all the more alarming and insidious because it is tacitly -– and often openly— aided by university administrators.
The most ironic location for such a display of totalitarian temperament was at the University of Michigan LAW School, where after having been thwarted in their efforts to intimidate by rock throwing and sign waving in the streets, they pulled the fire alarm each time I tried to speak. Of course, that was the just a mild prank compared to the black mask wearing, window smashing, bottle throwing, pepper-spraying mob that injured 11 cops in St. Louis a few days ago.
And so, I say “Right On!” to the public condemnation of the neo-fascists who disrupt peaceful rallies and incite mob violence. I want every act of a rally disruption or a synagogue desecration investigated thoroughly because I believe that, more often than not, you will find they are leftist agent-provocateurs and “false flag” miscreants who paint the swastikas on the walls.
Through my Team America PAC, which has the distinction of being labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, I have offered cash rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone committing these acts of vandalism in Colorado. So far, no takers. I venture to guess that around the nation, you will find that similar acts have been perpetrated by the same type of brown shirt/ski mask fanatics who defaced the statue of Christopher Columbus in Central Park and spray painted “Racist anthem” on the Baltimore monument to Francis Scott Key, who penned the words to the Star Spangled Banner. They are doubtless ignorant of the fact that Key was an outspoken opponent of the slave trade.
Yes, there are indeed “Nazis” everywhere, quite a few of them operating from “safe places” inside our hallowed universities. They all learned from the tactics of their namesakes who first burned books and defaced artworks and broke out all the windows on Kristallnacht in Germany, in 1938. They, of course, soon graduated to burning people instead of just buildings and books.
By all means, let’s all be on the lookout for the modern-day Nazis who use violence or intimidation to silence dissenters. They are on the march and have gained the support of the same mass media and organs of government charged with the responsibility of keeping them in check. What are we to do with public officials who promote self-censorship instead of defending the rights of citizens and groups targeted by the threat of violent disruption?
Does anyone think history cannot repeat the Nazi reign of terror or Mao Tse-Tung’s “Great Leap Forward”? When we look back at the 1930’s and wonder how a nation like Germany, with the highest per capita education level in Europe at the time, could descend into the snake pit of evil that led to the death so many millions, we should think of this:
- According to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center, 40 percent of millennials are ok with limiting free speech, and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that 54 percent of Americans surveyed cannot accurately identify the Bill of Rights.
- The same study found that 10 percent of the college students surveyed thought Judge Judy was on the Supreme Court. Hmmm.
I have not yet been asked if I would trade Judge Judy for Associate Justice Sotomayor, and that’s good: it would be hard to resist that choice if I put my country’s well-being ahead of mere rules and precedents. But, hey: if the Constitution is only a useless piece of paper left behind by “dead white males,” why let the Rule of Law stand in the way of progress?