Stephen Colbert and Me - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Stephen Colbert and Me
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So. A few weeks ago I was abruptly fired from CNN for tweeting two words from this sentence in my then-two day old column in The American Spectator. The sentence, mocking a would-be re-write of the First Amendment by the thugs at Media Matters, read this way:

The American Spectator has been unable to confirm reports that the original draft of this Media Matters revision ended with the words: “Sieg Heil!”

Knowing full well that Media Matters had led a “Stop Rush” campaign five years earlier, having written about it at the time and knowing that one of the targets had been a businessman advertising his non-political marketing firm on Rush Limbaugh’s show (as he did elsewhere in New York media) — a businessman/advertiser who also happens to be Jewish — I had no hesitation whatsoever mocking the group’s leader for MMA’s Nazi-style tactics. The businessman himself, one Mark Stevens, had been interviewed by me at the time and had described the tactics that included threatening his physical safety, harassing and bullying his female employees, and more as not some sort of innocent “boycott” but rather an “organized terror campaign.” Or in my words, Nazi-style tactics.

CNN found my words in mockingly using the two words that accompanied the infamous Nazi salute as “indefensible.” And with Media Matters leading the charge, I was out the CNN door.

Old news. Let’s move on. But wait!

Now comes this jewel from the star of CBS’s The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. As seen here, mocking the Breitbart chairman and ex-White House strategist Steve Bannon and President Trump, Colbert performs the infamous Nazi salute. Not once — but three times. The left-leaning audience roars at Colbert’s insinuation the President of the United States, Bannon, and Trump supporters are Nazis.

Yes, I know CBS is not CNN. But like CNN it is certainly perceived by the public — as is Colbert himself — as seriously left-leaning. So the obvious question? Why does Stephen Colbert have his job? Why did not CBS instantly issue some CNN-style statement saying Colbert’s Nazi salutes were “indefensible” — and fire him? Actually, CBS did something curiously different. As you will note when you click on the link to You Tube above that shows Colbert doing his Nazi salute? That has now vanished to be replaced by this link, which is a black screen reading the following:

“NOT FUNNY: Colbert gives…” This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by CBS.

Or in other words? CBS is saying you never saw Colbert doing what you thought you saw Colbert doing. Fortunately, a screenshot survives as above.

Over at Fox, host Tucker Carlson and media critic Joe Concha asked this exact question. The headline at Real Clear Politics:

Tucker Carlson: Jeffrey Lord Just Got Fired For Doing What Stephen Colbert Did

There is an answer, I would venture, for such a glaring double-standard, a double-standard larger than the Grand Canyon. The reason Colbert has not been instantly fired is because he mocked this particular president — Donald Trump — and ex-Trump aide Bannon, as Nazis. I mocked a left-wing group — Media Matters — as using Nazi tactics. And tellingly mocking anyone on the Left for employing Nazi-style tactics (again, against a businessman who is Jewish) is unacceptable in the world of liberal media.

President Trump — and earlier predecessors such as GOP nominees or presidents from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush on the other hand — are always seen as fair game for this kind of thing. All have been compared to Hitler and Nazis by the Left of the day. They are seen as fair game because the Left, in this case the liberal media, persists in trying to make Nazis a creature of the Right.

When in fact, as documented in detail by everyone from Ludwig von Mises (in his classic 1951 post-World War II edition of his 1922 bestselling book Socialism) to F.H. Hayek (in The Road to Serfdom) to today’s Dinesh D’Souza in his current bestseller The Big Lie, fascists, Nazis, and Nazism were and are in fact hard-core Leftists. They judge everyone by race, they hate capitalism, they hate Jews, love socialism and demand a powerful central government that discriminates and punishes not simply Jews but other minorities on their hate list — to name but five decided identifiers as to their place on the political spectrum. Supporters of a colorblind, capitalistic, free society where Jews and minorities are accepted as equals they are not.

But if there’s anything that can’t be tolerated by the mainstream media, it’s connecting the historical dots for those who have arrived late on the scene and have bought into the fantasy that Nazis past and present are on the Right. To say otherwise, to make, in my case, the quite serious point that when a businessman/advertiser on the Rush Limbaugh show, a businessman/advertiser who is also Jewish and is the target of a Media Matters-initiated campaign of terror, intimidation and hate — this is taboo. It is not proper to call attention to this garbage that is pushed by a Leftist group. And thus I have to go pronto — but Stephen Colbert? He can stay because, well, you know, wink wink.

D’Souza accurately points out in The Big Lie that in the way-back of the 1960s Berkeley professor and Leftist icon-of-the day Herbert Marcuse (alas, I’m old enough to remember Marcuse) was busy making the argument that “tolerance” is only for those approved by the Left. D’Souza writes:

Basically Marcuse argued that in order to defeat Nazism in America, it was necessary for the Left to use Nazi tactics.

By Nazi tactics I’m not referring merely to violence by angry students and activists. I am also referring to what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung. The term itself means ‘coordination’ and it refers to the Nazi effort to use intimidation across the cultural institutions of society to bring everyone into line with Nazi priorities and Nazi doctrine. Progressives in America are using their dominance — actually their virtual monopoly — in the fields of academia, Hollywood, and the media to enforce their own Gleichschaltung.

They do this not merely through the type of blatant propagandizing and outright lying that would do Joseph Goebbels proud, but also through the relentless battering and forced exclusion of dissident voices from their cultural institutions, so that theirs is the only point of view that is communicated to the vast majority of students and citizens. Again, from the point of view of the Left such intimidation and exclusion is warranted because it is right and proper for anti-fascists to use repression against those they deem fascists.

This whole modus operandi-which Marcuse termed “repressive tolerance” and which is encapsulated in the no-free-speech-for-fascists doctrine — is now at the heart of our political debate.

D’Souza goes on to make the obvious point. The modern Left has tried to rewrite history, portraying those who support freedom of speech and liberty as fascists and Nazis while those who repress free speech and liberty, not to mention those who hate Jews, are the real advocates of tolerance and diversity. This is standard operating procedure if laughably, provably untrue. As I noted back there in 2008, the official Democratic National Committee website tried to sell the idea that the party was historically in favor of civil rights. When in fact it skipped entirely the party’s deeply racist roots supporting slavery, segregation, lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan while opposing every and all civil rights legislation for a hundred years after the Civil War.

One suspects one of two things with Colbert. He is either genuinely clueless to the Leftist roots of that salute he used the other night (as are many Americans) — or he does know and is using such moments on his show to contribute to the rewriting of the horrendous history behind it.

And as illustrated vividly in the difference between CNN’s firing of me and the CBS shrug at Colbert? Woe betide if one mocks those on the Left who actually use Nazi-style tactics (in this case — it can’t be said enough — against a Jewish businessman who advertises on the Limbaugh show). But mocking the President of the United States or Steve Bannon and Trump supporters in the same fashion is perfectly acceptable in the Leftist media clubhouse.

Suffice to say, this has in reality nothing to do with me or Stephen Colbert. It has everything to do with the principles of a free society and whether or not that free society — America in this case — can survive when some of its most prominent elites are doing everything to acquiesce in that sabotage or even worse deliberately sabotage that free society outright.

In the words of President Reagan:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

Exactly.

Suffice to say, this is a battle for the soul of America. And it will continue.

Jeffrey Lord
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
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