Cyberbullies seek to silence WPC
When children insult and degrade their fellow pupils online with a goal of shaming, isolating and silencing them, sane adults react with unified horror. Parents, teachers, and school administrators have agreed to policies to prevent this cruelty and correct those who would engage in cyberbullying.
Unfortunately, while cyberbullying by children is actively discouraged, cyberbullying by adults – especially in politics and policy debates – can be actively rewarded with social media attention. It’s the scourge of the internet age.
Today’s example, the organized labor backed “Northwest Accountability Project” (NWAP).
Disagree with NWAP and you’re likely to be labelled a Nazi, White Supremacist, or both. They revel in seeking to create guilt by association. It’s as though their webmaster once played the game “six degrees of separation” and now cannot stop seeing connections to Hitler.
Their smearing practices are a cynical and sinister attempt at silencing the speech of opponents rather than engaging them in debate. In short, they are cyber-censors.
NWAP and its financial backers are upset that organizations like Washington Policy Center agree with the Supreme Court of the United States that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits government from compelling employees to join (or pay fees to) a labor union (or any other organization) as a condition of employment. Instead of arguing in favor of compulsion and persuading people that WPC is wrong to support individual choice, they slander us and others with smears designed to link us to individuals and organizations with beliefs antithetical to our own.
They do this in part because WPC informs workers of their right to choose. It’s the one workplace rule you won’t find displayed prominently on the breakroom wall. WPC also opposes organized efforts to make it difficult for public employees to exercise this right. WPC supports the right of workers to choose for themselves – including if one’s choice is to belong to the union.
Actual debate is difficult. Silencing your opponent’s voice before the debate even begins is the coward’s way out.
NWAP (and others like them) seek to light the virtual torches and sharpen the virtual pitchforks of hoped-for online mobs so that they then spread the misinformation to others. The goal is to make one’s opponent so toxic, you’ll scare others away from listening.
It’s contemptuous. And the attacks from NWAP are beneath contempt. Their “source” material in this attack quotes the ironically titled, “director of the Intelligence Project” at the Southern Poverty Law Center (the once-great organization that in recent years put Dr. Ben Carson on their “extremist watch list”) who asserts a “well worn path” to White Supremacy is “through conservative politics to Ben Shapiro and on to pure hatred” thus smearing all politics right of their own with racist extremism.
Further, whether you agree or disagree with the politics of Ben Shapiro, the insinuation that his teachings lead toward such hatred is grotesquely absurd. I used to work with Ben Shapiro and consider him a friend, but it doesn’t take a close relationship to learn Ben is Jewish and serious about his faith. Smearing him as a path toward Nazism is both asinine and gravely offensive.
To answer these kinds of internet trolls feels like rewarding spoiled children for awful behavior. But to not answer them leaves open the fear of being forever tarnished with disgusting smears, so a limited response seems best.
At WPC we welcome debate. We don’t cyber-censor our opponents, nor do we seek government aid to silence their views. We engage them in a battle of ideas. We think it would be better for all of us if there were more engagement, more back and forth on the policies of today.
And to the smearing cyber-censors out there: Grow up.
Washington Policy Center will not be bullied into silence.