In an interview with Bill O’Reilly, left-wing pundit Alan Colmes claimed that liberals are scarcely guilty of spewing hate speech. Instead, the “hate speech,” according to Colmes (and the mainstream media) has been coming from the Right, particularly from conservative radio hosts and Tea Partiers. To say this is to ignore innumerable examples of left-wing hate propaganda, including recent accounts that have been ignored by the mainstream media.
On March 29, ex-White House political consultant Karl Rove appeared at a Beverly Hills book signing to promote his new memoir, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. While there, he was aggressively approached by Code Pink Co-Founder Jodie Evans. She bore handcuffs and claimed she was there to make a citizen’s arrest and screamed, “Look what you did, you outted a CIA officer; you liked to take us to war; you totally ruined the country.” She placed her hands on him to conduct the arrest but was immediately detained by security.
Later, when Karl Rove attempted to speak to the crowd of 100 supporters, he was repeatedly interrupted by the 10 or so protesters still present. Rove remarked, “With all due respect, this goes to show the totalitarianism of the Left. They don’t believe in dialogue, they don’t believe in courtesy, they don’t believe in First Amendment rights for anyone but themselves.” Regardless of one’s opinion of Karl Rove or his variant of "conservatism," was this incident not newsworthy in light of other stories the media publishes about disruptive "conservative" protesters?
A similar event involving Sarah Palin took place on Saturday March 27. During one of Palin’s fiery support speeches for Senator John McCain’s re-election campaign, Palin was repeatedly heckled by a protestor who interrupted every word she said. Finally, Palin addressed him. “Young man, stick around and listen to what we’re going to say. Sir, maybe you’ll learn something.” Eventually, his obnoxious behavior prompted security to escort him from the rally.
Behavior like this is reminiscent of the sheep in George Orwell’s classic novella Animal Farm. To prevent opposing views from being heard, the sheep would bleat loudly, drowning out all other sounds. They paraded around mindlessly reciting expressions like “Two legs bad, four legs good!” Almost sounds like, “Separation of church and state” and “right to privacy,” the typical axioms of the left-wing movement with respect to removing any reference to God from the public square and abortion "rights."
On February 28, “Minister” Louis Farrakhan spoke to a crowd of 20,000 people in Chicago. During that speech, Farrakhan asserted, “The White Right is trying to set Barack Obama up to be assassinated.” He adds, “There are Christians praying for God to kill Barack Obama.” Farrakhan also complained, “Now they got him with a mustache looking like Hitler,” seemingly forgetting that only a few years ago, President Bush was branded as “Hitler” and a “Nazi.” Not surprisingly, this type of language inflames hatred against Christians and whites.
You may recall the variety of “quality” supporters of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, including rappers Jay-Z and Kanye West, both who epitomize the art of hate speech.
As an example, on Jay-Z’s 2004 album, The Black Album, a song called “99 problems” can be found. The song’s refrain explains, “I got 99 problems but a b***h ain’t one.” Sounds like misogyny to me! The song proceeds to describe Jay-Z’s alleged experiences of repeated harassment from police officers who were motivated to do so simply because Jay-Z is black. A song like that can certainly be accused of inciting hatred against law enforcement, yet it’s not.
In Kanye West’s 2004 hit song “All Falls Down,” his message is even less subtle than Jay-Z’s. In the third verse of the song, West sings, “I say f*** the police, that’s how I treat ‘em”. He goes on to talk about the presence of crack in black neighborhoods, claiming “a white man get paid off of all of that.” Besides the obvious misconceptions of this statement, the underlying issue is that lyrics like these provoke hatred against white people and law enforcement. Somehow though, this type of hate speech has been given a pass by liberals and the media.
Once again, liberals across the country, assisted by the mainstream media, have missed the mark. While they have attempted to paint conservatives as radical hate mongers, in part by focusing the bad actions of a few, they ignore hostility coming from the Left. Meanwhile, the lack of evidence connecting the Tea Party movement to violent or threatening behavior has not hindered accusations that conservatives are attempting to incite hate.
