Against Conservative Dhimmitude

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Did you hear that AirbnB has banned Michelle Malkin and her husband from using its services because Malkin attended and spoke at the American Renaissance conference, which Airbnb, following the standards of the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, considers to be a hate group? She wrote about it here. Excerpt:

Airbnb’s ideological witch hunts have claimed an unknown number of victims since 2016 as part of a woke company initiative to root out “bias” and expel anyone deemed an “extremist” with a “dangerous organization affiliation.” Press coverage of previous purges strongly suggests that the aforementioned character assassins of the Southern Poverty Law Center are involved through use of their far left, anti-white, anti-right “Hatewatch” list. Ever since I wrote my first book, “Invasion,” in 2002, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League goons have sought to stifle my voice.

But this latest salvo crosses the line. It’s not enough that I — a “woman of color” (the left’s own descriptive label, not mine) and mother of two multiracial children — was pronounced guilty of “hate” crimes and “promotion” of “white supremacist” ideas for delivering a speech whose full content Airbnb didn’t even bother to obtain from me. The Airbnb bullies also banned my equally nonviolent, nonhateful husband — who did not attend the conference and who is not a public figure or activist.

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This is a jaw-dropping thing, and it cannot be swept under the rug. I haven’t read Michelle Malkin in years, and I wouldn’t speak at or attend AmRen because I have strong philosophical differences with that group. But that is beside the point! Here we have a citizen being denied the use of a service not because she engaged in criminal behavior, but because she associated with people the service provider hates. And not only that, but the service provider has banned her husband! This is truly outrageous, and extremely illiberal.

Where does it stop? Because you know good and well this won’t be the end of it. Are we going to have woke hotels banning Republicans? Restaurants refusing to serve Southern Baptists? (Or, on the other side, hotels refusing to host people who attended Black Lives Matter events, and restaurants refusing to serve Unitarians?) Will left-wing activists start boycotting businesses unless they agree to a written policy refusing to serve conservatives? Again, get this straight: this has nothing to do with whether or not one likes Malkin or AmRen, or approves of their message. This is about living in a diverse, pluralistic country where we have to tolerate people with whom we strongly disagree, as part of what it means to live in a liberal democracy. But Airbnb, in its progressive ardor, is demolishing classical liberalism, which is what makes it possible for us to live together in peace.

{snip} The Left makes it clearer, day by day, that it has abandoned liberalism in favor of a moralistic, censorious, soft-totalitarian progressivism. They want a country in which Christian bakers are compelled by law to provide wedding cakes for gay couples, but the relatives — the relatives! — of conservative controversialists are denied the right to sleep in a rental apartment.

Make no mistake: what they’ve done to the Malkins is a rudimentary move to a social credit system, where access to goods and services depends on your politics. Do you really want to live in a country in which people with Biden stickers on the back of their cars are told that they are not welcome to shop at a small-town Alabama supermarket? That’s what the Left is bringing about. {snip}

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{snip} The haughty illiberalism of woke capitalists like Airbnb, and the craven unwillingness of corporations to tell the progressive pirates that they won’t bend to extortion, is going to force the hand of Republican legislators. What the Left is doing, by creating a de facto social credit system based on politics, is intolerable. They are making our country unlivable, all in the name of purity. They don’t actually give a rat’s ass about Joe Rogan, or Michelle Malkin. They simply want to crush opposition. It starts with Rogan and Malkin, but it ends with you and me and our children.