The Silencing Quotes

“Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is cast as racism, misogyny, bigotry, phobia, and, as we’ve seen, even violence. If you criticize the lack of due process for male college students accused of rape, you are a “rape apologist.” End of conversation. After all, who wants to listen to a rape lover? People who are anti–abortion rights don’t care about the unborn; they are misogynists who want to control women. Those who oppose same-sex marriage don’t have rational, traditional views about marriage that deserve respect or debate; they are bigots and homophobes. When conservatives opposed the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” it wasn’t due to a differing philosophy about the role of government. No, they were waging a “War on Women.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“The problem with the illiberal left is that it believes a “progressive” take on issues is an objective take, and cannot conceive that there are other legitimate points of view. As William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped, a liberal is someone who claims to be open to all points of view—and then is surprised and offended to find there are other points of view.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“If you are a conservative—or even a liberal who says something deemed conservative—your speech will get canceled or your award revoked for taking a view at odds with liberal dogma. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s honorary degree at Brandeis was yanked for slamming Islam, but nobody blinked when at a 2007 Smith Commencement address, Gloria Steinem compared people who oppose abortion and same-sex marriage to “Germany under fascism.”54”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“When people are afraid to express their opinions because they’ve seen other people treated as deviants deserving of public shaming or worse, they will be less likely to speak freely.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“dialogue” with the illiberal left is one in which they inform you of the “right” way to think. Resistance to their demands will result in your being stuck with labels like bigot, misogynist, homophobe, racist, sexist, or some other toxic moniker”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“A “dialogue” with the illiberal left is one in which they inform you of the “right” way to think.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is cast as racism, misogyny, bigotry, phobia, and, as we’ve seen, even violence. If you criticize the lack of due process for male college students accused of rape, you are a “rape apologist.” End of conversation. After all, who wants to listen to a rape lover? People who are anti–abortion rights don’t care about the unborn; they are misogynists who want to control women. Those who oppose same-sex marriage don’t have rational, traditional views about marriage that deserve respect or debate; they are bigots and homophobes. When conservatives opposed the Affordable Care Act’s “contraception mandate” it wasn’t due to a differing philosophy about the role of government. No, they were waging a “War on Women.” With no sense of irony or shame, the illiberal left will engage in racist, sexist, misogynist, and homophobic attacks of their own in an effort to delegitimize people who dissent from the “already decided” worldview. Non-white conservatives are called sellouts and race traitors. Conservative women are treated as dim-witted, self-loathing puppets of the patriarchy, or nefarious gender traitors. Men who express the wrong political or ideological view are demonized as hostile interlopers into the public debate. The illiberal left sees its bullying and squelching of free speech as a righteous act. This”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“The illiberal left denies women and non-white members of society the right to choose which political party or ideological positions they may support. That’s only for white men (who, if they’re not Democrats, are presumed to be racist and sexist anyway).”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“Posner and Shiffrin are influential legal scholars and they are not alone in their views. Their intolerance of free speech that leads to what they deem the wrong policy conclusions or offends the wrong people is frankly typical of the illiberal left. Today’s progressive legal policy is less likely to treat the First Amendment as a bulwark against government infringement on the free expression of Americans than a roadblock to a progressive ideological agenda.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“Liberals are supposed to believe in protecting minority views, even when they disapprove of those views. Instead an online mob of presumably “liberal” people tweeted about Eich’s donation,23 many calling him a bigot and homophobe for supporting Prop 8. Remember, this proposition passed the same year Senator Barack Obama sat in Rick Warren’s church to explain his religious based opposition to same-sex marriage.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“In a burst of refreshing honesty, Mary Frances Berry, an African American and former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under President Bill Clinton, wrote in a Politico online discussion: “Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats.” Berry, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, added, “There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.”17”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“Similarly at the Washington Post in 2005, one of the paper’s editors, Marie Arana, wrote “The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions. . . . We’re not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat.” She added, “I’ve been in communal gatherings in the Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“Casting disagreement as a physical attack or “hate speech,” or any host of socially taboo behaviors, has become a central tactic in an ever expanding campaign to silence speech.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“60 Minutes was once famous for asking hard questions. Now, at least if you’re President Obama, an interview with 60 Minutes looks more like a campaign promo.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“We no longer prize intellectual conversation, preferring instead to dismiss our opponents in 140-character feats of rhetoric,” Ambrosino noted. “We routinely scour the private lives and social media accounts of our political opponents in the hopes of demonizing them as archaic, unthinking, and bigoted.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“Debate and persuasion should be the default response when someone encounters a person who does not share their view, not demands that the other person change their position or be pushed to the margins of polite society.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“The illiberal left does not share this commitment. Their burgeoning philosophy in favor of government power to curtail freedom of thought, speech, and conscience is troubling. Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a graduate of one of the nation’s most elite law schools, the University of Virginia—said in a September 2014 interview of those who deny climate change, “I wish that there were a law you could punish them under.”36 Accusing the libertarian Koch brothers of “treason” for disagreeing with his view of climate change, he said they should be “at the Hague with all the other war criminals.” He asked rhetorically, “Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offense and they ought to be serving time for it.” Kennedy’s penchant for arguing for state action against those who do not share his view of climate change is not new. In 2007, he said in a speech at Live Earth that politicians who are “corporate toadies for companies like Exxon and Southern Company” had committed treason and needed to be treated as traitors.37 In 2009, he deemed certain coal companies “criminal enterprises” and declared that one company’s CEO “should be in jail . . . for all of eternity.”38”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“if you have not consented to sexual intercourse, it is rape.” In other words: if you have sex after drinking alcohol, you have been raped. This kind of lunacy has become the unquestioned dogma of illiberal feminists and their enablers in university and governmental institutions.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“Then, chillingly, they made an argument that has become increasingly common among the illiberal left: liberal political orthodoxy trumps academic freedom. “While academic freedom has immense value within the walls of the classroom,” they wrote, “[we] invite you into a dialogue with UVA students who are negatively impacted by your work. It is vitally important to balance the collective work of our academic community with the collective impact of that work in communities across the country.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“47 percent of eighteen- to thirty-year-olds say the First Amendment goes too far, and 44 percent of thirty-one- to forty-five-year-olds agree.43 If younger Americans are that accepting of government interference in speech, then how much more tolerant will they be of unofficial silencing?”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“society should always err on the side of respecting people’s right to determine their own beliefs and express them without fear of official or unofficial retribution. Debate and persuasion should be the reflexive response to disagreement and even harmful propositions, not an authoritarian impulse to silence.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“When people’s lives and careers are subject to litmus tests, and fired if they do not publicly renounce what may well be their sincere conviction, we have crossed a line. This is McCarthyism applied by civil actors. This is the definition of intolerance.”28”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“The people who are prosecuting many of these delegitimization campaigns are not fringe characters. They include Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, senior White House aides, administrators and professors of major public and private universities, and the president of the United States. Major media figures and major liberal activist groups consistently carry water for the illiberal left. These are all people who call themselves liberal, and who claim to believe in tolerance, while behaving in the most illiberal manner imaginable.”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“In”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“The”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“equality, you’re a shit human.”65 It became such a controversy”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“In September 2009, the White House had fired a warning shot, cutting veteran reporter and Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace out of a round of interviews with the president on healthcare reform. White House Communications Director Anita Dunn conceded that CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS were included, but Fox was excluded because the administration did not like the way Fox covered the administration.12 Deputy White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer explained the snub to the New York Times: “We simply decided to stop abiding by the fiction, which is aided and abetted by the mainstream press, that Fox is a traditional news organization.”13”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“Republicans accept as a well-documented fact of life that an overwhelming majority of the media is slanted against them.4 They take critical media coverage for granted. The Obama administration does not. So much so that harsh criticism by a news outlet is viewed as intolerable dissent. Moreover, this broadside from the president of the United States was not buttressed by facts. Pew Research Center found that from September 8 through October 16 of the 2008 campaign—the heat of the election cycle—40 percent of Fox News stories on then-Senator Obama were negative as were 40 percent of the network’s stories on Senator John McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent. You can’t get more fair and balanced than that. If you wanted to see bias against a candidate, CNN and MSNBC were better examples. Pew found that 61 percent of CNN’s stories on John McCain were negative, compared to only 39 percent of their Obama stories. The disparity was even greater at MSNBC where a mere 14 percent of Obama stories were negative, compared to a whopping 73 percent of McCain stories (and only 10 percent of MSNBC’s coverage of McCain was rated as positive). Overall, according to an October 2007 study of media coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (funded by Pew) in collaboration with Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy, the press gave much more favorable coverage to Democratic candidates, noting, for example, that 46.7 percent of stories about Barack Obama had a positive tone, while only 12.4 percent of stories about John McCain did.5 Obama should have been counting his blessings, not complaining about the one news television outlet that wouldn’t fall in line. He had received, by some measures, the most laudatory press coverage of any senatorial or presidential candidate in recent history.6”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech

“The more suppressive view of free speech seems to be gaining currency more broadly, especially among younger Americans. According to the 2013 First Amendment Center annual survey, “This year there was a significant increase in those who claimed that the First Amendment goes too far in protecting individual rights.” The older you are, the less likely it is that you believe the First Amendment’s protections are too robust. Only 23 percent of people over sixty and 24 percent of those between forty-six and sixty hold that sentiment. But an astonishing 47 percent of eighteen- to thirty-year-olds say the First Amendment goes too far, and 44 percent of thirty-one- to forty-five-year-olds agree.43”
― Kirsten Powers, The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech