I grew up after Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s era, but I never stopped hearing from liberals about 1950s Hollywood blacklists. Yet a monumental Oscar-winning director like Elia Kazan, who directed extraordinary movies that grippingly advanced freedom and human understanding, had antagonized Hollywood, so he then was blacklisted by them. The Left blacklists more robustly than McCarthy ever did. Today it is called “canceling.” The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has produced this list of more than 100 currently blacklisted and canceled American professors. I personally know of many others who have been canceled, so more than 150 academics and scholars now are blacklisted by American universities for being conservatives.

I grew up in a world where liberals and even more extreme leftists no longer were blacklisted anywhere. Rather, they not only had entered entertainment and universities but now dominated them and launched their own blacklisting. I attended Columbia University for college, majored in political science, and all my professors were left-liberal. I could not find a conservative anywhere on the university’s faculties of social sciences, not even a token. That is not coincidental but blacklisting. Conservatives apply for academic positions, and the leftists who dominate the social sciences departments review their résumés and publications, and “ding” them. It is the same at graduate schools in the social sciences. At the top-tier law school where I earned my J.D. degree, only Wesley (“Jim”) Liebeler was openly conservative. He taught antitrust law, a field that kept him away from first-years and from most other students except those who were corporate-focused. There also was a conservative professor of remedies and property transactions, and another of business accounting law, but both remained politically in the closet. Each “came out” to me, much as 1950s homosexuals “hid in closets” and very hesitantly “came out” only when cautiously certain they had met another. That is the reign of terror in academia. Three conservatives out of more than a hundred professors.

Diversity.

And so it goes — the coercion and canceling, hypocrisy and double standards, and lies of the Left:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, en route to his forthcoming impeachment, bans people throughout the state from eating at indoor restaurants. But he does it. With his gazillionaire donors. And, uh, no masks. 

Rep. Nancy Pelosi closes down the hair salons. But she can have one open for her to get a blowout. And, uh, no mask.

For decades, the Democrats vehemently opposed illegal immigration in order to protect wages for their voting base of union workers and Blacks. Democrats vociferously agitated for building a wall. And then they realized that the “Black vote” is in their pockets anyway, while illegal immigrants who cannot support themselves translate into more Democrat voters who rely on big-government welfare. So New Mexico and California turn blue, and other red states like Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada purple. Overnight the Democrat melody changed: Illegal immigration is good, and unaccompanied children look cute in Obama cages.

They viciously attacked President Trump for detaining unaccompanied minors illegally immigrating at the southern border. Ocasio said we were placing innocent children in “concentration camps.” But it had been Obama and Biden who had built those “cages” holding children, and Biden has continued his cages. But now Democrats are copacetic and sanguine. Pelosi and Schumer focus elsewhere, while Biden bemoans the climate “crisis” while denying the existence of a border “crisis.”

They demand “choice”: “pro-choice.” Yet they oppose school choice for Blacks and Hispanics in inner cities despite such choice being the single greatest ticket for their future generations to break the cycle of poverty and succeed through life by escaping the broken “woke” public schools. If children learn real math, real history, real English, real science, cursive writing, and are expected to get real passing grades, they will succeed in life. That is the elite world of the private school, the charter school, the magnet school. By contrast, an “education” in troubled inner-city public schools that focus on critical ethnic studies, critical race theory, Black Lives Matter syllabi, woke math, teaching birth control, and guaranteed passing grades denies children all they can be. Meanwhile, those same leftist Democrats who deny choice to inner-city residents, singing praises of public schools that fail, send their own kids — even Obamas — to lily-white private schools. And then they ban Dr. Seuss, to boot. One fail, Two fail, Red fail, Blue fail.

They blame Trump for COVID losses while it was their Blue State governors who coerced skilled nursing facilities to take in COVID-infected seniors, thus creating death traps that murdered thousands. Then they accused Trump of denying the pandemic when it was they and their staffs who falsified and spoliated data to escape political culpability. They gave Cuomo an Emmy Award for his COVID press conferences, acting as though he were a real governor. One awaits seeing him perform in Orange Is the New Black, a better-suited role.

They preached #MeToo and sought to destroy Brett Kavanaugh — as decent and as morally upright and as religiously devout a family man as anyone can find — while screaming “Women must be believed” and “Survivors must be trusted.” Then, when the Democrat Black Lt. Gov. of Virginia was accused not by one but by two different Black women, both themselves Democrats, of having been a rapist, Democrats protected him — as they later would shield Joe Biden after he was accused by Tara Reade. Now Biden and Kamala Harris, as of this writing, still will not call out Gov. Andrew Cuomo even after seven women have leveled accusations. “Hypocrisy” and “double standards” do not begin to describe adequately how despicable a Kamala Harris could be to prosecute an innocent Judge Kavanaugh in the presence of his wife and daughters while refusing to apply that identical standard to Cuomo. This is the Harris who locked up marijuana users and later giggled in a radio interview that she herself smoked weed.

Coercion and hypocrisy. The Hollywood crowd lead the call for higher taxes — in California and everywhere — because “it is only right,” and the lower economic classes “need the added support.” And then, as Hollywood’s precious state of California emerges as the highest-taxed state in America, Hollywood itself moves its movie-making out of California to states like Georgia and North Carolina and Iowa because those states induce them with tax breaks. Only when California capitulates and waives taxes for movie-making do the hypocritical Hollywood liberals return. 

They promote “affirmative action” special admissions tiers for the underprivileged to enter states’ taxpayer-supported and other private universities. But they secretly maneuver their own kids onto “rowing teams” that do not row nor even wade, and then pay bribes to assure that their dolts, otherwise unqualified for admission, get in via alternative athletic admissions. More honest parents among them instead just make straightforward six-figure donations to a university endowment fund, greasing the skids for their kid to get in. Yet others leverage their parental lineage — “Legacy Admissions” — to get their mediocrities in. So Bushes and Kennedys and Gores make into Yale and Harvard, a stepping stone for life, while worthy Asian-descended, American-born students get cheated out of the reward they truly have earned through years of hard work. Other parents simply enroll their tykes in $60,000-a-year elite private schools — places like the Dalton School and the Harvard-Westlake School and the Exeter School and the Andover School — to cast the die for life.

Once these liberals–progressives–socialists have assured their children’s futures — whether by bribing the rowing team coach or donating to an endowment or invoking “legacy” or simply enrolling the kid at the special private school that costs a fortune — they then play “White Privilege Three-Card Monte” and loudly bemoan “systemic racism.” But they do not give up their privileges. For added protection, much as store owners paid the Mafia for “protection” in the 1920s, they send a check to Al Sharpton or Black Lives Matter. Everyone wins in systemic racism.

There is no systemic racism or “White privilege” in America any more. We know it, and they know it. But they mouth the mantra of the Woke to protect their vaunted places. Bernie Sanders, for example, is “Exhibit A” for White privilege. He is a millionaire and owns three expensive homes, yet never produced anything. For most of his years, he lived off the earnings of his girlfriends and wives. He partied in Russia on one of his honeymoons amid communism in the Soviet Union. Having lived in mixed-racial Brooklyn, he moved to lily-White Vermont. But he knows the mantras. So Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who not only hate White privilege but especially hate Jews, make an exception for him. He, in turn, attacks Israel and opposes legislation that would ban the Nazi-like BDS effort that boycotts Israel. Reciprocity. And thus the terrified White liberal university professors who, but for their tenure that guarantees they never can be fired, would be first on the chopping block because Black and Hispanic scholars cannot get academic positions they truly deserve if there are not enough vacancies.

The Left’s hypocrisy and coercion extend everywhere. They tell us to “follow the science.” Yet they have subjectified science. So math now is to be “woke,” with children — except for theirs — no longer expected to know multiplication and division tables and to get correct answers. American history devolves into a fabricated Just-So Story about how the Pilgrims left England and founded Roanoke and Jamestown to get slaves, and Abraham Lincoln was racist. 

Follow the science? In the years since Roe v. Wade, science has determined more clearly than ever before that a fetus indeed has life. One picture is worth a thousand abortions. But that science does not matter. Catholics like Joe Biden tell voters that they are “devout Catholics,” and Nancy Pelosi occasionally begins a sentence with “As a Catholic,” but they lead the charge for abortion on demand, even late-term abortion, even post-birth infanticide. They would legislate on “Equity” and “Equality Acts” to coerce the impossible on truly devout Catholics who wish to live faithfully by the latest papal statement that gay marriage is sinful and therefore impossible under Catholic doctrine. Indeed, as the Left imposes their own constructs of “gender fluidity” on everyone from school children to women’s sports leagues, they shamelessly ignore the science that defines all the mammals in their orbit. They deem felines to be male or female, but felons are fluid.

Indeed, the pronouns. The Democrat Congress legislates rules to restrict saying “father” or “mother,” “sister” or “brother.” Not “Amen” but “A-women.” Inasmuch as Hollywood is almost universally Woke, let them change the names of their movies, even as they rewrite our history and rename their schools. So many movies to repair so that Hollywood becomes gender-neutral: “The Godperson.” “The Sorcerer of Oz.” “My Fair Person.” “O Person, Where Art Thou?” “The Thin Person.” “Raging Ungulate.”

And classic rock. The Beatles: “Well, they were just seventeen. You know what I mean. And the way they looked was way beyond compare. So how could I dance with another? Ooooooh-Oooooh! When I saw them standing there?” It turns out that Bach and Beethoven knew what they were doing when they composed music without words. Though the Woke would need to rename Copland: “Fanfare for the Common Person.”

Back to the climate. John Kerry’s private jet emitted 116 metric tons of carbon in one year. Yet he flew it to Iceland to accept … a climate award. Al Gore was averaging $30,000 a year in electric bills for his 20-room home and pool house. But California coerces its electric utilities to spend on “green energy” rather than primarily to renovate and modernize their classic electric infrastructure. Consequently, its wealthy cities have aesthetically elegant underground cabling, while above-ground electricity and aged infrastructure later elsewhere contribute to devastating wildfires that also could be avoided if the Left would allow a return to sensible forestry procedures that predominated before Clinton.

Left-wing coercion is endemic in left-wing philosophy. Conservatives believe we know better, but we also believe in personal freedom and that government must not interfere outside the “police power” fields of health, safety, and general public welfare. By contrast, the Left believes not only that they know better but also that they are entitled to assure utopia by coercing everyone else to live by their untested, unproven, and even often-tried-and-failed ideas. So Mao forced educated people to be reeducated or die. Stalin imposed his economic and agricultural theories on Ukrainians, and millions died in the Holodomor as a result. Now the Left feels, for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt, that they are safe to coerce the rest of us to follow their commands like lemmings.

We won’t. We are not alone. As documented in the November vote, fully half of this country — at least — rejects it. At least 75 to 80 million of us — and obviously so many more — won’t stand for it. The Left may control the airwaves, entertainment, universities, the “news” media, the social media — and still at least half of us stand apart, unswayed. Unbroken.

They have one advantage over us. Because they control most modes of communication and culture, they do create the impression that they predominate. Mass propaganda intimidates conservative and religious thought leaders, academics, and regular people. We saw this in Nazi Europe and Stalinist Russia. Someday the American churches that are steeped in religious faith and conservative cultural values will get their acts together, just as the Rev. Wright’s radical-liberationist side does. Someday conservative billionaires and millionaires will evaluate why they blindly donate fortunes to endow leftist universities whose professors teach and students are taught to destroy them. More importantly, when our half of this country’s consumers learn to wield the tool of boycott with the same fearsome power that the other side does, there will be change. It will be lawful. It will be constitutional. If the Woke can terrify Gillette and Nike, so can we when our 75 million–plus realize our numbers and the purse-power we wield.

If they can dominate social media and repress conservative voices, we can overcome once we figure out that our 75 to 80 million–plus can populate an equally powerful alternative social media and thereby, by abandoning Zuckerberg and Dorsey, can break in half the assets now financing Facebook and Twitter. If the Left can force movie and television studios and drama and musical theaters to produce left-infused entertainment, so can we force a cultural shift when we realize that we 75 to 80 million–plus have the same power of the purse that they have. I never have attended Urinetown because of its name. I never have watched Sch[xxx]’s Creek solely because of its name. I know about the “proud German name” in audio, just as I know the U.S. Supreme Court case of Schmuck v. United States, 489 U.S. 705 (1989). I have read the show’s reviews, and I understand the comedy is excellent and not necessarily vulgar. But I will not patronize the vulgarization of American culture. I won’t watch it, just as I have boycotted the NFL and NBA the past four years because of the knee-bending. Where Kaepernick and all his lemmings kneel, I take a stand.

Imagine if 75 to 80 million of us, and also our kids and all others who think like us but who did not vote, took a stand. You can bet the farm that a boycott of 100 million G-d-believing, socially conservative consumers would make America great again within months. The alternative is this sewer trash. That sewer trash will dominate “culture,” will “top the charts” and get rave reviews and “widespread critical acclaim,” just as the cancel-culture blacklists dominate academia, entertainment, and the media — until we 100 million understand that we are not alone.

In the end, the Left could not drive Rush or Hannity or Tucker or Laura off the air because our media matters. For all their boycotting, they ended up with a Fox News, quite imperfect though it be, that ultimately has replaced O’Reilly with Tucker, Gretchen with Martha and others even more conservative, Megyn with Laura, and that retained Hannity without Colmes. If — when — we 75 to 80 million–plus ever get it figured out and get our acts together, America indeed will become great again. It takes despising leftist coercion and hypocrisy. And knowing that we are not alone.