Have they come for you yet? If not, give it time. The leftist mob will descend on you just as it has descended on hundreds of other unfortunates during the past few years. It doesn’t matter what your political views are. You may be a die-hard leftist yourself, but if you deviate even once, in the slightest way, from leftist orthodoxy, you will be targeted. The aim is not merely to destroy your livelihood, though that is an important part of it. It is to deter others from saying or doing what you said or did.
Here is how the technique works. Almost everyone is beholden to, or dependent on, someone. If you have a job, then you are beholden to your employer. If you are a celebrity, then you are beholden to your fans. If you own or operate a business, then you are beholden to your customers. If you are a professional (say, a lawyer or a doctor), then you are beholden to your clients or patients. If you are a television, radio, or Internet personality, then you are beholden to your advertisers.
What the Left has discovered in the past few years is that it can use social media to pressure employers, fans, customers, clients, and advertisers to sever ties with those who are beholden to them. There is no guarantee that this technique will work, obviously, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it works often enough and well enough to embolden the Left to continue using it. It takes a strong, principled employer to withstand boycotts, protests, petitions, and other forms of aggressively adverse publicity. Many employers and advertisers capitulate at the first sign of controversy. They would rather be viewed as craven and unprincipled than to risk loss of income or social status.
The Left has been trying to use this social-media technique on Donald Trump since the day he secured the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. “Who has power over him?” they ask themselves. The answer is: the people who elected him. If his voters can be turned against him, then his presidency will either end (via impeachment) or be rendered impotent. More importantly, he will not be re-elected in 2020. Unfortunately for the Left, Trump’s voters show no signs of abandoning him. If anything, his support is growing. This infuriates leftists. Each day, they scrutinize and distort his Tweets and other public pronouncements in the hope of separating his voters from him. Today it’s racism; tomorrow it will be sexism; the day after that it will be hatred of foreigners, homosexuals, or the disabled. There has to be something that will sever the bond between Trump and his voters!
In the old days, people distinguished between their private or personal lives on the one hand and their public or professional lives on the other. What they said and did away from work had no bearing—or so they believed—on how well they did their jobs. Indeed, many employers had no idea what their employees said or did on their own time, and, frankly, they didn’t care. This has changed. The distinction between the personal and the professional is being erased. If you say something controversial on Twitter, Facebook, or a personal blog, it will be used against you by the Left. They hate you; they want you fired; and they don’t care what it takes to accomplish these ends. If it takes bringing a Tweet or a blog post to the attention of your employer (replete with distortions to maximize offensiveness), they will do it. Never mind that the Tweet or blog post has nothing to do with your employment and doesn’t even identify you as an employee. It will be used to embarrass your employer, harm your employer’s reputation, and reduce your employer’s income—all with the aim of pressuring him or her to fire you.
Some people, happily, are immune to being destroyed by the Left. Tenured professors such as yours truly are protected from being fired for uttering controversial opinions. Employees of government (including public colleges and universities) are protected by the First Amendment. This is not to say that professors and governmental employees haven’t been assailed, harangued, insulted, and bullied by leftists, for they have. It’s to say that they can’t be removed from their positions merely for speaking their minds. Some harassed individuals, in spite of their legal protections, may choose to quit or retire to avoid the mobs. Who wants to be vilified on a daily basis? Who wants to be ostracized by one’s peers? The Left would consider this a victory.
It might be objected that everything I have just said about the Left can also be said about the Right. I deny it. While there may be cases in which rightists have engaged in the politics of personal destruction using social media, my experience has been that the overwhelming majority of attacks are from the left. If I am wrong about this, then I condemn all of them, for that is the principled position. Since I believe that the attacks come almost exclusively from one direction (the left), I focus my condemnation there.
I wish I could say that the tide is turning and that people are beginning to resist leftist mobs. Alas, I fear that we have not seen the worst of it. Social media may be harmless and even beneficial in some ways (for example, in bringing far-flung families and friends together), but it brings out the worst in individuals who view their political opponents as enemies to be destroyed rather than as fellow citizens to be engaged or, if unengageable, tolerated. It rewards thuggery, intellectual dishonesty, and mob behavior. If things are to change, it will have to be because employers and others stop capitulating to the mob:
- They must begin to stand up for their employees.
- They must re-emphasize the distinction between what a person says or does in his or her private or personal capacity and what he or she says or does in his or her public or professional capacity.
- They must re-dedicate themselves to the idea of freedom of expression, not merely in the legal sense, as incorporated in the First Amendment, but in the moral sense so brilliantly depicted by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (1859).
- They must remind people, as often as they can, that society is not a family in which hurt feelings are to be avoided at all costs, but a collection of differently minded individuals who must be prepared both to be offended and to tolerate those who offend. Offense is the price we pay for diversity of opinion. Isn’t diversity a good thing?
In short, employers and others who have power to affect our lives need courage—the courage to resist the mob. Are you prepared to do your part?
Addendum: Here is a PDF. Feel free to circulate.
