By David A. Patten
NEWSMAX
In her new book “The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech,” long-time “Potomac Watch” columnist and Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kimberley Strassel brandishes her reporting chops and presents arguably the most detailed chronicle to date of the IRS targeting scandal – its genesis, its dramatic personae, what actually happened, and why.
Her book also introduces readers to everyday Americans who drop their kids off at school in the morning and then spend their day fighting to free themselves from the federal bureaucracy’s endless coils.
Their only offense, it seems, is caring enough about their country to get involved. But because they don’t tow the politically correct line on issues like taxes, healthcare, climate change, and federal spending, they find their activities have been virtually criminalized by limousine liberals trying to weaponize government bureaucracies to use them to silence dissent.
“Today,” Strassel ominously writes, “every American is at risk of retribution.”
Strassel exposes several other examples of hijinks in high places. Among them:
- The 2008 Prop 8 campaign over the definition of marriage in California unveiled the left’s new favorite tactic of obtaining the confidential names of donors to conservative causes, and then splashing their names in the public square to hurt their business and single them out for public ridicule.
- The Koch brothers, industrialists who have donated tens of millions of dollars to charitable causes, endured being singled out by then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who charged that they were trying to buy the election and called them “about as un-American as anyone I can imagine.”
- The plight of businessman and Romney donor Frank L. Vandersloot, whose firm markets wellness products and supplements, was accused on April 2012 by a post on President Obama’s re-election website of being “litigious, combative, and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement.” Strassel writes this made him “the focus of every left-wing journalist in America.” His business took a big hit but Vandersloot refused to back down, and wrote Romney another check for $100,000.
- The pre-dawn raids on the homes of conservative activists who dared to support Gov. Scott Walker’s public-sector union reforms in Wisconsin. These were part of the Badger State’s notorious John Doe investigations, which the state Supreme Court finally shut down in July 2015.
- The attorneys general of true-blue California and New York, who continue to try to force non-profit organizations in their states to reveal their donor lists – as listed on their confidential IRS Schedule B filings — as a condition for operating in their states.
Strassel sees the shotgun efforts to silence conservative organizations as evidence of a larger push to control the social agenda.
“The intimidation game is real,” she writes, “and it is now a defining feature of today’s political environment. Americans tend to worry about Washington gridlock and political dysfunction and rampant partisanship. Their greater worry ought to be the steady erosion of their own rights.”
Whether that campaign to squelch free speech that deviates from liberal orthodoxy will succeed ultimately depends on whether Americans will still fight for their own freedoms.
“The intimidation game only works,” she notes, “if its targets let it.”
David A. Patten is the senior editor of Newsmax Magazine.