The Intimidation Game Quotes

“Everything,” says Mitchell, “everything was a complete abandonment of the rule of law. It was all the forces of government using harassment and intimidation to shut people down.”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“And how is all that sunshine working out? Obama came to office promising to oversee the most transparent administration in history. Instead, his government may go down as the most secretive in the modern era.”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“Target’s donation was clearly aimed at electing a governor with free-market priorities that would benefit consumers, workers, and retailers. But left-wing activists didn’t care about this truth; they wanted to make Target an example. They combed through Emmer’s record, looking for a politically sensitive issue, and landed on the candidate’s opposition to gay marriage. At the time, Emmer wasn’t out of the mainstream in that position. In 2008, the majority of Americans still opposed gay marriage, as did, for the record, Barack Obama.”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“Conservatives, she explained, were “crazy” and worse than “alien terrorists.” In March 2014, a friend wrote to complain about Texas Republicans. Lerner responded, “Look my view is that Lincoln was our worst president not our best. He should’[v]e let the south go. We really do seem to have 2 totally different mindsets.” Around”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“And so the politicians know who is doing the criticizing, and with whom to settle scores. Former Senator John Kerry made sure that Sam Fox never got his ambassadorship to Belgium. Fox was disciplined for having donated to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The government subjected Frank VanderSloot and Catherine Engelbrecht to multiple audits as punishment for their conservative work. The IRS segregated out Tea Party applications and put them on hold as a penalty for opposing Barack Obama.”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“The United States in the past hundred years, and in particular since Watergate, has gone down a very different path. In the name of “clean and transparent” elections, it has layered ever more restrictions on political spending, and by extension on speech. It has instituted a vast new disclosure regime, ostensibly to better inform voters about political actors and the workings of government. This disclosure has instead empowered the intimidators to silence those who question them.”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“ALEC is a reason states have cut taxes on income and on corporations; reduced unemployment insurance; shored up private property rights; instituted medical savings accounts; reformed public pension plans; cracked down on trial lawyers; and enacted sunshine laws. Few Americans have heard of ALEC. But there’s a case to be made that no one policy organization has touched the daily lives of more Americans.”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“What the left has understood forever is that big business and big government go hand in hand. They use the growth of big business to expand the growth of big government, and vice versa. What they also understand is that business is far more susceptible to pressure than government. So they devote a lot of time to pressuring business. We on the right, we ignore that. We sit here and we throw little pebbles at big government and get all frustrated when things don’t change overnight. What we need to be doing is using the model the left created, and attacking this symbiotic relationship from the business side.”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“Tony Soprano couldn’t do it better, and Freed gets results. While most of the news media spent its ink on the proxy fight battles raging in 2011, the far more interesting fact was this: Going into that proxy fight year, fifty-seven of the S&P 500 companies had already chosen to forgo political spending or to disclose their political spending on their websites. They’d already been gotten to.”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“De Blasio went even further, delving back into the Target fray. The pol was a trustee of the New York City Employee Retirement System, which owned shares in Target. The left had already forced Target to cease using money in campaigns via trade associations. Yet the retailer hadn’t been able to shake the assault; activists sought to continue making an example of it. They scored a particular hit in 2011, when pop star Lady Gaga very publicly ended a deal with Target for her newest album due to its “continued political activity.” Target’s share price kept dropping.”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“he was far more aggressive in his demands, handing the IRS specific target lists in the run-up to the 2012 election. In a July 2012 letter, he listed twelve groups he wanted investigated for political activity. Eleven”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“Democratic chairwoman Ann Ravel landed there in 2013, straight from a job running California’s FEC equivalent, the Fair Political Practices Commission. She arrived with a mission to turbocharge the FEC’s powers. She’s proposed greatly expanding disclosure rules. She wants to give the FEC power to regulate Internet content. Most disturbingly, she wants to get rid of one commissioner, to end tie votes, and allow one party (presumably hers) to steamroll the other. With”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“Bauer understood the modern power of using government—even if only the threat of it—to silence political opponents. And his special insight was realizing that the tool for getting those government drones trained on the right targets was campaign finance law.”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“The only thing that had changed was a new administration, with a new view of the role of the IRS.”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech

“DISCLOSE, declared McConnell, wasn’t about clean government; it was “a transparent attempt to rig the fall election.”
― Kimberley Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech