The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Carl Salonen & the Left-Wing Trolls Who Smeared ‘Advice Goddess’ Amy Alkon

Posted on | April 26, 2011 | 10 Comments

Yesterday I blogged about Amy Alkon’s encounter with the online Left which, taking offense at something Alkon had written about unwed motherhood, organized one of its characteristic “Two-Minute Hate” campaigns against her.

What I did not know was that the Left attempted to destroy Alkon’s career as a journalist, by posting defamatory fallacious Amazon “reviews” of her book I See Rude People.

Nor did I know that Alkon had named Carl Salonen and Loretta Serrano as key perpetrators of that smear campaign.

Donald Douglas has an excellent post summarizing this shocking story, of which I was previously unaware. And this is the kind of vicious behavior in which self-proclaimed “progressives” now engage routinely. These destructive tactics are the radical offspring of what Frankfurt School intellectual Herbert Marcuse advocated in his notorious 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.

Elsewhere in the same essay, Marcuse denounces “pure” or “non-partisan” tolerance, which he describes as the “active, official tolerance granted to the Right as well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity.” Is anyone so blind or so ignorant of history as to miss the significance of this? Marcuse identified the Right as “movements of aggression” and “the party of hate,” whereas the Left he identified with “peace” and “humanity.” And he wrote that in 1965.

Marcuse was writing at a time when the United States was locked in mortal combat against Soviet imperialism, fighting against the most murderous idea in all human history. Marcuse was writing in the immediate aftermath of the 1964 Goldwater campaign, at a time when among Americans it was the Right which demanded resistance to Communist tyranny as the only hope of preventing the extermination of liberty in the world, at a time when the Left advocated “co-existence” with that totalitarian evil.

It was, as Ronald Reagan famously said, “A Time for Choosing.”

Marcuse’s demand for suppression of the anti-communist Right, at that key moment in history, highlights a fact that everyone should understand about the origins of our 21st-century Left: During the Cold War, when America was engaged in what JFK called the “long twilight struggle” against communism, they were on the other side.

That the Left’s cultural ambitions now extend so far that Carl Salonen and his merry band of online character assassins would attempt the destruction of Amy Alkon — a mere syndicated advice columnist, who writes about etiquette and relationships, etc. — demonstrates the enduring totalitarian spirit of the Left.

You had better speak out against the Left’s thuggery now, because if hatemongers like Carl Salonen and Loretta Serrano ever get their way, you won’t be able to speak out in the future.

Category: Conservatism 101

Comments

Comments are closed.