Regarding Press Release: ADL Attacks Freedom of Speech by “Shooting the Messenger.”
One of the most interesting aspects of the ADL attack on an AM radio program producer in western Tennessee is how it was just name-calling from start to finish. The diverse white American peoples are losing their awe of the labeling that ADL engages in, and the ADL labels are losing their power to influence us. We have seen so much of ADL’s name-calling that the words have ceased to sting.
But look at the names hurled at or around an innocent and intelligent broadcaster: white supremacist, anti-Semite, neo-Nazi, Holocaust denier, conspiracy theorist, anti-immigrant leaders, racist groups, and extremist views. Apparently even the heroic Colonel Charles Lindbergh came in for a verbal thrashing by the ADL, too. There’s no resting in peace for the enemies list at ADL headquarters.
(As a side note, creating an order of honor named for Lindbergh is an excellent idea.)
On our web site, we explore the phenomenon of name-calling because the act of naming the other is the building block for the act of slurring, and once a group like ADL moves into that area its motives can be analyzed.
Naming Others = Supremacy Claims
The first thing that is utterly clear about naming is that when it is done by persons outside the group so labeled, it is manifestly an application of a claim to supremacy over the person or group so named. You can’t have naming of the other without a claim to supremacy over the other. This understanding will ultimately cause the demise of all the labels bandied about in the second paragraph in this essay. Every single one is based on a claim to supremacy over, and the right to name, those it attempts to smear.
Nationality & Diversities Stripped
The second thing is that the name-calling strips its victims of their nationality (American) and their diversities in an attempt to dehumanize the victims of the name-calling into mindless clones of one another. This is called essentialism or reification in philosophy, but in the natural world it is the foundation stone for hate and bigotry which, in fact, underlie the ADL attack.
Name-Calling To Silence You
The third thing is that the name-calling is merely an attempt at silencing political comment and, let us not forget, political discourse is at the very core of the First Amendment’s freedom of speech rights. We’ve lost the freedoms of association and contract so far, and we must combat this insidious silencing attempt by mocking it, by deconstructing it, and by examining the hearts and minds of the would-be silencers for their foul and loathsome pathological supremacies and hatreds.
Just tell the silencers, “No, no, no.”
Bo Sears, Resisting Defamation