Nat Hentoff: Why I'm mad at liberal hypocrites

Nat Hentoff? Isn't he dead? Well yes. Since 2017. Before that, Mr Hentoff was an American historian, novelist, jazz and country music critic, and syndicated columnist for United Media. He was a staff writer for the New Yorker, and columnist for The Village Voice from 1958 to 2009. He wrote some fine books, including The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America. This article -- even more relevant now than 36 years ago -- appeared in the November 1985 "Mad as Hell Issue" of National Lampoon, on sale here.

Nothing gets me madder than liberals who condemn those right-wingers who attempt to suppress contrary opinions, while those very same liberals do the same thing. 

Item: The National Organization for Women (NOW) passed a resolution two years ago that prevents anyone from being invited to address the annual NOW convention if that person has any point of view that disagrees with any of NOW's policies. If Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum had passed such a resolution, every member of NOW would chortle at those right-wingers showing again how rigid and narrow they were. 

Item: The Progressive, a monthly out of Madison, Wisconsin, is one of the most exuberantly independent of all American political journals. It never caves in to anyone, least of all the government.... Like most irreverent political journals, The Progressive is in chronic need of money. It's been helped, now and then, by the Funding Exchange, a consortium of foundations created by the "rich kids" -- the scions of families with huge, rapaciously acquired fortunes who want to do good in penance.

On the question of abortion, the editors of The Progressive, like the staff, are pro-choice. But the editor believes that anybody who wants to talk to the readers in the advertising columns is entitled to, providing that what he's advocating is legal.

A small radical pro-life group in Kansas City, Missouri, Feminists for Life of America, put a tiny ad in the magazine for three issues running. The ad showed an eight-week foetus and advised pregnant women to think twice or maybe three times before killing him or her. That's all she wrote. The president of Feminists for Life of America, by the way, has been busted both for protesting abortion and for protesting nuclear power plants. And she runs a magazine that is far more to the economic left than those rich kids with their foundations.

Well, the executive director of the Funding Exchange (the rich kids' consortium) cancelled their subscription to The Progressive and also said she and her staff would not help raise any more money for the magazine. To be "progressive" enough for the liberal rich kids, The Progressive would have to keep its pages utterly clean of anything deviating from the pro-abortion orthodoxy.

Liberals -- especially if they're rich -- want to stifle ideas they find offensive, yet go on pretending they're the ones who are truly open to dialogue.

Then there are those librarians who, while they defend the books in their libraries from outside censors, do a pretty mean-spirited censoring job of their own. Some will not order "controversial" books -- a foolproof way of ensuring they won't get into trouble with pressure groups in the community. Others create their own system of banning books that have somehow gotten into the library. 

Consider a library center in upstate New York that provides books to school libraries in Albany, Schenectady, etc. This is the advice the hip, liberal librarians in upstate New York give to their colleagues in the schools. "Place a warning label on biased material: WARNING: IT HAS BEEN DETERMINED THAT THESE MATERIALS ARE SEX-STEREOTYPED AND MAY LIMIT YOUR SENSE OF FREEDOM AND CHOICE."

That's a hell of a turn for librarians to take -- labelling books as "bad" for readers. And who determined that those materials are "sex-stereotyped"? By what criteria?" Which novels by Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, and Mark Twain will have to be burned in the schoolyard? And what is this about limiting my sense of freedom and choice? Just who is doing that? Could it be these liberal librarians? 

But let me show you what gets me maddest of all in this ceaseless abundance of liberal hypocrisy. A political science professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz invites to his class one of South Africa's representatives to the United Nations. The professor wants his students to hear and to test the real thing -- a true believer in apartheid. The professor figures they'd learn more from an exchange with someone in the racist South African government than from simply reading about that government.

The South African was never able to say a word to the class. An integrated mob of fifty students made it impossible for the rest of the 150 students in the auditorium to hear the visitor. They so yelled and screamed that the South African had no choice but to leave. The students who had been waiting to ask him some very sharp questions about his government had been silenced just as effectively as had the South African. As the South African left the campus, a student yelled, "Let the story go out that students would not allow a racist to speak on this campus!"

That's the only part of the story that got out. The rest of it was that some American students, like the government of South Africa, do not permit views to be heard that are contrary to their own. But I'm sure the students who prevented the South African from speaking consider themselves to be authentic liberals.

There's a term -- "liberal" -- that used to have some integrity to it. Increasingly, though, liberals lust to censor just as fervently as reactionaries. And just like reactionaries, liberals deny that's what they're doing.

Mr Hentoff was never anyone's idea of a conservative, let alone a right-winger. His rant shows that the hypocrisy of the liberal elites was known, even if not admitted, within their own ranks. Well said, sir! In my next post, I'll let you know what happened to NOW, the Eagle Forum, The Progressive, and Feminists for Life of America. Stay tuned.