Bill Whittle is a well known conservative blogger, and political commentator, perhaps most widely recognized for his PJ Media internet videos and short films. I spoke with Bill by phone yesterday from his home in California. Whittle is the keynote speaker for the CD 2 Lincoln-Reagan Dinner. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
JG: You were recently slandered by the Regressive Leftist Media Matters for America as an “academic racist.” Your reaction?
BW: The best way is to explain what happened. George Soros recently donated 14 billion dollars to the Soros Foundation, which funds hundreds of organizations. One of them is Media Matters, which goes through everything a conservative commentator has ever said and makes sure they are able to grab anything they can to discredit that person and do it in the nastiest way possible.
There’s probably 5,000 hours of me on the internet spontaneously speaking, without a script. Media Matters took everything for their hit job from an interview with Stephen Molyneaux, where we were discussing Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve.
Media Matters selectively and deviously edited what I said. We always thought we’d lose our freedom of speech because of the government. That’s not where it’s coming from.
What’s happening here in front of our eyes is that people are being silenced, as well as silencing themselves. To see a headline calling you a racist is appalling and disgusting. This is who we’re fighting and this is what they do.
To falsely accuse someone of racism reveals an utter, complete lack of honesty, any shred of integrity, any shred of decency.
Republican candidate for Illinois governor Jeanne Ives distanced herself from me on the basis of this smear. About a month later, she ran an ad that was attacked by the Left and Republicans as racist and unacceptable. If she thought she was going to make it as a conservative governor in Illinois without being called a racist one way or another, then she was too naive to have run for office in the first place.
JG: The British singer Morrissey recently harshly critiqued Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, for skyrocketing crime, acid attacks and a general degradation of life. He said the Left calls everyone a racist these days and so the term means nothing now.
BW: In London now for the last two months, its murder rate has exceeded that of New York. There’s nothing to worry about, apparently, because the people weren’t shot they were stabbed to death. So good news for Londoners, nothing to worry about.
The mayor, a Muslim, and virtually all of these increase in stabbings are coming from his Muslim community, has decided to call for knife control instead of going after the problem. And anybody who disagrees with him is a racist.
Here’s the thing: the Left is already becoming afraid of what they have created. You hear this all the time from college professors who say “I’m a liberal but now my students scare me.” You better believe they scare you, they should scare you. They’re going to eat you first.
It doesn’t provide me any comfort but it does provide me hope. For example, you’ll find some sixty year old woman whose been a feminist for forty-five, fifty years, been fighting for feminism her entire life, she’s now the grand dame of feminism.
They go to a college campus, talking about the advances they’ve made as feminists and some young, black, lesbian, feminist stands up and says “How can you dare to speak about feminism as a straight white woman?” That liberal looks at them and realizes they are being vilified the same way that they’ve always vilified us. By this thing that they’ve created. So good luck.
JG: Starbucks comes to mind: the Left eats its own.
BW: Yes. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people. This is the kind of thing that gives me hope because when you understand that this entire generation was raised without competition, no one came in first, no one came in second, everybody got a participation trophy, no one is allowed to excel, no one is allowed to be different or better, make more money, you realize that’s there only one area in which millenials are allowed and that is who can be the greatest victim and who can generate the most outrage about synthetic injustice that they create around them.
That means that those targets are not necessarily going to be conservatives, they’re going to attack anything that they perceive to be different from what they believe in. It’s actually comforting to watch the Left start to squirm. A lot of comedians are on the front lines of this. Chris Rock won’t play colleges anymore because he says he can’t tell any jokes there.
Who do you think created these people, Chris?
JG: What can we do going forward so that the Left is not successful in shutting us down?
BW: A lot of times I give advice that it doesn’t please me to give. This is the curse of living in an age where everything you believe in is under attack. It pains me to say this but the first thing is to forget the idea of civil discourse. They’re not capable of it, they’re not interested in it. If you decide to engage in civil discourse with them, you are fighting by Marquis of Queensbury rules with people who are looking to do nothing but jab a knife in your ribs.
Civil discourse is not going to happen. Anything you do to show goodwill toward these people is simply another weapon that they’ll use against you. Not descending to their level sounds great as an operational theory.
While it would be nice to fight honorable people honorably, they’re not. You have a choice now of either fighting them on their level or losing.
John Gilmore
John Gilmore is an author, freelance writer & former opinion columnist for Alpha News. He blogs at minnesotaconservatives.org & is @Shabbosgoy on Twitter