Stanley Kurtz at National Review on silencing strategy

The campaign to use the tragic shootings in Tucson to silence conservatives continues. The latest twist is an attempt to highlight anonymous threats against leftist scholar and strategist Frances Fox Piven as a way of forcing Glenn Beck, a critic of Piven, off the air, or at least prohibiting him from mentioning her on his Fox News television show. This affects me as well, since an excerpt from my recent appearance on Beck’s show to discuss Piven has been aired in the course of the controversy. My new book, Radical-in-Chief, extensively treats Piven’s influence on contemporary leftist strategy, and on Barack Obama’s political development. If Beck is forced to stop talking about Piven, efforts will surely be made to silence me and other conservative critics of Piven.It is extraordinary that conservatives should be charged with stirring up violence at a moment when Piven, in an editorial in The Nation, has called for an American movement of “strikes and riots” on the model of the one recently seen in Greece. The anonymous threats against Piven are reprehensible. I condemn them in the strongest terms. Yet it is not conservatives but Piven and The Nation who advocate violence. Neither Piven nor The Nation should be forcibly silenced, but they certainly ought to be criticized. Instead, The Nation is leading the effort to silence those who have rightly condemned Piven’s call for rioting in America

Read the whole thing. And please pray that Obama is a one-term president. Don't be fooled by his tack to the centre.

A little more of Kurtz' post:

In her December 2010 Nation column, Piven wrote: “Local protests have to accumulate and spread — and become more disruptive — to create pressures on national politicians. An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece. . . .”

Never let a crisis go to waste, eh?