Three years ago, I wrote a column explaining left-right differences on 35 different subjects. Any one or two of them would make for a major political/cultural divide. Thirty-five make the divide unbridgeable.
What’s difficult to explain are the roots of this divide. I believe it is commitment to truth. Since I began studying the left as a graduate student of communism at the Russian Institute of the Columbia School of International Affairs, of one thing I have been certain: Truth is not a left-wing value.
It is a liberal value, and it is a conservative value, but truth has never been a left-wing value. From Lenin to today’s left, lying – especially about opponents – is morally acceptable as long as it serves the left’s goals of defeating opponents and attaining more power. Once you realize this, the divide becomes explicable.
Why has YouTube taken down the video of two emergency room physicians who argue that the lockdown may not be called for? Because the left has no interest in truth. It does not argue with opponents; it shuts them down.
That’s why the left is pressuring YouTube and Facebook to prohibit anything it differs with from appearing on their platforms. Just as the Soviets labeled everything in the Western press “imperialist propaganda,” the left labels everything with which it differs “misinformation.”
That’s also why virtually every university does whatever it can to prevent conservatives from speaking on their campuses.
Why has The New York Times just received a Pulitzer Prize for what leading liberal historians have labeled its “mendacious” rewriting of American history, known as “The 1619 Project”? Because to The New York Times and the Pulitzer Prize committee, truth is less important than smearing America.
When it cannot stifle opponents, the left smears them. Every prominent conservative or liberal opponent of the left has been smeared – which is just another way of saying “lied about” – as being sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted, misogynistic, transphobic, etc.
Allow me to use an example I know well: me.
In the span of just this past year, Newsweek lied, claiming I “mocked” Anne Frank (to Newsweek’s credit, it revised its column and published a corrected headline), and Purdue University’s “vice provost of diversity and inclusion” claimed I said, “Slavery was not bad” in a speech I gave at Purdue.
I sent this person a recording of my speech proving I never said anything remotely like what he charged. After many of my listeners and readers protested to the vice provost and Purdue’s president, the vice provost wrote me a private letter saying he was sorry if he “misunderstood” me. His charge was public; his apology was private.
This past week, as pure a lie as the previous two was manufactured by Media Matters – a left-wing organization whose sole purpose is lying and smearing conservatives – and then picked up by various media.
This is what I said – word for word – on my radio show: “How many names have blacks gone through in my lifetime? ‘Colored,’ ‘Negro,’ ‘African American,’ ‘black.’ That’s four different titles for the same human being. What was wrong with ‘Negro’? What was wrong with ‘colored’? There’s no problem with any of them.
“Do you know that the NAACP is still the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People? And then ‘African American’ – that changed, too. Does it have a dash or hyphen, or not? I don’t remember what was connoted by having a hyphen or not.”
Media Matters declared the comments “racist.” And the allegation was dutifully picked up by the New York Daily News, which ran this headline: “Conservative Talk-Radio Host Dennis Prager Bemoans Loss of Racial Slurs, Gets History Lesson.” And by the Daily Mail, which ran this headline: “Conservative Talk-Radio Host Dennis Prager, 71, Bemoans the Loss of Racial Slurs in Society to Describe Black People.”
The article, by Daily Mail writer James Gordon, a Media Matters follower (he actually appended a link to Media Matters at the end of his column), claimed: “Prager…used his show to bemoan society no longer using racist language coined during eras of slavery and segregation.”
Everything about these articles is a lie. Not one of those titles for blacks is racist. Therefore, I could not possibly “bemoan” the fact that society no longer uses these words.
The term Martin Luther King Jr., every other black leader and every non-black anti-racist through the 1960s used to described black people was “Negro.” There is, to this day, a major black organization called the United Negro College Fund. A variant of the term “colored” is regularly used by liberals to this day – “people of color” – to describe non-whites.
“Black” is used by everyone, including most blacks. And “African American” is not only not a “racist slur”; it is also the contemporary left’s preferred term for blacks.
Media Matters created a lie out of whole cloth about me. And those who rely on Media Matters – such as James Gordon at the Daily Mail and Nancy Dillon at the Daily News – repeated it, word for word. I invite both of them to come on my radio show to defend the accuracy of their articles.
For the record, my view on race is taken from Viktor Frankl. There are only two races: the decent and the indecent.
If you wish to send either or both of these writers this column and/or your own thoughts, I can only tell you that your letters to Newsweek and Purdue cases were immensely helpful. We need to fight back.
Nancy Dillon: [email protected]; twitter.com/NancyDillonNYDN.
Daily Mail: www.dailymail.co.uk/home/contactus/article-3701145/Factual-Inaccuracies.html.