Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (7 page)

Liberalism’s leverage is not that it has broad support but precisely that it doesn’t. Who listens to NPR? Who, outside of New York City, reads the
New York Times’?
Who claims to be “frightened” of George W. Bush? The answer: People who are desperately eager to associate themselves with “respectable opinion”—as opposed to actual, widespread, local opinion believed by the riffraff. Broad societal prejudices are nearly irresistible. They fill a psychic need by creating a “majority” opinion and eliminating the need to process new information. Propaganda “greatly simplifies [the individual’s] life and gives him stability, much security, and a certain satisfaction.”
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Liberals need not bother with logical persuasion as long as they can prey on people’s sense of weakness. “Any statement whatever, no matter how stupid, any ‘tall tale’ will be believed once it enters into the passionate current of hatred.”
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They don’t need arguments, they’ve got Gwyneth Paltrow.

If liberal propaganda didn’t work, it would be impossible to comprehend bimbo starlets and uneducated slobs attacking the intelligence of the man who won the Cold War. On the occasion of Reagan’s ninetieth birthday, for example, Michael Moore opined on ABC’s
Politically Incorrect:
“Personally, the problem with Reagan, as I see it, is that he was the beginning of the depleting of the political gene pool, when Americans settled for somebody who really wasn’t and shouldn’t have been in that office, wasn’t quite there all the time.... Here’s what Reagan did: He gave weapons to the Ayatollah, so that he could raise money for the contras, which then helped bring a crack epidemic into the United States. That’s what Ronald Reagan did and that’s his legacy! That’s his legacy!”

To point out that Moore is a college dropout is not to adopt the classism and snobbery of the left. A lot of people who went to Southwest Texas Junior College are shrewder than Yale graduates. But try flipping around that scenario. Imagine a no-account college dropout attacking Al Gore’s intelligence on national TV. The audience wouldn’t get that. It would be strange and confusing. Larry Flynt, who never finished grade school,
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said of President Bush (who was graduated from Yale College and Harvard Business School): “He is the dumbest president we have ever had.”
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Actor Martin Sheen, who never went to college after flunking his college entrance exam—”intentionally,” he claims
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—said Bush is “a moron, if you’ll pardon the expression.” (Strictly speaking, “moron” is a word, not an expression.)

When Reagan was president, there wasn’t a college campus in the country where the mere mention of his name failed to inspire cackles of hateful laughter. (Except probably Hillsdale College and Bob Jones University.) Now it’s “Bush” that prompts the knowing giggles. At law schools “Rehnquist” inspires the canned laughter. It seems unremarkable that Hollywood zeros and college dropouts sneer about the intelligence of the guy who won the Cold War.

Liberals bully people with their veiled class bigotry. They are snobs even when championing a grade-school dropout like Flynt, whose self-described first sexual experience was with the egg sac of a chicken.
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In an article in the
Cincinnati Enquirer,™
redneck pornographer Flynt is described as a cross between George Washington and Bill Gates. He is a “radical,” a brainstorming “rebel,” and a “shrewd businessman.” Flynt has savoir faire and a devil-may-care attitude: “It’s a little past 6 p.m. and Larry Flynt is already courting eternal damnation.”

By contrast, the attorney who prosecuted Flynt for obscenity offenses— a former Marine, no less—is described as “dowdy” and a “moral crusader.” Flynt’s opponents “shout,” while Larry “smiles and nods,” “quips,” and “argues.” Negative depictions of Flynt are put in quotes—”dirty old man” and a “girlie” magazine. (The depiction of the prosecutor as a dowdy moral crusader does not take distancing quotes. Being a dowdy moral crusader is evidently a hard fact.) For not capitulating to the smut peddler and immediately turning itself into Sodom and Gomorrah, the local community is said to be engaging in a “crusade.” But when Flynt doesn’t capitulate either, he is “strong-willed.”

Let’s review who’s on a crusade here. The original publicity poster for the Flynt hagiography,
The People vs. Larry Flynt
—a movie that bears no relationship to reality—portrayed the Flynt character as Jesus on the Cross, superimposed on a woman’s bikini-clad crotch.
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Not only that, but Flynt is histrionically touted as a martyr for the First Amendment. The “raunchy rebel” is matter-of-factly said to have “helped safeguard free speech for all Americans.”
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In point of fact, Jerry Falwell’s suit against Flynt wasn’t “the People” against Flynt, since it wasn’t a criminal case. It wasn’t even a libel case: It was a tort case—intentional infliction of emotional distress.

So a prosecutor who prosecutes Flynt is on a “crusade” and Flynt is a martyr. The martyr gets lots of fawning news coverage, but the tyrannical crusader is the subject of sneering attacks. (As a rule of thumb, it’s extremely unlikely that you’re a martyr if the media calls you a martyr.) Flynt pronounces President Bush “dumb.” No one knows or cares what the ex-Marine with a law degree thinks.

Now decide, you Mr. Pedestrian Nobody: Do you laugh at how stupid Republicans are or don’t you? Do you say you are a feminist, pro-choice environmentalist who is “afraid” of George W. Bush and laughs knowingly at Dan Quayle? Or are you one of those hicks who watches NASCAR races?

There is no more pristine example of the left’s “in”-crowd snobbery than their treatment of conservative author and activist Phyllis Schlafly. Taking on the role of Disinformation Commissar for the now-dead Soviet Union, the national news media maintain a rigid radio silence on Phyllis Schlafly, while endlessly celebrating mediocre feminist shrews. Her very name prompts derisive hoots from Hollywood starlets who couldn’t approach Schlafly’s IQ if they were having brains instead of silicone injected. To listen to the cool people, you could be forgiven for thinking Schlafly is one step above a cretin. In fact, Schlafly is one of the most accomplished and influential people in America.

After working her way through college (forty-eight hours a week in an ammunition plant, test-firing machine guns) where she earned straight As and graduated (a year early) Phi Beta Kappa and Pi Sigma Alpha, Schlafly won a scholarship to Harvard graduate school.
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Though Harvard Law School did not admit women at the time, Schlafly’s professors were so bowled over by her intellect, they were prepared to make an exception for her.
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Her constitutional law professor called her “brilliant” and gave her an A. Her undergraduate political science professor wrote that her “intellectual capacity is extraordinary and her analytical ability is distinctly remarkable ... [Schlafly] is the most capable woman student we have had in this department in ten years.”
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Schlafly has written ten books, most of them on military policy—one an eight-hundred-page vivisection of Henry Kissinger and his policy of detente. Her first book,
A Choice, Not an Echo,
sold three million copies. (The average nonfiction book sells about five thousand copies.) That book led to Barry Goldwater’s nomination and created the movement that eventually led to Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Her military work was a major factor in Reagan’s decision to proceed with High Frontier technology.

Most astonishing was her single-handed defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. When Schlafly decided to take on the ERA, it was supported by every living ex-president, 90 percent of the U.S. Congress, almost every governor, and every major newspaper, television network, and magazine in the nation, including thirty-six women’s magazines with a combined circulation of sixty million readers. Support for the ERA was written into both the Democrat and Republican Party platforms.

On the other side was Phyllis Schlafly. But as George Gilder has remarked, that was enough.
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She was composed, brilliant, and relentless. Refusing to be intimidated by conventional thinking, Schlafly repeatedly raised questions that polite people thought it bad taste to mention. Thus, for example, she questioned how ERA would affect the draft, family law, abortion, gays, adoption, widows’ benefits—even locker rooms. Though the amendment’s proponents sneered at Schlafly’s claim that the ERA would end the draft exemption for women, law professors would soon be making the same point in the likes of the
Yale Law Journal.

When champions of women’s equality scoffed at Schlafly for being one of those “women with absolutely no legal training [who] stand there brandishing law books, telling people what ERA ‘really’ means”—as Senator Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) put it—she went to law school. In her fifties, with a radio show, a syndicated column, and her battle against the ERA, she graduated on time near the top of her class.
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Winning her reputation as the greatest pamphleteer since Thomas Paine, Schlafly mobilized an army of women—all before the Internet. In the end, Schlafly’s arguments trumped the political platforms of both parties, both Republican and Democratic presidents and their wives, and a slew of Hollywood celebrities including Alan Alda, Carol Burnett, Mario Thomas, and Jean Stapleton.

Reviewing a history of the sexual revolution in the
New Yorker,
John Updike later wrote: “If the court’s 1973
Roe v. Wade
decision, legalizing abortion, was ... ‘the crowning achievement of the sexual revolution,’ the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, which ran out of time in 1982, with only three more states needed for ratification, was the legal triumph of the counter-revolution, led in this instance by Phyllis Schlafly.”
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If anyone on the left did this, we’d never hear the end of it.

Schlafly could have rested on her laurels after writing
A Choice, Not an Echo.
She could have rested on her laurels after defeating the ERA. (She could have rested after being named—as her biography cheerfully notes— * 1992 Illinois Mother of the Year.”) Indeed, Schlafly could have rested on her laurels on any number of occasions over the past half-century. But she kept going. There is no important political debate for nearly half a century in which Schlafly’s influence has not been felt.

None of this is widely known because Schlafly doesn’t brag about it. There is certainly not the remotest possibility that the mainstream media will ever breathe a word of her extraordinary accomplishments. Schlafly had derailed the left’s precious sexual revolution. Consequently, she is demeaned and censored by the champions of women’s advancement. There is a raw “1984” blackout quality to the media’s ideological refusal to acknowledge Schlafly while posting endless tributes to worthless feminist nothings. The primary result of the feminist movement appears to be a slew of articles on LexisNexis hailing and praising feminism with unseemly gusto.

Schlafly’s feminist counterpart and molecular opposite is Gloria Steinem. While Schlafly is a serious intellectual, Steinem is a deeply ridiculous figure who succeeded as a journalist only by becoming the news rather than reporting it. That leftists treat them in exactly the wrong way suggests that they are totally blinded to the facts by their ideology.

Steinem’s influence was limited to a narrow sliver of liberal women living in big cities. It just happened to be the sliver that controls news and pop culture. Thus, for three decades, Gloria Steinem could not get her toenails painted without a major feature spread in a glossy magazine covering the event in laborious and hyperbolic detail. No matter how stunning her failures, a gaggle of media feminists would warmly compliment Steinem for her bravery and wisdom in choosing Hint of Pink over Musty Sunset.

But apart from the ephemeral achievement of winning the hearts and minds of liberal women who pen endless articles praising Steinem, it’s hard to get a handle on any concrete accomplishments. Her biggest cause, the Equal Rights Amendment, failed, when it was rejected by American women who lined up behind Phyllis Schlafly. A string of follow-up half-measures, such as the Economic Equity Act, failed. Her magazine failed. Her winsome anti-male campaign, captured by her slogan “A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle,” failed. The feminist movement failed.

In a 1989 article subtitled “Feminism Is Not Dead,” even
Time
magazine had to acknowledge: “Ask a woman under the age of 30 if she is a feminist, and chances are she will shoot back a decisive, and perhaps even a derisive, no.” (But, the magazine rushed to explain, “they are not feminists, or so they say, but they do take certain rights for granted.”
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Indeed, Steinem’s life would seem to be the opposite of a feminist success story, if feminists consider it desirable for women to be judged by their accomplishments and not their looks and the men they acquire.
Ms.
magazine—Steinem’s great accomplishment, her project in lieu of marriage and children—was a spectacular flop. Eventually, just to keep
Ms.
afloat, she had to sleep with Mort Zuckerman, a rich liberal media mogul—whom Steinem later casually admitted she didn’t love.
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For achieving the spectacular feat of actually sleeping with a rich Democrat, Steinem was again heaped with praise. In a column
defending
Steinem, Liz Smith wrote: “Not only did Zuckerman lend
Ms.
$700,000, but he has check stubs that show $406,151 in gifts to the magazine and its foundation.... The publisher also sent one of his own top executives to spend two weeks trying to overhaul the magazine.”
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