Tammy Bruce > Quotes

“Group dynamics and the decision to sacrifice the individual for the group are the first steps in a march down the road to Thought Crimes (euphemistically termed Hate Crimes) and totalitarianism in its purest form.”
― Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds

“The famous speech Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, included the sentence: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character". Today's left-wing, through identity politics, affirmative-action policies, and hiring quotas, has shattered that dream.”
― Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds

“Multiculturalism--the claim that minority cultures and ways of life should be protected through group rights and privilege--amounts to the Balkanization of this country into blacks, Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics, and so on. It highlights differences and obscures similarities, and it gives each group the idea that it has a special knowledge about itself that no one else can share. How many times have you heard that you have no right to criticize a black (or Latino or Bengali) if you aren't black (or Latino or Bengali)?

Multiculturalism is the antithesis of the American melting pot, and quite deliberately so. I've heard black nationalists argue that the melting-pot theory, with the assimilation it demands, is just another racist attempt to "disappear" the black man in America. Multiculturalism is heralded specifically because it keeps people in separate groups. Ironically, if actual multiculturalism--an appreciation for diversity--were in effect today instead of the warped balkanization we have under that label, each of us would be free to embrace a culture other than our own. As a black woman, Paulette Williams would have been celebrating multiculturalism much more distinctly by keeping her own Anglo name. Or perhaps she could have changed her name to Mary O'Reilly or Edna Ferber. Now that would have been real multiculturalism.”
― Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds

“The Misery Merchants tell us, for example, that most blacks are poor. In fact, only one in four black families is poor, and only one in five lives in an inner city. They tell us that there has been an "epidemic" of racist arson against black churches. In fact, there are seven times as many white churches burned every year as there were black churches burned during the seven years from 1990 to 1996. By spreading myths such as these, the Misery Merchants do not encourage success among their constituents; they only deepen the sense of misery. They are working 24/7 to make sure that their version of life, one of divisions and hatred, becomes your reality.”
― Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds

“The Misery Merchants tell us, for example, that most blacks are poor. In fact, only one in four black families is poor, and only one in five lives in an inner city. They tell us that there has been an "epidemic" of racist arson against black churches. In fact, there are seven times as many white churches burned every year as there were black churches burned during the seven years from 1990 to 1996. By spreading myths such as these, the Misery Merchants do not encourage success among their constituents; they only deepen the sense of misery. They are working 24/7 to make sure that their version of life, one of divisions and hatred, becomes your reality.

John H. McWhorter, the black author of Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, observes that the perpetuation of these myths is doing more today than racism is to obstruct black achievement in this country. As McWhorter puts it, the America of the Misery Merchants "remains a racist purgatory in which all black effort is a Sisyphean affair that renders even just keeping one's head above water a victory".”
― Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds

“It's a fine line, but one that can, and must, be walked. Calling attention to, challenging, and educating the public about objectionable ideas or people is a fundamental necessity in our society. When we begin, however, to demand the silencing of someone because we're offended by his or her opinion, we've crossed the line.”
― Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds

“What started as a struggle for equal rights and a more color-blind society has turned into a major industry--the victim industry. Like the rest of the Left establishment, today's black civil-rights establishment--the Misery Merchants, as I call them--work to propagate divisions and hopelessness, with the single goal of holding onto the money, power, and prestige that come from leading the supposedly downtrodden.”
― Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
― Tammy Bruce, Fear Itself: Exposing the Left’s Mind-Killing Agenda

“The Left Elite has worked for years to brainwash us into a sort of values lobotomy. We are not to judge those who kill, if the guilty are people of color or women; we are to excuse those who destroy lives as victims of a racist, sexist, and homophobic world, or now, on the global scale, the unfair and oppressive "multinational corporate" world; we are to blame the innocent and lionize the guilty.”
― Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values

“The reason Limbaugh gets so much airtime is pretty obvious: people like him. He is a principled conservative with a populist foundation, and he discusses issues that hit people where they live. For those who are of a different political persuasion, he offers an invaluable window on what Republicans are thinking. Personally, I find him witty, funny, and often wrong. If NOW finds him too wrong to ignore, then countering his ideas would be the principled and feminist thing to do. But, alas, NOW [National Organization for Women] has nothing of substance to say. Instead, its Flush Rush campaign just gives Limbaugh more proof that the "feminazis" are alive and well.”
― Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds

“The FBI is also investigating the numerous death threats against Dr. Laura herself, which began with the initiation of the gay campaign and ended with its success in the cancellation of her television show. References to her [Dr. Laura Schlesinger] opinion about gays and lesbians, and to the campaign against her, accompanied the death threats. Isn't that ironic? Individuals threatening to kill someone because they don't think she's tolerant enough?”
― Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds

“One now accomplished goal is the brainwashing of society into believing that because of the color of their skin or their gender, or their sexual preference, some in our "multicultural society" can never be understood by others, making judgment and punishment inappropriate.”
― Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values

“By defining society not as an entity made up of individual people but as a collection of cultures--such as white culture, black culture, Hispanic culture--the Left effectively isolates us, whether we like it or not, into special-interest groups. The culture has the identity, eclipsing the individual. We're no longer individuals with unique minds and talents; we're defined instead by the color of our skin, by the country in which we were born, by the religion we practice.”
― Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds

“Here, courtesy of Dan Rather, anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News, is a prime example of how an editorial edge is woven into your "news":

This was President Bush's first day at the office, and he did something to quickly please the right flank of his party: he reinstituted an anti-abortion policy that had been in place during his father's term and the Reagan presidency but was lifted during the Clinton years.

Rather is telling you in no uncertain terms that President Bush used this important issue to make a political payoff in his first act as president. Compare that to Rather's characterization of Bill Clinton's first day as president:

On the anniversary of Roe versus Wade, President Clinton fulfills a promise, supporting abortion rights . . . Today, with the stroke of a pen, President Clinton delivered on his campaign promise to cancel several anti-abortion regulations of the Reagan-Bush years.

A cynical player of partisan politics versus a man fulfilling a promise to voters--two very different ways of characterizing men, each of whom was both appeasing a wing of his party and fulfilling a campaign promise. Although I was personally thrilled with Clinton's decisions on abortion rights, I can't pretend, as Dan Rather chose to do, that it was a matter of pure principle. Spin is that simple, that insidious, and a part of your nightly news.”
― Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds

“Wasn't the fight for women's rights based on our demand to be treated the same as everyone else? As we've seen regarding the gay, black and feminist establishment outside the academy's walls, demands for special treatment lead to the marginalization and patronization of the constituency at issue.”
― tammy bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds

“GLAAD's original mission was certainly admirable. Gays and lesbians, who had long endured the cold shoulder of a disapproving society, finally had an organization that would speak out on their behalf and fight injustice. But, like so many well-meaning organizations, GLAAD fell victim to the process described by Lord Acton. Seemingly overnight, it went from character building to character assassination. Fattened up with newfound power, it chose not to debate those with differing opinions but to try to destroy them. For political scientists, this is not a revelation. But for those of us who have emotional capital invested in the ideal of progressive thought and action, the attack on Dr. Laura Schlessinger should be a serious wake-up call.”
― Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds

“[H]ate-crime legislation was enacted to give special protections to select constituencies, and, as practiced, it makes certain people more valuable than others in the eyes of the law--exactly the kind of thinking that civil rights, feminist, and gay-rights groups wanted to combat.”
― Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds