By Hank Beckman –
As the leftist mob works its way through the nation on its way to who-knows-what end, supposedly outraged by the death of George Floyd, but in reality making the most of the opportunity to attack or “cancel” anything or anybody that falls in its line of sight, it appears that nobody is safe and everything is fair game for the mob’s vengeance.
The police should be disbanded and/or defunded, its resources diverted to community organizations and social workers. Mayors of major American cities have been made to grovel, even kneel, before unkempt rabble begging forgiveness for not immediately agreeing to the latest demands of people whose sole achievement has been going into crushing debt for worthless degrees, but somehow making it out of their parents' basements to join the mob.
Anyone questioning the motives of Black Lives Matter—the organization, not the sentiment—needs to be fired from their job and driven from public life, no questions asked and no apologies accepted. Sports stars like Drew Brees are set upon by their angry coworkers and forced to repeatedly apologize for having the audacity to disagree with them. Others like Sidney Crosby are called out because he didn’t speak out quickly enough to satisfy the modern-day Jacobins.
The statue-toppling that began with Confederate heroes, the reason being that they were not only racists but traitors, soon morphed into destruction of any historical figure handy. Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt had no involvement with slavery; Lincoln even conducted a war to end it. But being white males of historical significance they had to go.
Especially pointless was thugs protesting George Floyd’s death by vandalizing the Shaw Memorial, dedicated to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first all-black volunteers in the Civil War. A statue of the abolitionist Matthias Baldwin was defaced in Wisconsin; not a lot of history majors in the mob, apparently.
There appears to be no end in sight to the carnage, with 153 public intellectuals, almost all liberals, taking to Harper’s Magazine to make their case against “cancel culture,” and plead for tolerance for free speech. Many no doubt harbor sympathy for the mob’s goals, insofar as there are any goals other than ending the United states as we know it. But they are also educated people who must be keenly aware that even Robespierre eventually had his date with the national razor.
There is some merit to the argument that Confederate traitors should be relegated to the category of historical villains alongside Benedict Arnold, the Rosenbergs and Aldrich Ames. Let’s help the mob find some other traitors to cancel.
If betraying your country is to be the criteria for becoming an unperson, what are we to make of the support for someone like Edward Snowden?
While working for a subcontractor of the CIA, Snowden became disillusioned with the nation’s approach to surveillance and leaked classified material to journalists, among them the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald.
Just how much was leaked has never been determined, but some estimates show that as many as 1.5 million files were exposed. But government officials have made it clear that the files contained information sensitive enough to compromise intelligence operations and tip off groups like ISIS to our methods of defense and intelligence operations.
While Snowden’s ostensible motivation was that he was outraged at the spying on American citizens, Greenwald acknowledged in an interview that in order to expose domestic abuses, he had no choice but to include sensitive details about international operations.
If anyone would seem to qualify as a traitor, it should be Snowden. And that’s not just the opinion of a this conservative observer. No less a progressive than Barack Obama condemned the leaks, calling them an “avalanche of unauthorized disclosures.”
But that didn’t stop Netflix from making a sympathetic movie about the traitor, directed by—who else—Oliver Stone. Stone is essentially beyond redemption and boycotting the movie now would have no effect on his future prospects. But Netflix survives by viewer subscriptions, so someone needs to organize a boycott and let Netflix suits know how we feel about them supporting traitors.
And the New York Times, now so eager to banish any prominent Confederate from the public square, loved Snowden’s betrayal of our country, calling him a whistleblower and claiming he “had done his country a great service” by leaking the files.
The Obama Administration disagreed, indicting Snowden on two counts of the Espionage Act. He fled the country, eventually winding up as a guest of Vladimir Putin in Russia, where he remains to this day.
Other candidates to be cancelled are anyone who ever had a good word to say about Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, or Bradley Manning, as he was known while stationed in Iraq.
Manning was found guilty of violating the Espionage Act when he provided Wikileaks with 750,000 files full of classified and/or sensitive information.
Manning spent seven years in prison before having her sentence commuted by President Obama. Since his leaked information contained actual military records, you would think that, even more than Snowden, Manning would qualify as a bona fide traitor in the eyes of those leftists suddenly so outraged about the Confederates who betrayed our nation.
But you’d be wrong. Not only did Manning enter the Democratic primary for Maryland’s U.S. Senate seat, but she actually gained 5.7 percent of the vote. What are we to make of a supposed mainstream political party that allows a convicted traitor into its political process?
She was also named a visiting fellow Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, but later disinvited after an outcry from other dignitaries, including former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell and current CIA Director Mike Pompeo spoke out against the honor. Morrell even resigned from the university’s center for international affairs.
Others heaped awards on Manning the “whistleblower.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded Manning its Pioneer Award; the Sam Adams Association for Integrity in Intelligence, a group of retired intelligence officers, gave him its Sam Adams Award.
Let’s call out any journalist, politician or other public figure who ever had a kind word to say about these two traitors. Explain yourselves, please.
Next we should look into all these colleges and universities that have welcomed 1960s radicals who committed treasonous acts of terror against the country. Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn should be first on the list.
After working to overthrow the government and being a leader of the Weather Underground, a violent revolutionary group, Ayers and Dohrn went underground to escape charges of Ayers crossing state lines to commit violence and Dohrn’s participation in violent protests.
Charges against Ayers were dropped due to the government’s illegal methods and he found a comfortable position as an elementary education professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, staying employed there until retirement. He never bothered to repent about his violent past or the tactics of the Weather Underground, once saying that the movement hadn’t done enough.
Dohrn was sentenced to probation and became a law professor at Northwestern University. She was infamous for making fun of the victims of the Manson Family by once brandishing the “fork salute,” so named for the fact that the savages stuck a fork into the victims and then sat down to eat next to their fresh corpses.
Alumni should contact these universities and let them know in no uncertain terms that donations might not be so generous in the future. Nothing gets a college president’s attention faster than the fear that their school’s endowment might be at risk.
And don’t forget the aging Boomers around who still weep for Alger Hiss, Lauchlin Currie and Harry Dexter White. Repent or be gone.
Now that I think about it, this cancel culture thing could be fun.
