The Imitation Game was a recent Oscar-winning movie biopic that promoted a message of liberal tolerance. By contrast, Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel’s new book The Intimidation Game extensively chronicles how liberalintolerance is on the march.

Largely told through Strassel interviewing those individuals affected by the IRS targeting scandal and left-wing activist campaigns against corporations and business organizations, Strassel’s book is an engrossing and alarming look at how the First Amendment is under threat.

The Left’s silencing of free speech is a phenomenon that the author thinks is getting worse.  “I only finished writing the book in February, and I could have already written a sequel!” Strassel jokes.

Heat Street spoke more with her about the subject. Below is an edited and condensed transcript:

Heat Street: Does the Left’s recent crackdown on free speech represent a concerted effort by liberals and the Obama administration?

Kimberley Strassel: It is a concerted effort because you see the same tactics happen again from the same people and the same groups who talk to each other and have meetings. This is not a bunch of random events.

In terms of the administration, no-one has evidence that Barack Obama picked up a telephone and ordered anyone at the IRS to target people. I doubt that happened. But he didn’t need to. He spent all of 2010 after the Supreme Court decision [on Citizens United] out on the campaign stump saying, “Look at these scary dark money not-for-profit groups in the election stealing your democracy. We don’t know who they are or who is funding them. They might be illegally funded.” He knew that was nonsense. These were average Americans in Tea Party groups. It’s a bit like Becket saying, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” [the words reportedly uttered by English King Henry II about his Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket] That’s what he was doing, he was asking the IRS to do it and they did.

The IRS silenced tens of thousands of Americans during two election cycles, which is about as bad as it can possibly get in terms of government abuse.  So he not only not discouraged it but actively engaged in it.

HS: Has the war on free speech has now spread to universities?

KS: If you don’t like what other people have to say and your way of dealing with that is to seek to silence them, that’s no longer about political ideology but about tendencies. Your tendency will be to exact that practice on anybody whose speech you disagree with. That’s why we love the First Amendment, because it doesn’t make distinctions. It allows all kinds of people to say things we disagree with, but once you go down the road of thinking there are some people who should not be allowed to speak, there’s no ending of it.

People have talked a lot about what has been going on in campus and in particular protests against conservative speakers, but the book has a section talking about a very organized effort that is run by outside groups — environmental groups and unions. One of these targets is Un-Koch My Campus [a reference to Charles Koch’s funding of free-market discussion forums and programs].These groups train activists and students to harass the university with FOIA requests and go to the press and make a big scandal out of it so the university will feel compelled to not take the money and do these programs.

The campus protests and the “safe space” argument — it’s about not wanting to have a debate. They say what they want to say, but anything else that might make them slightly uncomfortable needs to be shut down. I find it hard to believe that this is the view of anyone who feels they have a winning argument.

HS: How effective have these efforts been on campus?

KS: So far UnKoch My Campus hasn’t been hugely successful in that the universities have largely held their ground because they are, to some degree, committed to a diversity of viewpoints and obviously there’s nothing scandalous about capitalism or free market thought. It’s been far more damaging to individual professors who they have targeted in these programs. What the activists will also do is try to embarrass and humiliate them and try to get them fired.

I interviewed dozens of people who were the targets of this abuse. It turns out this book is largely a little bit of a story of a bunch of free speech heroes. Most of the people that were targeted did not roll over and go silent, they fought back, and one of the messages of the book  is the only way you can thwart some of these tactics is to call people on it and really stand up to it.

HS: To quote Eric O’Keefe, director of the Wisconsin Club of Growth,  in the book, “Why does the left want to get rid of free speech?”

KS: It’s a very terrifying and sad thing. Going back decades I always admired the Left for its commitment to free speech, and they were long the party that actively talked about this with groups like the American Civil Liberties Union. But the politically correct culture and the interests groups that now make up a lot of the Left exert a lot of pressure for people to toe the politically correct line. That is not free speech. But I believe in terms of the tactics we’re seeing now, it stems from that Supreme Court decision on Citizens United in 2010. Once that opened up, they knew they had to change gears and you see it most virulently in their campaigns against corporations where they openly say, “You have no right to take part in democracy. You should not have a voice and therefore any tactic we use against you is justified.”

HS: Liberal activists counter that they’re just engaging in robust debate.

KS: If they were only just pointing it out, we should all love debate. But there is a qualitative difference between a debate and staging a boycott of a store. One is voicing your opposing opinion and engaging in civil discourse. The other is taking an action that is designed to harm shareholders or people who shop there or a brand. If they want to call that debate, I guess… but it’s not. It’s taking action, usually action designed to silence. That action is designed to make sure that business’s voice is no longer heard anymore in society. They’re trying to shut down debate. We recently saw this when Black Lives Matter said if Google gave any money to the Republican convention, they would run an ad campaign all over Silicon Valley encouraging people not to use Google.  They’re perfectly fine that Google is going to give money to the Democratic National Convention as well. But if you give the money to the RNC, then you are giving money to a racist, according to Black Lives Matter, and therefore your company by extension is racist and bad things should happen to you. But I also have criticism for companies that roll over to this.

HS: Do you think Donald Trump would continue the war on free speech if he is elected President?

KS: I don’t want to try and foretell what Donald Trump would be like as a President, especially on such a serious subject as this. What I will say is that we have seen with the current President what happens when they don’t take that office seriously and when they don’t understand that anything they say or do is an enormous signal to a vast bureaucracy. For instance, when Obama was running for re-election in 2012, he singled out the names of eight Romney donors and put them on a campaign website, accused them of terrible things just as if they were criminals — no proof to that effect — and painted a big target on the back of these eight men. In the months that followed, at least one of them, a guy I wrote about, Frank VanderSloot, found himself subjected to several IRS audits and audits from other branches of the federal government having never received any audits like this before. What he did was donate money legally, even disclosed it, and then to be targeted by the President of the United States for engaging in political speech — it doesn’t get worse than that. Suddenly a private investigator was riffling through his divorce records to dig up dirt. This is what happens when the President of the United States decides to target you, and so I think there’s a risk that with President Obama having used these tactics frequently, that the next President will feel more able to build on them rather than restrain them. In Washington, I’ve found once you let any genie out of the bottle, it’s hard to stuff it back in. Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders have all made statements that ought to worry people about what they would do  in office with the power of the Presidency.

HS: The Intimidation Game extensively chronicles the IRS scandal, in which conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status were singled out for intense scrutiny. Yet many people have consigned that episode to history as a minor Washington controversy?

KS: I think it was one of the worst cases of government abuse in modern history in this country. This was the federal government putting on ice tens of thousands of Americans during two election cycles, and this was done purposefully. If you look at all the documents, there were people who had witnessed the President talking about this question and Democratic members of the Senate who were demanding constantly to do something about this. You had Lois Lerner making clear in a lot of her emails her own beliefs that these groups were bad for elections and bad for Democrats. This was the government silencing people’s ability to talk in an election. Other than jailing people, I’m trying to think of something that would count as worse government abuse. You read the IRS chapters in the book and you know what the government said was a complete and utter lie. They continue to lie about it today.