In George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 words were used to mean precisely the opposite of what they do mean. "Peace is war, love is hate, freedom is slavery" the totalitarian masters of Oceania repeated over and over. Orwell, a man of the left, came to view the left as a great threat to freedom and illustrated that threat in his novel Animal Farm.
Sixty four years after Orwell's death the left is still the greatest threat to freedom, at least in this country, and still uses words to mean the opposite of what they do mean.
"Intolerance is Tolerant, Uniformity is Diversity, Bullying is Compassionate" is the modern expression of Orwell's famous triad.
At Mozilla the CEO, Brandon Eich, has been forced out because six years ago he made a relatively small donation to a group which was campaigning to keep the definition of marriage what it had been for 2000 years, what Barack Obama said at the time it should be, and what most Americans agreed it should be. Nevertheless, the left saw an opportunity to bully and intimidate by punishing a man for his views and they mounted a campaign to have him fired. This time they succeeded.
They had tried the same ugly tactic on previous occasions with Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chick-fil-a, and Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty, only to be resoundingly rebuked by the public. In Eich's case it's harder for those who support him to demonstrate their support in any significant way.
The message is clear: Anyone who takes a stand for traditional marriage can expect the same thuggish treatment from the left.
But it's not just around the issue of gay marriage where such tactics are employed by the left.
At many universities and other institutions any scientist who deviates from the party line on naturalistic evolution will be denied tenure or other professional advantages. If the hapless victims are biology grad students they'll often find their life made difficult, and they may even be forced out of their program. More than one grad student or untenured professor has been advised to keep his unDarwinian opinions to him or herself until the PhD or tenure has been granted.
Many Christian students in public schools have been insulted and denied basic free speech rights, not by other students but by school personnel simply for praying over meals or writing an essay that incorporates Christian themes.
If one is participating in a silent pro-life vigil one can expect verbal and even physical abuse.
To oppose the president's policies, no matter how respectfully, is to incur the epithets of racist, bigot, and hater.
Many conservative speakers are either prevented from appearing on university campuses or their presentations are disrupted by left-wing students.
The left cannot win any of their arguments in a fair contest in the public square so they feel compelled to resort to bullying, name-calling, and intimidation. They fear, rightly, that they cannot afford to have people hear an alternative point of view so they have to prevent that competing point of view from being aired.
This is completely contrary to the spirit of our founding as a nation and is, in fact, the very essence of fascism. Many people have the misconception that fascism is a right-wing ideology, but this is false. Fascism, like communism, is a totalitarian system that imposes its will by force and compulsion and as such it's a phenomenon of the left.
When a man like Eich has his career ruined because he holds a view of which gay fascists disapprove, when scientists have their careers ruined because the academic fascists disapprove of their opinions, when people are suspended from school or fail a writing assignment because they express a worldview which the faculty brown-shirts disdain, then we no longer live in the land of the free and are in serious danger of collapsing into a sordid atheistic totalitarianism.
We must guard our freedoms, especially the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion, jealously or surely one day we'll realize we no longer have it. We should also reproach the tactics of those on the left, like the people who forced Brenden Eich out at Mozilla, who wish to strip us of our basic freedoms while imposing their own values of politically correct groupthink and social and moral conformity on the rest of us.