Meira Svirsky has an excellent post on the culture of shaming.
A new culture of shaming has taken hold in America. Trump administration employees are being shouted out of restaurants and movie theaters or impolitely “asked” to leave.
A CNN reporter was recently heckled at a pro-Trump rally.
The level of civility has gotten so bad that Congresswomen Maxine Waters stated that shaming should be a concerted political strategy of the Left.
“If you see anybody from that Cabinet [of the Trump administration] in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Waters said. She later encouraged protesters “to absolutely harass them.”
While people are certainly entitled to their own opinions, harassing others who don’t agree with them in the public sphere degrades one of the most precious rights given to us by our founding fathers: freedom of speech.
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Waters’ call takes the sails out of our right to free speech to the next level. Harassers may not be violating any law on a technical level, but the effect of their tactics will serve to create a self-imposed state of censorship. Sounds pretty Stalin-like to me.
Is this the type of country we want to live in?
As the world devolved into fascism, communism, Nazism and Islamism, America stood apart, maintaining respect for political process – a large part of which eschewed demagoguery and relied on dialogue.
It’s time to get back there.