Intimidation

While looking at a news site this morning,  I noticed that a movie star is being castigated on social media as an “ableist” for her kind tweet wishing Stephen Hawking to rest in peace and saying he is now free of physical constraints.  This  is unimportant in itself.  Anyone taking offense from her comment or not recognizing that being crippled is indeed constraining likely suffers from another sort of disability – being a fool. The movie star will either properly  ignore or laugh off the criticism or cave in and tweet some sort of craven apology. However it and the fact that it made national news are a fine illustration of something that is worth noticing.  Lacking the political power they had when Obama was in office, leftists are working, often successfully,  at getting their way and enforcing their orthodoxy  through intimidation.

Intimidation can be a powerful tool that can be used to gain obedience from people over whom the intimidators have no actual power.  It works well on people who are unsure of themselves or guilt ridden and works especially well on moral cowards. On a good deal of evidence this last group apparently  includes a large percentage of executives in big corporations.

A  recent example is the rush by companies to end relationships with the NRA after a deranged criminal shot several students at a school in Florida.  The NRA stands for exactly the same principles and policies after the shooting as it had for years before it. The fact that criminals sometimes use guns to shoot several people at once was well known.  The millions of  members of the NRA are as desirable a target for marketing as they were earlier.  Yet the executives of many companies  joined the stampede, not because of anything of substance but seemingly only because they were scared – scared by a log rolling blitz in the traditional media and a few tweets and emails, many probably fake. This behavior is not unusual.

There are a couple of things people who care about the country can do.  They can speak their minds fearlessly,  refuse to accept undeserved guilt, and either ignore would  be enforcers of the canons of political correctness or tell them to go to hell, depending on situation.  They can also take advantage of the cowardice of  executives by putting the same sort of pressure on them through social media and other means that the leftists are doing. (I cancelled a credit card with First National of Omaha over their behavior on the NRA and told them why in writing.) That does not come naturally to those who are used to minding their own business and letting others mind theirs, but the leftists picked this fight and its rules.