The Church of the Liberal Pieties

It’s Sunday morning, as good a time as any to return to the Church of the Liberal Pieties. The felicitous phrase, coined by yours truly several years ago, refers to the degeneration of liberalism into a religious movement, one that promotes dogmas, burns books, denounces heretics and generally tries to shut down public dissent from whatever it considers to be God-given dogma.

Lately, it has targeted Spotify star and Bernie Sanders supporter Joe Rogan. His crime, disseminating what the CLP considers to be heretical opinions. Led by a septuagenarian rocker named Neil Young and a septuagenarian chanteuse named Joni Mitchell, church members have been doing everything in their power to censor Joe Rogan.

Now, in a brilliant riposte to this religious movement, Glenn Greenwald takes out after the censors. As  you know, Greenwald himself is a gay British socialist who lives in Brazil with his husband and children. No crazed right winger he.

And yet, for having committed the crime of appearing on Fox News, he has become persona non grata on CNN.

How does it happen that liberals, whose movement has been based, from the onset, on a love for free debate in the marketplace of ideas, have become chronic scolds, running witch hunts and inquisitions?

Greenwald explains.

American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by "liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).

It began with a war against whatever was deemed hate speech:

For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of "hate speech” to mean "views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech." Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.

It advanced to a war against disinformation, defining disinformation as any opinion or even facts that countered the opinion of Dr. Fauci:

Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.

To offer us some perspective, Greenwald remarks the massive quantity of disinformation that the mainstream media was purveying about one Donald Trump-- how banned from Twitter and Facebook-- in a gesture that surely signifies a willingness to shut down the speech rights of anyone liberals do not like:

When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont's heating system and Putin's sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being "Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is "disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID's origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documents and caused people to die. 

What is disinformation?

This "disinformation" term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of “disinformation” and of its little cousin, “misinformation.” It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of "disinformation.” Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard.

Of course, the demonization of Donald Trump, following fast on the demonization of George W. Bush and certain other Republicans, provides the justification for the censorship. The other reason lies in the fact that the political left is filled chock full of the products of America’s educational system, and most of them are too stupid to engage in anything resembling a fair and free debate.

For those who convince themselves that they are not battling mere political opponents with a different ideology but a fascist movement led by a Hitler-like figure bent on imposing totalitarianism — a core, defining belief of modern-day Democratic Party politics — it is virtually inevitable that they will embrace authoritarianism. When a political movement is subsumed by fear — the Orange Hitler will put you in camps and end democracy if he wins again — then it is not only expected but even rational to embrace authoritarian tactics including censorship to stave off this existential threat. Fear always breeds authoritarianism, which is why manipulating and stimulating that human instinct is the favorite tactic of political demagogues.

Of course, the long knives are out for Substack, given that it provides a platform to people like Greenwald and other dangerous radicals like Matt Taibbi, Julie Burchill, Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss. Among those leading the charge is one Chelsea Clinton.

About whom Greenwald has this to say:

That included Chelsea Clinton, who lamented that Substack is profiting off a “grift.” Apparently, this political heiress — who is one of the world's richest individuals by virtue of winning the birth lottery of being born to rich and powerful parents, who in turn enriched themselves by cashing in on their political influence in exchange for $750,000 paychecks from Goldman Sachs for 45-minute speeches, and who herself somehow was showered with a $600,000 annual contract from NBC News despite no qualifications — believes she is in a position to accuse others of "grifting.” She also appears to believe that — despite welcoming convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to her wedding to a hedge fund oligarch whose father was expelled from Congress after his conviction on thirty-one counts of felony fraud — she is entitled to decree who should and should not be allowed to have a writing platform:

No one will suggest that the American right has not wanted to censor on occasion. And yet, the Church of the Liberal Pieties had made it into an article of religious faith:

The goal of liberals with this tactic is to take any disobedient platform and either force it into line or punish it by drenching it with such negative attacks that nobody who craves acceptance in the parlors of Decent Liberal Society will risk being associated with it. 

And that means, the Democratic Party:

Democrats are not only the dominant political faction in Washington, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, but liberals in particular are clearly the hegemonic culture force in key institutions: media, academia and Hollywood. That is why it is a mistake to assume that we are near the end of their orgy of censorship and de-platforming victories. It is far more likely that we are much closer to the beginning than the end. The power to silence others is intoxicating. Once one gets a taste of its power, they rarely stop on their own.

But, what is the difference between the efforts to remove certain racialist theorizing from public education and the efforts to censor disinformation? Here, Greenwald has the answer:

Liberals often point to the growing fights over public school curricula and particularly the conservative campaign to exclude so-called Critical Race Theory from the public schools as proof that the American Right is also a pro-censorship faction. That is a poor example. Censorship is about what adults can hear, not what children are taught in public schools. Liberals crusaded for decades to have creationism banned from the public schools and largely succeeded, yet few would suggest this was an act of censorship. For the reason I just gave, I certainly would define it that way. Fights over what children should and should not be taught can have a censorship dimension but usually do not, precisely because limits and prohibitions in school curricula are inevitable.

It takes a serious mind to distinguish between what is taught in school and what is offered to adults. Apparently, members of the CLP are not up to the task.

And also, today’s liberalism, a proud product of the European Enlightenment, has become the religion that it hated:

In modern-day American liberalism, however, censorship is a virtual religion. They simply cannot abide the idea that anyone who thinks differently or sees the world differently than they should be heard. That is why there is much more at stake in this campaign to have Rogan removed from Spotify than whether this extremely popular podcast host will continue to be heard there or on another platform. If liberals succeed in pressuring Spotify to abandon their most valuable commodity, it will mean nobody is safe from their petty-tyrant tactics. But if they fail, it can embolden other platforms to similarly defy these bullying tactics, keeping our discourse a bit more free for just awhile longer.