Sean Hannity and the Revolution

I don’t know the truth behind the mysterious murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, and I have no opinion on it. But after decades of investigating the Left, I do know that Seth Rich isn’t the reason Sean Hannity of Fox News is under siege.

As one radical famously put it in the 1960s, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution!” And the meaning of “revolution” is simple: “We get more power. You get less.”

This lust for power explains the Left’s obsessions with multiple targets at Fox News, which broke the liberal stranglehold on television news when the channel debuted in 1996. And it explains the attacks on the upstarts at Breitbart news, and the Antifa violence on college campuses that keeps unruly voices like Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking.

Lust for power—and resentment of others’ power—also explains the 2012 brouhaha when Rush Limbaugh derided Georgetown law school student Sandra Fluke after she demanded tax dollars pay for her contraceptives. Then as now, Hillary Clinton-booster David Brock and his attack dogs at Media Matters for America led the assault.

Unfortunately for them, some of us weren’t fooled. As Rush’s witty spokesman Brian Glicklich observed at the time, “David Brock is so outraged at Rush Limbaugh’s words of three weeks ago that he started organizing a protest—almost 3 years ago.”

Glicklich is right. Brock and Media Matters keep smear campaigns on all prominent conservative voices ready to launch, whenever an opportunity presents itself, because the Hannities and the Rushes endanger the Left’s goal of monopolizing public debate by silencing their critics.

The far Left has also reached into its bag of ready-made slurs for a campaign against the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This Arlington, Virginia-based organization advances the cause of free markets, limited government, and transparency too effectively for the Left to tolerate. It has long been targeted by the Citizen Engagement Laboratory—a cobweb of shadowy left-wing pressure groups who claim to represent grassroots Americans on various issues but turn out to be highly incestuous “Astroturf” groups that share staff and IP addresses (for a full report, go here). This cabal leapt on the death of Trayvon Martin to claim that ALEC’s past support for Stand Your Ground self-defense laws caused the fatal shooting. The Laboratory and its Petri-dish groups still regularly attack corporate donors to ALEC, even though businesses frequently ignore the angry letters and emails they receive—once the businesses compare those letters with nearly identical ones, years old, sent from groups with different names but the same origins.

In short, the war against the First Amendment is being waged in a thousand trench skirmishes. Unfortunately for Sean Hannity, he’s the new target.