Republicans control the White House, Congress and a majority of state legislative seats in the U.S., and right-wing political movements are ascendant across the globe. But to Dennis Prager, right-wing pundit and propagandist, “The dominant force in America and many other Western countries today is fear of the left.”
In a commentary that ran on Townhall and the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal on Tuesday, Prager wrote that “the most dynamic religion of the past 100 years has been neither Christianity nor Islam. It has been leftism.”
Prager says that everywhere he speaks, terrified people come up to him and whisper that they are conservatives or supporters of President Trump. He compares these frightened people to dissidents in the Soviet Union and even to Marranos, “the name given during the 15th-century Spanish Inquisition to Jews who hid their Judaism while appearing to be Catholics lest they be persecuted.” Regarding the latter, he acknowledges that the consequences of the persecution facing American conservatives—losing friends or a job—is not the same as being driven out of one’s home or being killed, but insists “otherwise, the label is apt.”
Among the litany of examples of a left-wing mob mentality that Prager cites is the case of Starbucks. Last month, video of two black men being arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks while they were waiting for a friend to arrive went viral, and the ensuing outrage led Starbucks to announce that it will close all its stories for an afternoon later this month for training on implicit bias.
But in Prager’s re-telling, the handcuffing of the customers disappears entirely:
In the recent case of a Philadelphia Starbucks manager who asked two black men to purchase something before giving them the code to the restroom, Starbucks immediately appeased the left-wing mob. The company didn’t wait until any facts came out; it simply abandoned the manager and announced it would close every U.S. store one day in May to educate all Starbucks employees about “unconscious bias.”
These are only a few examples of the left-wing intimidation that dominates much of American life.
It does so in large measure because liberals are either too afraid to confront the left or they don’t understand that the American left, not the American right, is the mortal enemy of liberalism.
As BuzzFeed’s Joseph Bernstein noted in March, PragerU’s online videos promoting a right-wing take on everything from feminism to climate change, gun control to socialism, have racked up more than one billion views.
