The American left has become the greatest purveyor of bullying during the last half-century. That’s the dirty little secret: buried beneath all of the left’s supposed hatred for bullying is a passionate love for bullying—the use of power to force those who disagree to shut up, back down, or face crushing consequences up to and including loss of reputation, career destruction, and even death.
President Obama and his leftist allies like to claim they’re anti-bullying. They stand up for the little guy. They stand up to the powerful. They protect victims.
They’re liars. What’s more, they’re the true bullies, as I explain in my new book, Bullies: How The Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
Standing up to the bullying of the left was Andrew Breitbart’s chief mission in life. That’s why Bullies is dedicated to him – Andrew was a mentor to me. I met him when I was 17 years old, a sophomore at UCLA. Andrew saw a column I wrote in the UCLA Daily Bruin and emailed me. That’s what Andrew did. He identified people who wanted to fight back, and he nurtured them. That’s why he’s so irreplaceable. And that’s why we must live up to his dream: of an American public empowered to fight the bullies.
Andrew hated the bullies of the left. “These liberals are bullies,” he said once. But he didn’t run from them. Instead, he embraced the fight. He called it “fun” to “call out these intellectual bullies.” It was this task that got Andrew up in the morning. It’s the fight he sought. It’s the fight in which he reveled.
It’s a fight we must embrace. Leftist bullying reaches new heights every day. And it has found its apex in the Obama administration.
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