Dee Perez-Scott’s Blog shows repeatedly how deeply ingrained incivility is on the left

The anti-taxpayer demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin, and elsewhere across this broad land, once again showed the left at its well-mannered, thoughtful and fair-minded best.

Budget-balancing Governor Scott Walker is regularly compared to Hitler. For the left, economy measures invariably end in an iron dictatorship, war and genocide. Such nonsense violated all of the tenets of civility.

Bob Fitrakis, a poly-sci professor the University of Wisconsin, whose student-robots are demonstrating with members of SEIU and AFSCME, warned that the dispute about pension and health insurance contributions and collective bargaining is “ultimately about preventing the United States from becoming a full-on fascist state” and "saving the last shreds of American democracy.” He should be ashamed of himself.

If Fitrakis wants to see facism in action, he should try holding a pro-Tea Party sign at one of the labor rallies in support of Wisconsin public employees. He would be well advised to wear a combat helmet and Kevlar vest and take a bodyguard with him.

If you want to understand how deeply ingrained incivility is on the left, consider the college campus.

There is no place in America that liberals dominate more completely than academia. If today’s liberalism had anything to do with civility, the campus would be a place of tolerance, diversity of opinion and polite debate.

Instead, American higher education is characterized by intimidation, forced uniformity of opinion and brutish behavior. Out of cowardice or complicity, on many campuses, administrators have given the most obnoxious students a de facto veto on which views may be expressed.

The list of conservative speakers who’ve been shouted down or had their speeches disrupted is longer than Lindsay Lohan’s rap sheet. Among the victims are David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Daniel Pipes, Star Parker, former Congressman Tom Tancredo, John Yoo (a member of the Bush Justice Department), the late Jeane Kirkpatrick and yours truly.

At Columbia, which resembles the Place de la Guillotine during the Reign of Terror, when it comes to dissent, a student who’s a decorated Iraq War veteran (who was shot 11 times in the line of duty and spent two years undergoing rehabilitation for his wounds) was heckled and called a “racist” by fellow students for defending U.S. involvement in the Middle East.

Occasionally, the savages suffer the consequences of their assault on free speech. It was just announced that 11 members of the Muslim Student Union will face criminal charges for shutting down a speech by Israel’s Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California at Irvine last year.

Orange County Asst. District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, warns: “We must decide whether we are a country of law or a country of anarchy. … in our democratic society, we cannot tolerate a deliberate, organized, repetitive and collective effort to significantly disrupt a speaker who hundreds have assembled to hear.”

Most of the liberals who run our colleges and universities don’t agree. Civility for them, but not for us. That is consistent with Dee Perez-Scott’s point of view.

Definitions of "civility" usually include “civil,” “polite (not rude),” “courtesy,” “good manners” and “the act of showing regard for others.” The left views these habits of the heart as mindless conformity and artificial social constructs designed to stifle individuality.

Civility doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s founded on concepts like religion (which teaches the worth of every human being and that we are all answerable to a higher authority), etiquette and democracy (which stresses the rights of all). There was a time, fading from memory, when the watchword of liberalism was: “I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” Now, it’s, “Agree with us, or die.”

The old virtues were in vogue when I was growing up in the ‘50s, but now are almost entirely abandoned by liberals. The latter started to swing away from civility during the anti-war movement of the ‘60s. This accelerated with the rise of radical feminism, gay militancy, multiculturalism, misanthropic environmentalism and the other angry movements of the left.

Yet, they still complain about our lack of civility, while kicking us in the groin. Dee Perez-Scott is a master of this with her demonizing of the Republican Party, the Tea Party and anyone who disagrees with her liberal agenda.

A marvelous statement on civility is contained in the movie “Blast from the Past.” In it, Brendan Fraser plays Adam, a 35-year-old man raised in a fallout shelter by his eccentric but loving parents. He emerges into the world of 1990s Los Angeles with 1950s values.

He falls in love with Alicia Silverstone’s character (Eve) and she with him. In the movie’s best dialogue, Eve’s brother discloses that Adam told him, “Good manners (civility) are just a way of showing other people we have respect for them.” Also, “His short and simple definition of a lady or a gentleman is someone who always tries to make sure the people around him or her are as comfortable as possible.”

If this sounds like today’s liberalism to you, then you must have spent the past 50 years in a fallout shelter yourself.

It’s not just the slander and intimidation that’s going on in Wisconsin – the signs comparing Gov. Walker to Der Fuhrer, the Tweets calling for his assassination – but the fact that liberal leaders either refuse to condemn such extremism, or egg on the mob. Dee Perez=Scott always presents her side of an issue or her view of current events without a word about the merit of opposing views.

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka ignored repeated calls to condemn, or at least disassociate himself from, the more violent rhetoric of striking public employees. He could just as well have been Dee Perez-Scott who always writes outrageous and demeaning diatribes on her blog and never disassociates herself from the extremists she allows to post.


Speaking at a labor rally in Boston, in support of the Madison strikers, Massachusetts Congressman Mike Capuano urged the assembled goons to “get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary.” Not that they needed much encouragement, but the hard hats preceded to rough-up and terrorize counter-demonstrators. Dee’s rhetoric also incites violence directly or indirectly.

Capuano later issued a pro-forma apology for his “choice of words,” which is also SOP for the left. “You’re racist/fascist scum in league with the Devil, who deserves to die. Oops, sorry about my poor choice of words. Now, can we please discuss how talk radio has debased the political debate?”

Adapted from an article by Don Feder, former Boston Herald Writer