Powerful piece by Murray Soupcoff on "Leftwing McCarthyism". Soupcoff traces how namecalling has become the left's favored means of silencing and discrediting opposing viewpoints:

... what name calling would we be referring to? Why the use of such pleasant labels of disapprobation as right wing, right winger, right of center, far right, rightist, reactionary, extremist, fanatic, racist, homophobic, misogynist, anti-female, etc., etc., etc. Of late, even the term "conservative" has increasingly been tainted in everyday discourse.

Use of such adjectives in a derogatory and detracting manner has increasingly been employed by the liberal-Left for such varied purposes as marginalizing Republican candidates for office, justifying the denial of judicial appointments to strict constitutionalist judges in the U.S. Senate, and stifling debate on liberal college campuses.

Of course, what it all comes down to is reverse McCarthyism. Plain and simple, liberals have made it a risky business to espouse conservative opinions in legal contexts, in the mainstream media or on college campuses. And that's for fear of the targets of liberal wrath being politically lynchedótarred with one of the many nasty labels employed by the liberal-Left to marginalize and disarm any opponents it can't otherwise deal with.

As already indicated, we're of course taking about such common ever-so-polite liberal-leftist appellations as "extremist", "fanatic", "racist", or "homophobic"óas in "right-wing extremist", "conservative fanatic", "hateful racist" and "homophobic right winger". Having one of these labels applied to you in mainstream North American society these days is a unique kind of status degradation ceremonyóalmost the equivalent of experiencing a secular excommunication or modern-day shunning. For these days, such loosely-applied labels as "right winger", "reactionary", "extremist", "racist", "misogynist", and "homophobic" prescriptively imply that the stigmatized person is so irrational, unfair, selfish, ignorant and cruel as to be beyond the moral pale. Built into such judgmental labels is the ideologically-charged assumption that anyone espousing such "hateful" views must be so twisted and pathological as to be some kind of subhuman monsteróthe left's ingenious method for 'Hitlerfying' (and thus stigmatizing) any dissent against their prevailing orthodoxies.

As many a victim of such political labeling has discoveredóespecially in legal circles or on college campusesóthe unspoken intention of such prescriptive labels is to de-legitimize in the eyes of their peers (or potential employers) these selected "deviants", and to strip away any and all credibility from the ideas or opinions expressed by such individualsóattempting to somehow identify them with cataclysmic outpourings of hate, extremism and wrongdoing in the past. In other words, this Orwellian corruption of language is used to stigmatize any vocal dissenters from the liberal orthodoxy as dangerous social reprobates so morally bankrupt they're not worthy of even being given a hearing.

In honor of one academic's recent achievements in the field of leftwing McCarthyism, Critical Mass recently created the Gilmore Awards. All nominations are accepted all the time.