A mere three years ago, Regnery published then–Fox News commentator Kirsten Powers’s book The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech. In that tome, she denounced what she called “the illiberal Left” who “routinely demonize those who hold the ‘wrong’ views.” Powers warned that they “work to delegitimize the person making the argument through character assassination, demonization, and dehumanizing tactics. These are the self-appointed overlords — activists, university administrators, journalists and politicians — who have determined what views are acceptable to express.”

In the first chapter, Powers wrote, “Dissent from liberal orthodoxy is cast as racism.”

With no sense of irony or shame, the illiberal left will engage in racist, sexist, misogynist and homophobic attacks of their own in an effort to delegitimize people who dissent from the “already decided” worldview. Non-white conservatives are called sellouts and race traitors. Conservative women are treated as dim-witted, self-loathing puppets of the patriarchy, or nefarious gender traitors.

Fast forward to Friday night, when Powers, now a CNN contributor appeared on Don Lemon’s program:

“People will say that they support [Donald Trump] for reasons other than his racist language,” Powers said. “The way he demonized people trying to come to our country on the caravan, and they’ll say, well, I’m not racist, I just voted for him because I didn’t like Hillary Clinton. I just want to say that doesn’t make you not racist. It actually makes you racist. If you support somebody who does racist things, that makes you racist. I just want to establish that.” [My emphasis.]

Powers went on to explain the voting habits of white women: “I think we have to remember that the white patriarchal system actually benefits white women in a lot of the ways and they’re attached to white men who are benefiting from the system that was created by them, for them, and their fathers and their husbands and their brothers are benefiting from the system and so they are also benefiting.” (How far is that characterization from“dim-witted, self-loathing puppets of the patriarchy, or nefarious gender traitors”?)

A debate between the Kirsten Powers of 2015 and the Powers of 2018 would be fascinating to watch.