Bullies

by Ben Shapiro

  The question isn’t why universities see fit to hand over six-figure salaries to unrepentant former terrorists Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. The question is why there’s nobody on the other side of the aisle. And the answer is simple: in order to become a professor, you need other professors to oversee your Ph.D. studies. You can’t hope to butt up against the liberal infrastructure and win. Conservatives are automatically weeded out of the system. Try getting a Ph.D. with a thesis about how FDR’s policies destroyed America’s fiscal health for the next century. Then get ready to distribute résumés to local fast-food joints.

  So how did colleges become so liberal? Back in the 1940s and 1950s, colleges weren’t nearly as liberal as they are now. But in the 1960s, college faculty decided it was easier to appease rampaging leftist students than to deal with them. They came to an agreement with the wildebeests: stop taking over the buildings and locking the doors, and we’ll start teaching you about how America sucks. The professorial strategy on America’s college campuses was the same as the management style there: surrender. Even as idiot smelly hippies rioted and brought the National Guard down upon them, America’s leading leftist intellectual lights enabled them. “The present generation of young people in our universities are the best informed, the most intelligent and the most idealistic this country has ever known,” said Professor Archibald Cox of Harvard Law School, my alma mater. That same year, 1968, there were well over two hundred demonstrations at American universities. It was students who led the violence at the Democratic National Convention that same year. No wonder Professor Louis Kampf of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology admitted, “[T]he young go into the profession with dread, the old can scarcely wait for retirement, and those of the middle years yearn for sabbaticals.”28

  Do colleges have an impact on the kids who attend them? You bet they do. Even though you thought you were ignoring your professor and chatting up the hot blonde in the back of your Philosophy 101 course, chances are that you had to take a final in that course. And chances are that if you wanted to do well in that final, citing Ayn Rand probably wasn’t the best strategy. There’s a reason studies show that people skew more liberal the longer they’re in school. As of 2010, just 25 percent of people who graduated from high school supported same-sex marriage; for college graduates, that was 39 percent; for master’s students, that was 46 percent. And students don’t get smarter over the same period—surveys also show that college seniors know just as little about basic civics as college freshmen do.29 However, they do know infinitely more about where to find free condoms, and what environmentalist lines work best on idealistic leftist coeds (hint: the answer is “I work with dolphins”).

  The level of intolerance on college campuses for traditionally conservative thinking is astonishing. Religious people find themselves under assault from professors and administrations that despise their thinking. And meanwhile, those professors and administrators get paid substantial sums to generate white papers on behalf of liberal politicians. Want to be quoted in the New York Times about how evil George W. Bush is? Just grab a job at a top university. After all, the media’s always looking for someone they can tag an “expert.”

  That’s why Barack Obama and his cronies are constantly seeking to put more people into the college system. In his 2012 State of the Union address, he referred to kids going to college as an element of the “basic American promise.” In February 2009, he said to a joint session of Congress, “Tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training . . . every American will need to get more than a high school diploma.” And in September 2011, he said, “Not only do you have to graduate from high school, but you’re going to have to continue education after you leave. You have to not only graduate, but you’ve got to keep going after you graduate.” And in May 2011: “I want every child . . . in America ready to graduate, ready to go to college. . . . ”30

  To that end, Obama has pushed for government to increase subsidization of student loan rates, making it less expensive for your kid to get that crucial degree in Lesbian Dance Theory. And, not coincidentally, for your kid to imbibe the liberalism that has poisoned the body politic at the universities.

  HOLLYWOOD BULLIES

  Hollywood is a liberal industry, and everybody knows it. Hollywood is full of bullies, and everybody knows it. Only in Hollywood are bullies like Harvey Weinstein—who reportedly is one of the nastiest people in Hollywood, a man who once headlocked and dragged New York Observer reporter Andrew Goldman out of an event, threatened to “beat the s—” out of director Julie Taymor’s dinner companion, and told Democratic politico Terry McAuliffe “You motherf—er! I’ll rip your balls off!”31—able to hypocritically produce movies like Bully. And then, of course, bully the ratings board to change the rating from R to PG-13.

  Bullying in Hollywood is ubiquitous. It’s ubiquitous from people like Barbra Streisand, who thinks it’s ideological fascism to replace Robert Scheer with Jonah Goldberg in the pages of the Los Angeles Times32 but demands that members of the servant class elevate her bed a specific number of degrees in hotels and recarpet her bedroom.33 Mariah Carey requires an attendant to discard her gum.34 Michael Moore demands an enormous hock of ham, a beanbag filled with Jell-O, and a whoopee cushion with George W. Bush’s face. Okay, that last example isn’t real. But the other ones are.

  Nobody treats people worse than the biggest stars in Hollywood. Personally, they’re bullies.

  But ideologically, they’re even bigger bullies. These stars all live in beautiful homes off Sunset Boulevard, ensconced behind walls of leaves and enormous staffs of personal attendants. They walk into bars in New York City, leave them looking like outtakes from a Bosnian documentary, and never get prosecuted. They get married, divorced, married, divorced again, married, go to drug rehab, get divorced, get married . . . and then finally announce they’re gay, to the applause of the mainstream media. It’s a great life.

  Hollywood routinely discriminates against people who refuse to be bullied, as many top-level Hollywood executives, writers, and producers admitted to me. If you’re a conservative in Hollywood, you stay underground for fear of firing. If you happen to have voted for California’s Proposition 8, upholding traditional marriage, you keep that buried behind NSA-level security—the moment your peers find you out, you’re out of a job. As Nicholas Meyer, director of The Day After, as well as writer of Star Trek II, IV, and VI, told me when asked about discrimination in Hollywood, “Well, I hope so.” Or as Vin DiBona, producer of MacGyver and America’s Funniest Home Videos, explained to me, “I think it’s probably accurate [that there’s anti-conservative discrimination] and I’m happy about it actually. . . . If the accusation is there, I’m okay with it.”

  The point? Only liberal content will be produced if liberals can bully conservatives out of the industry.

  The Hollywood crowd engages with the political and media crowd on a regular basis, crafting narrative for the left. It’s no surprise that President Obama and his regulatory friends have gone out of their way to focus on issues near and dear to Hollywood. They’re his palace guard, bullying on his behalf—and doing it to tremendous effect.

  CONCLUSION

  All of these bullies act as a phalanx, targeting their opposition for destruction. And their bullying works. It works so well, in fact, that even the most untouchable people and institutions feel the wrath of their thuggishness.

  Take, for example, Obamacare.

  Now, for years, the media and Hollywood had coordinated to attack the American health-care system. Movies like John Q suggested that America’s health-care system was massively discriminatory and required vigilante justice to set it straight. Every television show seemed to focus on some poor sap who lost his house because Grandma needed dialysis. The media, meanwhile, covered every bankruptcy, every sob story, from every person who developed a disease and didn’t get proper insurance. This isn’t to say that America’s health system is per
fect—it isn’t. But by the time Barack Obama came to office, many Americans were under the impression that the American health-care system was worse than Zimbabwe’s.

  Rather than recognizing the fact that America’s life-expectancy rate after cancer diagnosis was the best on the planet, rather than seeing that America’s surgeons set the global standard, rather than understanding that America is the global leader in research and development in the medical field—and most of all, rather than spotting the obvious truth that overregulation and oversuing of the medical industry had set up a thicket of red tape, raising costs and lowering quality of care—the media and Hollywood portrayed America’s health system as a paragon of failure. Not only that, they suggested that that failure was due to capitalism, not the forest of legal nonsense set up by well-meaning politicians (and politicians who’d been paid off).

  By the time Obama took office, the ground was prepped.

  Obama promptly created a faux groundswell in favor of complete overhaul of the health-care system in America. Nobody demanded it. In fact, most Americans wanted Obama focused on the economy. Mitt Romney ripped Obama for his failure to focus: “When you have an enterprise in trouble,” he said, “the Number One rule is this: Focus, focus, focus.”35 Even the leftist media wondered what Obama was doing. “President Obama’s goal of remaking the health care system was always going to be difficult to reach,” lamented the New York Times in March 2009. “But as he prepares to begin a campaign for universal coverage this week, the ailing economy has complicated his task.”36

  But with the help of his friends—with the help of the folks at places like Center for American Progress, and his friends in the media, and his friends in Hollywood—Obama did what he wanted to do. He bullied the Tea Party; he suggested they were racist; he tore apart the insurance companies, denouncing them as greedy. He rammed his health-care plan down the throat of Americans. And Americans did what they wanted to do: they booted Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats from their perches of power in Congress in response.

  That’s when the most shocking bullying of all began.

  See, there was one little problem with President Obama’s health-care plan: it was blatantly unconstitutional. The Constitution of the United States does not allow the federal government to force people to buy health insurance, as Obamacare mandated. Certain specific taxes were okay under the Constitution, but this wasn’t one of them.

  And the Supreme Court majority knew it.

  That majority was composed of five justices: Justice Alito, Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas, Chief Justice Roberts, and the supposed swing voter, Justice Kennedy. All five of those justices were expected to vote to strike down the so-called Obamacare individual mandate; they were expected to strike down the law as a whole. They were expected to strike it down because it was one of the worst violations of individual liberty in American history—the federal government was claiming the authority to punish you for failing to buy something they wanted you to buy.

  Instead, in a shocking turn of events, Chief Justice John Roberts, an appointee of President George W. Bush, voted with the liberals on the court to uphold Obamacare in its entirety. This was no surprise to me—I’d opposed Roberts’s nomination all the way back in 2005.37 But it was a surprise to virtually everyone else, mainly because Roberts had clearly signaled during oral arguments that he was against the Obamacare mandate. Now he ruled that the mandate wasn’t actually a mandate; it was a tax. As a tax, said Roberts, it was constitutional; as a mandate, it wasn’t. Therefore, it was constitutional.

  This was, to put it bluntly, the worst kind of bullcrap ever put on Supreme Court paper.

  As it turned out, Chief Justice Roberts had switched his vote. He didn’t switch his vote because he suddenly discovered a new legal theory that knocked his socks off. He did it because of external pressure. As CBS News observed, approvingly, “Roberts pays attention to media coverage. As chief justice, he is keenly aware of his leadership role on the court, and he also is sensitive to how the court is perceived by the public. There were countless news articles in May warning of damage to the court—and to Roberts’ reputation—if the court were to strike down the mandate.”38 President Obama himself led the bullying charge, stating in early April 2012 that if the Supreme Court saw fit to overturn his signature legislation, it would be “unprecedented.” “Ultimately I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” he blathered, his ears quivering with rage.39

  And Roberts caved.

  Now, the Supreme Court of the United States is supposed to be free of politics. That’s why these legalistic doofuses in silly-looking robes get a lifetime appointment and a free supply of arrogance to go with it. They’re not supposed to be susceptible to bullying—upholding the Constitution is supposed to be a bully-free job.

  Clearly, it wasn’t.

  And the American people paid the price.

  The American people continue to pay the price exacted by the liberal bullies each and every day. Conservatives in particular face the mighty wrath of the leftist thugs—and they typically back down. That’s why America is on the verge of moral and economic bankruptcy, racial chaos, and loss of confidence in herself. The bullies are winning. And they won’t stop until we punch back.

  2.

  ANTI-PATRIOTIC BULLIES

  On January 27, 2009, the very same week that President Obama entered office, he granted an interview to Al Arabiya, the pan-Arab news channel that routinely spouts the Saudi royal line. It was Obama’s first formal interview as president of the United States. Presumably, either The View was booked that day, or Obama wanted to reach out to heretofore American enemies and present them with the philosophy of his newly minted administration.

  It was the latter. The Obama administration actively reached out to Al Arabiya to procure the interview. Hisham Melhem, Obama’s interviewer and an Arabist polemicist, made Obama feel right at home, explaining to him that his wife and daughter were Obama fans. Obama, ever humble, puffed up like a blowfish.

  And Melhem got just what he wanted: a pandering interview in which the president of the United States threw his country under the bus. As Time reported, “Melhem, long a vocal critic of U.S. Middle East policy, says he was touched by Obama’s conciliatory tone and references to his Muslim roots.” The interview, said Melhem, “was [Obama’s] way of saying, ‘There is a new wind coming from Washington.’ ”1

  It was unclear whether this new wind was coming from Obama’s head, or from his posterior.

  “My job to the Muslim world,” said the president, “is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that.” In other words, the problem in the Middle East is America.2

  As it turned out, Obama didn’t just think America was the problem in the Middle East. He thought we were the problem in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the undiscovered islands of the Philippines. And he determined to visit them all to let them know just how sorry we were.

  This vital mission would involve going on bended knee to countries around the world, spitting on the records of past American presidents, and disgracing the American warriors who had spilled their blood to secure American freedom. After all, he had to do something to justify that Nobel Peace Prize.

  So after his stop in Cairo, Obama headed over to Istanbul, Turkey. He didn’t discuss the looming threat of Islamism there, or the problem of Iranian nuclear development. Instead, he focused on American slavery. “The United States is still working through some of our own darker periods in our history,” he blathered. “Our country still struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation, the past treatment of
Native Americans.” What this had to do with Turkey was anyone’s guess. Perhaps Obama just heard Turkey and thought Thanksgiving.3 Or perhaps he was trying to strategically overlook the fact that Turkey was already moving in opposition to America’s ally, Israel.

  We hadn’t just been a “colonial power” in the Middle East, Obama said. We had rammed our views down the throats of our allies in Europe—we’d been “arrogant,” failing “to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world,” as Obama told the French.4 This was unfair. Americans do recognize Europe’s leading role in two world wars and the rise of European communism, as well as the creation of Euro Disney.

  But wait, there was more!

  In South America, America had made “promises of partnership” and then broken them, been “disengaged,” and “sought to dictate our terms.” America, Obama pledged in Trinidad and Tobago, would “be willing to acknowledge past errors where those errors have been made.”5 Errors by Hugo Chavez? No big deal—Obama was too busy laughing and joking with the fat dictator to talk about such trivial matters. Chavez couldn’t have been more pleased. The only downside for Chavez was that his gift to Obama—an anti-American tract by Eduardo Galeano titled Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent—was probably already in Obama’s Kindle.6 As Obama said, it “was a nice gesture to give me a book. I’m a reader.”7 He’s lucky Chavez didn’t give him a land mine. Word is Obama’s a fan of machines.

  These were just the apologies abroad. At home, Obama apologized for going “off course” in the war on terror, the errors of the CIA,8 and the internment of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.9 About the only American thing Obama didn’t apologize for was American cheese. And it’s only a matter of time before he and Michael Bloomberg team up to ban it for fat content.