Amy Otto covered the Mozilla/Brendan Eich case very well in her post. I wanted to take this a step further an in area she touched on briefly:
Do we have the ability to donate to causes we believe in anymore if roving bands of ”tolerance” gangs can bully any company by identifying one employee who gave to a cause they disagree with and demand their head?
This is the real crux of the issue and one conservatives should be paying attention to. My Twitter timeline is filled with calls for a massive boycott of Mozilla which completely misses the point of what this is all about. Sure, I deleted Firefox but that was my own decision. I couldn’t care less if somebody else uses it. I’m not interested in teaching Mozilla a lesson for what they did.
I am more interested in making sure this kind of thing never happens again.
Why? Because it is only going to get worse if the people in this country who respect the free exchange of ideas, do nothing.
As Neal pointed out the other day, the people who pushed for and celebrated Eich’s ouster from Mozilla (Yes, I am aware he was not “fired” but his stepping down has all the hallmarks of the politician who leaves office to “spend more time with his family.”) are not liberals. They’re not progressives.
The truth of the matter is that “liberalism” in this country has been infected and hollowed out by leftist rot.
He’s 100% right. These people are not interested in “tolerance” or “diversity.” They are interested only in their point of view and making sure your beliefs conform to theirs. Or else. The left (thinking of themselves as liberals) have managed to convince themselves that shaming and smearing others for beliefs that do not align with theirs is not only permissible but encouraged. Over at Ace Of Spades, Ace himself has written a post about white liberals and how they have deemed themselves to be the arbiters of who the racists are:
Well, they manage this balancing trick the way Karl Lueger did: They decide who the racists are.
White Liberals, and White Liberals alone, will decide when context and intent will be weighed in the balance to rescue someone’s words (as in the case of an important White Liberal ally like Steven Colbert), or when context and intent will be jettisoned from the analysis entirely, and the Progressives’ zero-tolerance no-exception rule will be applied instead (as in the case of a 1%-er businessman like Dan Snyder).
After all, they can’t be bigoted:
— John Ekdahl (@JohnEkdahl) April 5, 2014
Fugelsang is an idiot but he’s not alone in this mindset.
It is this view that they are pure of heart which allows them to feel as though they can be like Donald Sutherland in ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’ and just point and screech when you say or believe something they deem to be “intolerable.”
I have seen people wonder how reaction by conservatives to what happened with Eich is no different than the #CancelColbert movement. I even had a Twitter debate with one of the PFoL editors about it. The comparison doesn’t hold up under any kind of scrutiny.
What Colbert said with respect to the ‘Ching Chong, Ding Dong’ “joke” was related directly to his role as host of the unfunny Colbert Report.
Brendan Eich was pushed out of his job simply because of something he thought and believed.
People are arguing it wasn’t just that he “believed” it but he took action by donating money to the ballot measure for Proposition 8. So what? This is another ridiculous example of free speech rights being stepped on. Contrary to some rumors, Eich’s name was not on a list leaked to some gay advocacy group by the IRS. California law requires any donation greater than $100 to a ballot measure be disclosed to the public. This is absurd of course. Allahpundit says it best:
The state is authorized to provide certain personal information about anyone who donates more than $100 to a ballot measure. Why the state is allowed to do that, I’m not sure. The reason you want transparency when donating to a candidate is to prevent an elected official, who’s supposed to serve the public interest, from being secretly coopted by huge sums of money provided by a special interest. In a ballot measure, though, the money being spent is designed to influence the public itself. They’re the final arbiter of the public interest, no?
The state is effectively saying to The Chosen Ones, “Here you are. Go ahead and do some Sutherland screaming based on this list.”
This is the United States of America. Yet we have a reached a point where people have to fear for their jobs because a bunch of self appointed leftist assholes believe they get to determine what people are and are not allowed to think or believe.
To hell with them.
There needs to be serious push back against these left-wing fascists because where does it end? Today it’s a donation to a cause the hard left deems inappropriate. Tomorrow it will be a politician you voted for. Then they’ll go after the websites you like to frequent. Then the television shows you like to watch. The list can go on for quite some time.
We have a choice to make. We can either kick these punks back into their little sewer of “tolerance” or we can allow them to continue to permeate our culture, attempting to shame the masses into believing exactly as they do.
I choose the former.