End of Discussion: How the Left's Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulate

Description: End of Discussion by Mary Katharine Ham, Guy Benson With a new foreword for the paperback edition reflecting Trumps election and the recent uproar surrounding right-leaning speakers on college campuses, this unapologetic conservative duo featured on FOX News, Townhall, The Federalist, and CNN combat the silencing of free speech in America.With a new foreword for the paperback edition reflecting Trumps election and the recent uproar surrounding right-leaning speakers on college campuses, this unapologetic conservative duo featured on FOX News, Townhall, The Federalist, and CNN combat the silencing of free speech in America.Theyre trying to silence you. But dont let them dictate the End of Discussion.In the age of Trump, a prejudice against free speech is spreading, fueled by a growing movement that believes ideas must be squelched to "protect" people. The presidential election of 2016 should have been the clearest sign yet to the Left that trying to convince half the country to shut up is not the same as actually convincing them. And yet, in its wake, the impulse to stifle and punish "incorrect" viewpoints, and the "deplorables" who voice them, is alive and well. Its a vicious and ironic cycle, especially in academia, where dissenting speech is deemed dangerous and equated to violence -- while actual violence is justified to bully its proponents. From Berkeley to Middlebury, the mob is on the march.Free speech isnt always pretty, but its vital to the American way. We have to make America talk again. End of Discussion arms readers to find their voices and fight back against the death of debate. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Guy Benson is the Political Editor of Townhall.com and a Fox News Contributor.Mary Katharine Ham is a Senior Writer at The Federalist and a CNNPolitical Commentator who co-moderated a 2016 GOP primary debate with ABC in New Hampshire. Review "At a time when the people in charge are trying to force you to shut up and obey, free speech has never been more imperiled in America -- and Mary Katharine Ham and Guy Bensons arguments have never been more important. Buy this book, for yourself and those you love. Youre going to need the intellectual ammo." – Tucker Carlson "This book needed to be written, needed to be published and needs to be read. Best of all, its great fun to read." —Brit Hume "End of Discussion will actually start more conversations than it finishes. Mary Katharine and Guy are two of the bright stars of conservative commentary, and their insight and humor comes together well to showcase the absurdities of manufactured outrage and the benefits of taking a breath before launching an attack. End of Discussion is a smart and charming political page turner that was a delight to read." —Dana Perino, former White House press secretary and cohost of The Five on Fox News "Heres why I can wholeheartedly endorse and recommend this book: Mary Katherine Ham and Guy Benson are really good writers. This book had me laughing out loud on yesterdays flight." —Jim Geraghty, contributor to National Review "A brilliant exposé of the lefts outrageous outrage over everything! Free speech isnt free. It must be fought for. Get in the fight with this fantastic book by Mary Katherine Ham & Guy Benson!" —Brad Thor #1 New York Times bestselling author of Code of Conduct "I cant think of any two people more qualified than Guy Benson and MaryKatharine Ham to expose the lefts decidedly undemocratic efforts to silence opposing views. With their characteristic wit and humor, they take on the outrage industrial complex on behalf of fun- and freedom-loving Americans everywhere." —S.E. Cupp, author and nationally syndicated columnist "This book will make you laugh—and cry—at a world where honest debate is all too rare." —Juan Williams, Fox News analyst & author of Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate "Come for the writing and the humor, stay for the point: The outrage industry is destroying politics. Benson and Ham have diagnosed a new kind of media cancer, one that is metastasizing and eating away at our ability to survive as a free people, freely debating our future. Yes, that sounds serious for a book with as wonderfully light a touch as this, and one so full of laugh-out-loud moments. But it is true. Thats why you need to read this book." —Hugh Hewitt Promotional With a new foreword for the paperback edition reflecting Trumps election and the recent uproar surrounding right-leaning speakers on college campuses, this unapologetic conservative duo featured on FOX News, Townhall, The Federalist, and CNN combat the silencing of free speech in America. Review Quote "This book needed to be written, needed to be published and needs to be read. Best of all, its great fun to read." - Brit Hume Promotional "Headline" With a new foreword for the paperback edition reflecting Trumps election and the recent uproar surrounding right-leaning speakers on college campuses, this unapologetic conservative duo featured on FOX News, Townhall, The Federalist, and CNN combat the silencing of free speech in America. Excerpt from Book 1 Head Explosions Youre perched in front of your laptop, eyes boring holes into the screen. A familiar, uneasy feeling swells inside you. Moments ago, you logged in to Facebook, where a gray-lettered prompt in small font beckoned you with four innocuous words: Whats on your mind? Something is on your mind, as it happens; it pertains to a viral national controversy, and a lot of people in your feed have been buzzing about it. Youve entered a few sentences reflecting your opinion into the status field, and now youre anxiously eyeing the post icon. One click, and your take will officially be on the record, permanently. Sure, theres an edit button, and a delete function, but the Internet is forever. Youve posted hundreds of statuses before, accumulating countless "likes" and sparking a handful of debates, but this time feels different. The hot story du jour is fraught with ... lets call them sensitivities. A significant number of people in your "friend" orbit arent going to agree with your minicommentary. Thats fine with you, in theory, but youre increasingly aware that disagreement of this type may not end well. Youve seen it happen: angry comment "flame" wars erupt, friendships are strained or dissolved, heavy-duty names are called, and motives are impugned. HR departments have even gotten involved on occasion. Heres the thing: you dont want to be lumped into the "bad person" camp--a fate that awaits those who fail to convey the proper feelings on a matter of public debate. Youre confident you dont deserve it, and you know what is, and is not, in your heart. But other people might not, and some wont care. They might seize on a word or a sentence fragment in your post, and things could spiral from there. Posting a selfie, or a music video, or that adorable photo of your dog is far less likely to get ugly (one doesnt typically get called a bigot posting about ones puppy1), so you select the text youve entered and trash it. Its just not worth it. You click away from the page and move on. A growing number of Americans are beginning to sense an insidious strain of self-censorship in themselves, either explicitly or subconsciously. You find yourself keeping your mouth shut about controversial issues like gay marriage or so-called womens issues because youd rather not suffer the social costs of being cast as the enemy by the increasingly aggressive thought police. They have enforcers everywhere--at the office, at dinner parties, and all over the media. This silencing impulse isnt born out of normal or healthy self-reflection and restra∫ it arises out of fear. Nor is it part of a free societys natural process of discarding truly pernicious ideas after open discussion, making marginalization the rightful cost of losing to better arguments. Instead, outrage mongers turn this process on its head, disqualifying ideas without debate instead of after debate. The fear to speak is cultivated by people who actively work to raise the social cost of engaging publicly on any number of issues. We call them the Outrage Circus. They are highly ideological, often deeply partisan, and relentless in their vigilance, ever on alert to name and shame violators of their approved order. Once youve violated one of their capricious and fluid "rules"--even unwittingly--malice is attributed, and restitution is demanded. Nothing short of full, professed repentance shall suffice. But sometimes even that is not enough, as the relentless, pedantic hall monitors of our discourse often see fit to exact economic costs for perceived social transgressions. Think or express the wrong ideas, and theyll come after your livelihood. Play the wrong Top 40 hit at a club? Pink slip for you, as one college DJ found out in North Carolina. Uncomfortable with hosting a same-sex marriage ceremony in your own home? Thatll be a $13,000 fine, as a couple with a small business in New York discovered. Display the wrong piece of modern art on an American campus, and youll bring scandalized activists and professors down on you, as Tony Matelli realized when his realistic tighty-whitey-clad statue Sleepwalker was shunned and vandalized on the Wellesley College campus after being deemed potentially traumatic for women on campus.2 Hell, even Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler has had her work banned because its not sufficiently inclusive of women. Thought policing is strictest on Americas college campuses, so much so that the idea of a campus as a place of freewheeling free inquiry and speech is almost a laughable relic of a bygone era--a theme well expand on in chapter 5. The outrage industrys most loyal adherents and enforcers are leftist activists, often trained on campus to believe that protecting certain people from offense in the public sphere is a higher calling than defending free expression. Thus, seemingly without irony or familiarity with Orwell, free speech becomes an exercise not in pushing boundaries but in creating new ones, openness is about closing off, and radicals become more puritanical by the day. In leftist circles, participants vie viciously for the title of most socially aggrieved in pursuit of the ultimate social windfall--the sanitization of the public square of the arguments of ones adversaries. Were not the only ones whove noticed. A bevy of liberals in good standing, Bill Maher and Dan Savage among them, have felt the sting of violating the grievance hierarchy. Jonathan Chait, in a 2015 essay for New York magazine, called the "new p.c." a "style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate." This system, he wrote, "makes debate irrelevant and frequently impossible." It might be fun to watch this snake devour itself from the tail in a paroxysm of censorship if it werent for the fact that the Outrage Circus is so intent on exporting these practices to the rest of society. And unhappily for us, their regulations are most unsparingly enforced against conservatives of all stripes. Commenting outside of the ever-shifting lines of "correct" thinking and preapproved terminology has always been a problem sweated by politicians and their publicists. No more. While public figures still bear the brunt of the Circuss acrobatics, "normal" people are no longer exempt. If moments of heterodoxy among liberal lights are punished, imagine what, say, a libertarian homeschooling mom might be in for. Thus, some are turning to self-censorship as the hassle-free, easy way out of being attacked. But it also results in being left out of the conversation. This move toward acquiescence isnt just limiting. Its dangerous for society. North Korean and Islamist terrorists brought new attention to the problem in 2015 in dramatic and tragic fashion, throwing into stark relief the choices and dangers free society faces. In the case of Sonys The Interview and French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, those who found artistic speech offensive launched criminal and unspeakably violent attacks with the object of preventing such speech in the future. A disturbing number of free societys spokespeople and publications failed to defend that speech, some even arguing for self-censorship, in the face of these attacks. If were not willing to fight bullies with keyboards and petitions, were certainly not going to stand up to bullies with machine guns. The Business Weve Chosen To our occasional shame, we work in politics. We chronicle, quote, and quantify our countrys least edifying industry. We entered this sordid fray, ironically, based on a belief that said industry should be as unobtrusive to its citizens and their daily business as possible. (Were conservatives. Thats kind of the whole idea.) To the detriment of our mental health, our job requires us to pay lots of attention to the goings-on of Washington, D.C., every single day. We routinely survey the state of our "national conversation" with great frustration and occasional alarm. As close friends with preternaturally similar worldviews, we often find ourselves on near-daily phone calls that feature some variation of this exchange: "Wait, is this a thing now? I think this is a thing." "WHY is this a thing?!" We call these cathartic venting sessions "head explosions," which often commence with some variation of the "I cant even" meme. Theres much pacing, occasional unparliamentary outbursts, and rending of tiny garments, as Mary Katharine does her babys laundry with the phone on speaker. Regardless of how productive our head explosions may be, theyre certainly cheaper than real therapy. Frankly, though, we shouldnt be surprised by almost anything anymore. We work in an industry whose number-one export is outrage, yet we are consistently amazed at how little it takes to create "an outrage." Efficient at nearly nothing else, Washington excels at the worlds worst kind of alchemy--what was formerly mundane becomes "a thing" to talk about. Washington is where the oddities of campus oversensitivity and leftist outrage come to get weaponized--something to freak out about, something to obsess over, and most important, something over which to bash political enemies and fellow countrymen. Pause. Did you see what we just did? Did you catch the thing? We wrote "countrymen" instead of using a gender-neutral term (which is, what? "Countrypeople"?)3 A rational human being might assume we meant no harm by using "countrymen," out of a customary assumption of good faith, or an examination of our nonmisogynistic careers, personal lives, and public comments. Our political adversaries instead might choose to deem this an attack on women, and with a helpful assist from their al Details ISBN0553447777 Author Guy Benson Short Title END OF DISCUSSION Pages 304 Language English ISBN-10 0553447777 ISBN-13 9780553447774 Media Book Format Paperback Year 2017 Imprint Crown Publishing Group, Division of Random House Inc Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Subtitle How the Lefts Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun) Publication Date 2017-08-01 UK Release Date 2017-08-01 AU Release Date 2017-08-01 NZ Release Date 2017-08-01 US Release Date 2017-08-01 Publisher Random House USA Inc DEWEY 320.5130973 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:137920368;

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