Kirsten Powers’ new book The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech surveys the political landscape of the past couple years and finds something new to worry about.
A self-described liberal, Powers writes that the “illiberal left” is trying to dominate the discussion on campus, online and in the media through intimidation. In our discussion, Powers suggests there is an authoritarian impulse at play, one that has been gaining steam in the broader culture.
What follows has been lightly edited for space and clarity.
Breitbart News: Tell me a little about the genesis of the book. Was there a particular moment when this idea clicked in your head?
Kirsten Powers: There were different things along the way that I wrote columns about for my USA Today column–the Brendan Eich situation at Mozilla where he was forced out of his job for giving money to the anti-same sex marriage initiative. And then the Aayan Hirsi Ali incident at Brandeis. The various commencement–I call it commencement shaming incidents. I just started to think something is going on here that I think goes beyond the old P.C. I wanted to look into it and see if there was something more than just one-off events. Another incident was Louie Giglio being disinvited or being forced to bow out of the inauguration for a sermon he had given 20 years ago, which was noteworthy because four years prior Rick Warren, who had the same exact position on homosexuality had been at the President’s inauguration. So something had shifted clearly. I started looking into it and interviewing people who are free speech activists. I discovered that there was something much bigger going on here–it wasn’t just a few one-offs it was a pretty wide-ranging silencing.
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