If you're a Leftist and you've lost Matt Taibbi, the editor of Rolling Stone magazine, a liberal icon publication for decades, then you've really screwed up.
In a June 12 piece published online titled, "The American Press Is Destroying Itself," Taibbi declares what conservatives and sane independents have known for some time now: The far-Left in America is nuts and worse, hell-bent on destroying the country as it was founded.
After his customary bashing of President Donald Trump, Taibbi writes, "It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It's become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness."
All of which is true.
There's more:
The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.
They've conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it's established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" out loud to a data scientist fired* from a research firm for — get this — retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones!
So, what has sparked Taibbi's epiphany? Did he, like Tom Cruise's character Jerry Maguire, have two slices of bad pizza, go to bed, and wake up with a conscience.
If only.
In fact, Taibbi's lamenting of the lunatic far-Left comes only as the barbarians arrived at his gate.
"Now, this madness is coming for journalism. Beginning on Friday, June 5th, a series of controversies rocked the media. By my count, at least eight news organizations dealt with internal uprisings (it was likely more). Most involved groups of reporters and staffers demanding the firing or reprimand of colleagues who'd made politically "problematic" editorial or social media decisions," he writes.
Oh.
So, when the Left is doxing and shaming and beating on and stalking and threatening conservatives and others who support President Trump, it's 'nothing to see here.' But the minute the 'woke crews' begin to awake and stalk newsrooms, suddenly Taibbi sees the forest for the trees.
Well, he's too late. Conservatives have been waging this culture war now for years, only to see the battles intensify with one new incident of craziness after another, usually on the hour, since the arrival and inauguration of Donald Trump.
And here's the really bad news for Taibbi. Whether or not the barbarians come to his gates over at the Rolling Stone is yet to be determined, but the growing legions of perpetually outraged on the Left are not going to go away.
So it's either stand up to them and demonstrate that free speech and expression is a two-way street, as the founders envisioned, or be shamed into silence like a coward, only to crawl out from the basement long enough to realize something that's been trending now for years.
They've Lost Rolling Stone! Editor Declares 'American Left Has Lost Its Mind'