Shut Up. Just Shut Up.

Are you red-baiting me?

I wrote below about how governments across the Westernmost West seem to all be in trouble at once; an inflection point in history. I see now another inflection point, probably related. Our first exhibit being the suppression of the Christchurch killer’s manifesto.

It’s a safe bet that Pete Buttigieg will sink back into relative obscurity well before the Iowa caucuses. But in the meantime, he seems to be the toast of every Starbucks. A recent Daily Beast article was irate about the right “red-baiting” him. The Washington Examiner had run a piece saying his father was a Marxist.

Yet this is undeniably true. Professor Buttigieg was an expert on Gramsci, publicly declared himself committed to “the Marxist project,” edited Marxist journals--journals with “Marxism” in their title, not journals that might only be alleged to be crypto-Marxist--and endorsed the Communist Manifesto. Pretty definitive.

And why, after all, would the Washington Examiner, or anyone else on the right, bother at this point to “red-bait” Buttigieg? From their perspective, probably, he would be the ideal candidate for the Democrats to nominate, especially if he is indeed a Marxist. They should be strategically pro-Buttigieg: a lightweight and, presumably, well to the left. The cynical political thing to do would be to keep any such powder dry, hope he is nominated, and then unleash it in the general.

Instead, they seem to be disinterestedly serving the public interest. Rather as journalists are supposed to.

The Daily Beast mounts this denial of Buttigieg’s father’s Marxism:

“Prof. Buttigieg clearly thought much of Marxism outmoded. In an article appearing in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1998, he argued that the Communist Manifesto ‘needed liberating from Marxism's narrow post-Cold War orthodoxies and exclusive cadre.’ The man hardly sounded like a narrow dogmatist.”

You know who else said Marx needed updating? Who else said almost exactly this, making them, too, “hardly narrow dogmatists”? Professor Buttigieg echoes here Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Zedong.,Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, or Josip Tito. None of them were Marxists by this standard. Nobody ever was. Maybe Engels.

So what is this argument really, other than a demand for censorship of facts you do not like?

The Beast goes on to make a second argument, not really compatible with the first: even though his father was not really a Marxist, it is unfair to saddle the son with the opinions of the father. So so what if Dad who wasn’t a Marxist was a Marxist?

The first problem with this is that the Examiner article does not anywhere accuse Buttigieg the younger of Marxism. It quotes him saying he is a capitalist. Barack Obama’s father, after all, was also a Marxist. We may each make our inferences, but the article itself does not.

And as to the insistence that we must each be judged on our own views, and not on the basis of our ancestry or relationships, this flies directly in the face of the standard assumptions of the modern left. Last presidential election, the Democrats ran Hillary Clinton. It would be disingenuous to insist that her selection had nothing to do with her being the wife of Bill. It would be even harder to argue that Justin Trudeau’s being Canada’s prime minister has nothing to do with who his father was. The Kennedy clan parlayed such grace by association up and down the left aisle for generations. Many on the left now want Michelle Obama to run for something. More broadly, the left considers ancestry a vital reason to vote for or against a candidate: you are supposed to vote for Obama because he is black, you are not supposed to vote for Sanders or Biden or Trump because they are white and male. You are even supposed to vote for Buttigieg himself because he is gay, asserted on the left to be an inherited characteristic, and certainly a matter of relationships.

Foundling discovered under a cabbage leaf. Presumed orphaned.

Two wrongs do not make a right, but to object only when the standard is not double is dishonest.

It is another example of a growing drive to censorship, to get people to shut up, to suppress all dissent.

Another apparent example on stage right now is the latest in the case of Jody Wilson-Raybould, now expelled from the Liberal caucus. Instead of focusing on the original issue of whether she was unduly influenced, the left is aflame with blame over the fact that she recorded a conversation to demonstrate she was unduly influenced. The problem is no longer the crime, but reporting it. This is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

It is all of a piece, too, with the growing tendency everywhere to political correctness and speech codes and deplatforming and banning, and to shouting down and rioting against speakers. Or witness the faculty advisors at Wilfrid Laurier University seeking to sanction Lindsay Shepherd for showing a video available on public TV in class.

A lot of people obviously have a lot to hide. No other explanation is possible.

I think though that it is all a desperate, rear-guard action. It is linked to the growing threat to elites and professional expertise everywhere we are seeing in Brexit and the yellowjackets of Paris. They are intrinsically unlikely to successfully suppress unwelcome facts in an era of endemic social media; the rapidly growing demand for censorship is their hysterical response. Can you really imagine, for example, expecting to enforce a new ethical requirement that nobody must ever record another without their prior consent, when everyone now carries video cameras and recording devices in their pockets? At the same time we are demanding all police wear body cams?

The truth shall set us free. Unfortunately, the truth will always have powerful enemies.