Many readers will doubtless be familiar with some of the tales of intimidation told in Kimberly Strassel’s The Intimidation Game: How the Left is Silencing Free Speech. Strassel’s great accomplishment is to bring them all together in one place. She identifies a national phenomenon and fleshes it out with exacting details and fresh reporting you’ll find nowhere else (on the John Doe cases in Wisconsin, for example). The Intimidation Game is alive with heroes—True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht, the incomparable Cleta Mitchell, Brad Smith, Hans von Spakovsky, Clarence Thomas, J. Russell George, Lisa Nelson, Erik O’Keefe. And villains as well—Lois Lerner, Bob Bauer, Eric Burns, Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama. It all makes for an important book and a stimulating read.
Strassel paints a frightening picture of an America where your treatment by the IRS depends on your politics. It’s an America where people in high places use government agencies—the IRS, the FEC, the SEC and the FCC—to go after their political opponents. An America of cover-ups, Fifth Amendment pleas, and contempt citations when Congress attempts to investigate. It’s an America where individuals and companies are singled out, harassed, humiliated, and intimidated for donating to particular causes or organizations. It’s an America of small business boycotts and protests at the homes of CEOs whose companies take the wrong side in a political argument or belong to the wrong group.
It’s also an America where U.S. senators advance legislation aimed to make companies “think twice” before spending money on candidates or political advocacy, an America where the president publicly targets individuals for supporting his opponent or publicly accuses specific political groups of committing crimes based on nothing more than undocumented slurs. It’s an America of suspicious IRS audits, bomb threats, the harassment of company executives’ children, the defacement of property—the smashing of car windows, the keying of cars, bricks through church windows—for taking the wrong position on a political issue. It’s an America where armed law-enforcement officers show up in the middle of the night with secret subpoenas to search the homes of individuals who simply exercised their First Amendment rights to free speech and association.
Strassel nicely pieces together the broad effort of one side in our politics to shut up or shut down the other, and identifies the key piece of equipment the left wields in its intimidation game: disclosure requirements.
Disclosure requirements sounds wholesome, but they are out of place in American history. The founders certainly believed in anonymity. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison wrote the Federalist Papers as “Publius.” Benjamin Rush wrote anonymously under the name “Leonidas.” The first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Marshall, wrote on a landmark court decision—anonymously. In the civil rights era, the court repeatedly held that requiring donor lists—a favored tactic of segregationists from Montgomery to Little Rock—was unconstitutional. Near the turn of this century, liberal Justice John Paul Stevens said that “the interest in having anonymous works enter the marketplace of ideas unquestionably outweighs any public interest in requiring disclosure as a condition of entry,” and talked about the risk of economic reprisal and government retaliation. Disclosure, the court understood, is a kind of “tee time” for the players in the intimidation game. It allows them to tee up their political opponents for humiliation and harassment by private interests or the government.
Strassel argues that it’s time for both the right and left to revisit disclosure and reclaim the historic and important place of anonymity in our politics. For the right, the reasons couldn’t be more obvious. It’s the left that has largely, but not exclusively used disclosure requirements and government agencies—against the right. For the left, the reason to rethink the disclosure issue—and all it has given rise to—is simple: What will happen when liberals or progressives are no longer in charge and conservatives decide to play the intimidation game?
Ann Corkery is a partner at the law firm of Stein Mitchell and a former U.S. public delegate to U.N. General Assembly and U.S. delegate to U.N. Commission on the Status of Women.
