The silencing.

• Author: Fischer, Raymond L.
• Position: National Affairs - The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech - Book review

"The illiberal left has abandoned the open-mindedness and reason of liberalism for prejudice, ideological conformity, and marginalization for opposing thoughts."

A PROUD LIBERAL deeply involved in Democratic politics, Kirsten Powers worked as a political appointee in the Clinton Administration, served on Andrew Cuomo's staff during his first race for governor of New York, and consulted for the New York Democratic Committee. Even the few Republicans she knew were liberals. However, working as a journalist at Fox News and undergoing a later-life conversion to Christianity, Powers has acquired a "regular relationship with conservatives." In writing from the Jeffersonian tradition of liberalism, Powers exposes the "illiberal left" and its attempts to squelch free speech and freedom of conscience in The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech.

Powers defines "illiberal left" as people who smear individuals who express the "wrong" views. Illiberals, "self-appointed overlords" who have mandated "acceptable ideas," believe in silencing people or groups who express opposing ideological, philosophical, or political views. With no sense of irony or shame and with righteous zeal, illiberals pursue "racist, sexist, misogynist, and homophobic attacks" in order to delegitimize an individual or group expressing ideas different from their "already decided" world views. Originating on the left side of the political spectrum, illiberals have created alarming intolerance in their attempts to silence dissent from "conservatives, orthodox Christians, moderate Democrats, independent liberals, and agnostics."

Although illiberals consider themselves liberals, they act in "direct contradiction to fundamental liberal values of free speech, debate, and dissent." Instead of using persuasion and rhetoric to make a reasonable case for their causes and views, they resort to delegitimizing the person making an opposing argument by "character assassination, demonization, and dehumanizing tactics." In what one author refers to as "We Are All Already Decided" phenomenon, "activists, university administrators, journalists, and politicians determine what views are acceptable."

In their passion to silence opposing ideas, illiberals hunt down "heretics, dissidents, and run-of-the-mill dissenters" not only "to silence them, but to make examples of them for the rest of society." They strive for a world "sanitized of information that offends them."

While illiberals profess...