Phil Robertson, 1; A&E, 0
A&E has backed down. It will not put Phil Robertson on "hiatus." I wrote about this decision here.
The fallout is nowhere near over. This attack, followed by a tail-between-the-legs retreat, is like red meat in front of starving lions. A&E tried to push around a man over whom it had no control and no leverage. A&E had no negative sanctions that could be used to control Robertson. This was my point here.
I have seen this before. The fracas that was created by Phil Robertson in his interview in GQ magazine is reminiscent of an event that took place over half a century ago.
Sometimes you have to be old enough to remember something that happened half a century ago, because no trace of it remains available to people who did not live through it. This is even true in the era of the World Wide Web.
In 1961, a series of articles appeared in the national media about the John Birch Society. Simultaneously, or at least as close to simultaneous as I remember it, there was an exposé of what soon came to be known as the Black Muslims. This was the Nation of Islam. It is a strange variation of Islam. It is tied to a theory of race, which is not true of orthodox Islam.
The attacks on the John Birch Society, which at that point was only three years old, gave more publicity to the organization than anything that ever happened to it before. The liberal media did their best to create the impression that these people were essentially off their rockers. They were opposed to the United Nations Organization. They were opposed to the Warren Court. They were opposed to graduated income taxation. They were opposed to sex education in the public schools. Across the boards, the John Birch Society was taking a stand against almost everything that the liberal American Establishment held dear and was using tax money to promote.
I was not a member of the organization, but I knew people who were. I had been familiar with it since 1959, which was within a year of its founding. I generally agreed with its positions. I was in college, and I was not a political activist. The conservative organization that I supported was the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. It is now called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. I did not know where a JBS chapter met.
In later years, I knew people who were high up in the organization. I was a friend of Gary Allen, who wrote for the monthly magazine, American Opinion. I knew Larry Abraham, the co-author with Allen of None Dare Call it Conspiracy. He had been a JBS regional coordinator in the early 1960s. Abraham told me that the greatest period of recruitment for the JBS began when the articles in the liberal media began to attack the organization. He told me that members constantly told him that, before the attacks on the organization began, they had never heard of anything like the JBS. They found out from the attacks that they believed almost exactly what the John Birch Society was being pilloried for promoting. That was when they began looking to find a way to get into the JBS. They knew they wanted to belong to some organization that held the same views they did, but they had not known where to start looking. The attacks in the media let them know where to find the national organization.
I don't know if the 1961 attacks on the Nation of Islam led to major recruiting programs. The attacks came at a time of rapid growth for the organization. Certainly, the general public had never heard of it prior to C. Eric Lincoln's book. I do know this, however. Lincoln's book had no negative impact on the growth of the organization. Almost immediately, Malcolm X had access to the media. The attacks created interest in the Nation of Islam, and he was there to take advantage of this. I can remember seeing him on Los Angeles television, on one of the local TV talk shows late in the evening: the Tom Duggan show. I also went to hear him speak in the spring of 1962 at UCLA. I am convinced that there is no way that he would have been given these speaking opportunities, had it not been for the attacks which had begun less than a year before. He gained his national reputation only after Lincoln's book appeared.
The liberals who are dominant in the media do not understand social cause-and-effect. They do not understand that attacks on widely held ideas that liberals happen to oppose always backfire on the liberals orchestrating the attacks. The responses to the attacks call attention to the fact that large numbers of people are committed to a particular set of ideas. Most people are not part of any organization that holds such positions. They are fringe positions as far as the liberal media are concerned, but they are deeply held positions by members of what really can be accurately described as the silent majority.
The silent majority is defending an outlook that is either ignored by the liberal media or is under attack by the liberal media. The liberal media are manned by highly insulated people who have no contact with the general public. These people talk to themselves. Members assume that their views are widely held views.
The classic example of this is the New York liberal who reads the Sunday New York Times and has never been to church. The Sunday New York Times is written by people who have never been to church. They are utterly astounded to find out that, on a regular basis, at least half of Americans attend church. They are incapable of understanding the mindset of anybody who would attend church. They really do believe that the climate of opinion inside the climate-controlled hothouse of American liberalism represents the thinking of most Americans.
A&E's FANTASY WORLD
When A&E banished Phil Robertson from the show, but then tried to cash in on the older shows by running them in a marathon over Christmas, it screamed "Hypocrisy!" from the rooftops -- or cable boxes. Then it decided to run all of the shows of the next season, despite the fact that Phil Robertson was in all of them. The organization set itself up for a fall. It looked as though the senior decision-makers were totally hypocritical. They were attempting to impose negative sanctions on Robertson, while cashing in on his family.
They never figured out that a dynasty run by a patriarch is -- gasp! -- a family in which the father has the last say on big issues. The family was a family. This is not Hollywood.
What the organization did was to alert millions of people to the fact that millions of people are not buying into GLAAD's agenda. We don't really know if the millions of people who opposed Robertson's firing represent the silent majority, but we do know that it is a much larger minority than GLAAD. Now GLAAD knows it, too. A&E almost created a martyr. Instead, it has created a victor. A&E tried to take him to the woodshed. Instead, the public torched the woodshed. He just sat on the sidelines and watched.