A California Democrat operative and recently elected member of the Democrat National Committee has called for supporters of President Trump to be subjected to a program that sounds uncomfortably like “reeducation.”
Taking to Twitter on November 17, DNC member David Atkins tweeted: “No seriously … how *do* you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook?” He continued: “We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South.”
This is a terrifying and disturbing opinion. The author of this tweet appears to be saying that the 75 million Americans with whom he disagrees should be brainwashed into thinking the same thoughts he thinks and into holding only those opinions that he finds agreeable.
This is not some new position on the progressive Left, either. Writing in Salon in October 2019, Chauncey Devega asked: “Is it possible to deprogram Trump’s political cult members and return them to normal society? Should good Americans isolate Trump supporters and refuse to interact with them? In what ways does Trump fit the profile of a cult leader?”
Atkins later tried to walk back his incendiary and disturbing tweet. No, he said, “of course I’m not advocating ‘reeducation camps’ or anything like that. The point is that conservative infotainment is disinformation propaganda indistinguishable from cult programming, and social media algorithms enable it.”
This is a “dog whistle” to fellow-traveling leftists who want to end the First Amendment. And, on cue in the responses to his reprehensible tweets, out popped other “progressives” outwardly complaining about the First Amendment.
“I’m not sure how you do this with the 1A,” bemoaned one reply, “but the German way has to be the way. Anti-democratic (small d) organizations have to be outlawed…. Much as some people like to pretend, more speech isn’t really the answer. It’s deplatforming.”
Another reply, apparently from some alternative, upside-down universe, launched this whopper: “the answer, I found, is complicated … you can start by breaking the Authoritarian GOP’s chokehold on 98% of the media….”
Is there anyone anywhere who actually and seriously believes the media is 98 percent controlled by Republicans?
The takeaway from this tawdry tweet latrine is that a significant part of the progressive Left wants conservatives to be muzzled and, moreover, wants the First Amendment to be at least ignored, if not overturned.
In fact, the evidence is everywhere that progressive-left aligned media sources and social media platforms are aggressively censoring conservatives and deplatforming them. It is this trend that is powering the rocket-ship growth of alternatives such as Parler.
The uncomfortable fact is that censorship and reeducation of political opponents (even if you call that reeducation “deprogramming”) are tools and policies of illiberal dictatorships.
Since the leftists brought up Germany, consider the rise of the Nazi dictatorship, which, Americans should be reminded, was a socialist dictatorship. American journalist William Shirer recounted the rise of this demon state in first-hand detail in his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Beginning a section he titled “The Nazification of Culture,” Shirer wrote:
On the evening of May 10, 1933, some four and half months after Hitler became Chancellor, there occurred in Berlin a scene which had not been witnessed in the Western world since the Middle Ages. At about midnight a torchlight parade of thousands of students ended at a square on Unter den Linden opposite of the University of Berlin. Torches were put to a huge pile of books that had been gathered there, and as the flames enveloped them more books were thrown on the fire until some twenty thousand had been consumed. Similar scenes took place in several other cities. The book burning had begun.
Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Schuster; 1959, 1960. Page 241.
It is impossible to read those words in 2020 and not imagine a crowd of radicalized socialist “youths” taking to America’s streets to do exactly the same thing (or worse).
On the heels of such public exhibitions of enthusiasm for repression, the Nazi government began to control every aspect of cultural life. Again, Shirer:
Seven subchambers were established to guide and control every sphere of cultural life: the Reich chambers of fine arts, music, the theater, literature, the press, radio and the films. All persons engaged in these fields were obligated to join their respective chambers, whose decisions and directives had the validity of law. Among other powers, the chambers could expel — or refuse to accept — members for “political unreliability,” which meant that those who were even lukewarm about National Socialism could be, and usually were, excluded from practicing their profession or art and thus deprived of a livelihood.
Shirer, page 242
This history is incredibly and uncomfortably akin to what radical progressives are demanding today in America. In the words of today’s progressives, anyone who didn’t agree with the Nazi program was “deplatformed.”
Put another way, in Nazi Germany you got yourself deprogrammed, or else.
It is thus more than a little ironic that Atkins, who like so many of his comrades in America’s “progressive” cadres, appears to have an affinity for Nazi-like totalitarianism, referenced notions of deprogramming Nazis in the wake of World War II in his tweets as a way to treat American conservatives.
Americans of that now long-ago era fought an apocalyptic war against the very tyranny that American leftists now call for. They then waged a generations-long “cold war” to thwart the aims of the Communist Eastern Bloc that sought to implement socialist tyranny internationally. They fought because they believed Americans and others had and have a natural right to their own opinions, to express those opinions freely, to peacefully assemble and to go about their business without molestation by petty bureaucrats armed with nuisance and dangerous regulation.
Now, if there is any good to come of this, at least we can say there is a new-found clarity. Conservatives will defend the right of even obnoxious and dangerous leftists to speak their minds, as conservatives believe wholeheartedly in the wisdom of the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment. Conservatives will never call for anyone to be “re-educated” or “de-programmed” of their political opinions. Instead of demanding deplatforming, conservatives will call for debate and conversation and will let people make up their own minds.
The other side, the so-called progressives, wants to rule your mind with force, and to shut you up if you disagree.
These are the sides; these are the stakes. Freedom or tyranny.
Which will it be?
