“The culture of liberalism cannot be dissented from without cost.”

That’s a pull-quote from this article in The American Spectator. If you’ve seen noted actor Jon Voight out there publicly commenting on the dangers of some of the government policies and plans we’re hearing about, you may have imagined he’s going to take some heat from Hollywood for airing his views. Not that Hollywood refrains from activism. It’s that there’s only one form of activism allowed.

Voight, in addressing the annual House-Senate GOP dinner in Washington in May, had used the phrase “Let’s give thanks to them [various Obama critics] for staying on course to bring an end to this false prophet, Obama.” With the certainty of the sun rising in the east, left-wing critics pounced.

Pretty outrageously, too.

Not to be outdone in all this were columnists Frank Rich and Paul Krugman of the New York Times Op-Ed page, a place where a raw hatred of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was carefully stewed to a rarefied putrid essence for a full eight years. This pair of journalistic Draco Malfoys spend their time hunched over laptops muttering incantations about those they consider to be cultural Mudbloods. Mudblood (the derogatory term for Muggle), of course, is the word Harry Potter’s bullying nemesis Malfoy sneeringly applies to wizards who fail to meet the Malfoy wizard racial purity test — the Pureblood.

“This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic,” Rich seethed of Voight, as if he himself had not spent the previous eight years enthusiastically greenlighting the idea of filling the political atmosphere with toxic rhetoric about the Bush White House. So too with his fellow supremacist Krugman , who has now officially designated Mudblood Voight as part of the “lunatic fringe.”

There it is. The inevitable, sneering categorization of all dissenters of liberalism as the “lunatic fringe.” And now Voight’s “a card-carrying member of it”, Jeffrey Lord notes,

…which henceforth signals those in the film world who might wish to hire Mr. Voight that the New York Times is advising them they might want to think twice, if not half a dozen times, before doing so. After all, films must be reviewed by the Times, whether they have Jon Voight in the cast or not. The signal also goes out that it should be a very cold day in hell before Voight ever receives another professional award of any kind from his peers.

In the ultimate irony, in spite of contributing heavily to The Times massive losses — to the point that the paper is heading perilously towards financial extinction — the almost rabid insistence on alienating readers with bullying attacks like that on Voight continues. It’s almost as if those in charge simply cannot restrain themselves, better judgment having fled entirely.

Now this is interesting…

In Reagan’s words, the critics of these and other political/cultural Mudbloods really do “hate.” They appear to others, although surely not to themselves, as psychologically incapable of serious discussion, irrational to the point of mania.

There is a reason “for this kind of insanity”, Lord writes.

That reason was perhaps best fingered by John Dos Passos, the great American novelist of the Lost Generation who himself walked the path of actors Reagan and Voight, earning the same disdain from his one-time political soul mates on the left. Of the “liberal mentality” Dos Passos said it was nothing more than “the ideological camouflage of the will to power” of a “new ruling class.”

And those who can inflict real damage to their hold on power, he says, are those who “have serious credibility with the American public.”

More of them are emerging and, in spite of the demonization of the….(why don’t we ever hear of ‘left-wing extremists’?) liberal orthodoxy….they are not easily intimidated, and they are not going away. This is a battle of ideas. And moral courage.

Good time to read Charity in Truth. Benedict’s new engagement with the battle of ideas, and moral courage.