Alec Baldwin: The Left Is Now Full of Corrosive Hate, And That's All the Fault of Fox and Breitbart

You know when I say "Read the Whole Thing?" Here's my suggestion: Don't read the whole thing.

It's not that there isn't some minor interest to parts of it; there is. But overall, it's long-winded, self-justifying, and self-indulgent.

You can read a bit of at Hot Air, but here's the part I focus on:

In the New Media culture, anything good you do is tossed in a pit, and you are measured by who you are on your worst day. What’s the Boy Scout code? Trustworthy. Loyal. Helpful. Friendly. Courteous. Kind. Obedient. Cheerful. Thrifty. Brave. Clean. Reverent. I might be all of those things, at certain moments. But people suspect that whatever good you do, you are faking. You’re that guy. You’re that guy that says this. There is a core of outlets that are pushing these stories out. Breitbart clutters the blogosphere with “Alec Baldwin, he’s the Devil, he’s Fidel Baldwin.”

Broadway has changed, by my lights. The TV networks, too. New York has changed. Even the U.S., which is so preposterously judgmental now. The heart, the arteries of the country are now clogged with hate. The fuel of American political life is hatred. Who would ever dream that Obama would deserve to be treated the way he has been? The birth-certificate bullshit, which is just Obama’s version of Swiftboating. And all for the electoral nullification that seems like a cancer on the American system. But this is Roger Ailes. And Fox. And Breitbart. And this is all about hate. It’s Hate Incorporated. But the liberals have taken the bait and run in the same direction—and it’s just as corrosive. MSNBC, in its own way, is as full of shit, as redundant and as superfluous, as Fox.

Wait, we started this, and the left then imitated us?

Of course this is nonsense on stilts. I have decried this Scalp-Hunting culture myself, frequently, as infects both the left and the right.

But here's why I sometimes am conflicted about it:

The right is engaging in this defensively, as an Alinsky-style attempt to "Make them live by their own rulebooks."

The right has been savaged by these tactics for decades. It is frustration over that that I believe is responsible for so many people being unwilling to acknowledge that Ted Nugent's remarks were way over-the-line: Because they know this game is played by the left relentlessly, but the left is never (or very rarely) called to account for its own PC Speech Transgressions.

No one on the right -- or very, very few on the right -- wish this odious, toxic, censorious regime to continue.

But many on the right worry about unilateral disarmament. We know that if the left is permitted to engage in this game, without the sick rules of this game ever being turned against them, they will do so zealously and in perpetuity.

They will have no reason whatsoever to re-assess their strategy of Scalp-Hunting based on accusations of Speechcraft. (That is, witchcraft -- only the "magic words" here are not Satanic, but contrary to the PC code. And you can't be burned at the stake for Speechcraft accusations, but you can and will probably lose your job.)

I don't think that Alec Baldwin should have been fired due his own Speechcraft Trial. Not per se, I mean. In a properly-functioning civic culture, Badlwin would have been criticized, laughed at, jeered at, and made to pay a social penalty commensurate with his crime. (Which was, at the end of the day, a crime equal to about that of Ted Nugent -- he got mad, he wished to make an insult sting, and he resorted to broad slurs against large numbers of people when he should have kept his insult to his actual target.)

But that is not the regime we live under. The regime we currently live under, perpetrated by a censorious, Scalp-Hunting left, which even attacks progressive dope Piers Morgan for being insufficiently sensitive to transexuals' feelings. (Morgan's transgression consisted of asking a transexual about being a boy, before having a sex change -- this was a horrible aggression, you see, because the transexual in question believes that "she's" always been a girl.)

Here is the ultimate consequence if this ridiculous regime of ginned-up social media offense-taking and consequences-demanding is permitted to persist: We will simply wind up silencing ourselves, for fear of outraging the latest Censor On a Warpath.

I would like very much for this regime to end. I'm sure most readers believe the same thing.

But it is silly to claim this is all due to "Breitbart" and "Roger Ailes" and "FoxNews." Conservatives are very late to the politically-correct Scalp-Hunting game-- the left has been doing this for decades.

It's not the right, after all, which is siccing the IRS and a host of other government agencies on Catherine Engelbrecht.

It's not the right, in this climate of government harassment of critics, declaring that Health and Human Services should now monitor each and every social media message in America.

It's not conservatives calling for an end to academic freedom on college campuses.

It's not Republicans who are purging even the Science Fiction Writers of America of veteran members for alleged "sexism," nor who are proposing a regime of censorship in that organization's quarterly Bulletin.

The regime will come to an end when those on the left -- especially liberals who have upset by this transformation of the movement into a censorious Scalp-Hunting club but who have kept silent about it in order to keep the left/liberal alliance intact -- begin speaking up about it, and defending those accused of new Speechcraft violations, including those on the right.

I will tell you personally that I and most of the people I know are ready, willing, and dying to put this corrupt, vicious, anti-free-speech, and anti-American sport to an end.

But we can't quite do that when people like Chuck Todd are always ready to call the right's outrage "fauxtrage" or false outrage, but never willing to say the same thing about the perpetual outrage of his fellow travelers on the left.

A detente can be reached, and most on the right wish for there to be one. But this detente cannot simply be a return to the old system whereby this vicious tactic was gleefully employed by the censorious left and no one else.

It's about time that anyone interested in Free Speech -- or America -- begins telling the censors of all stripes to pipe down.

posted by Ace at 04:30 PM

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