With the Juan Williams fiasco providing the right-wing with a lot of fodder for tarring the left as authoritarian and intolerant, I thought it would be convenient to put together a post on my own blog which argues that the real threat to free speech comes from the War Party and anti-Muslim agitators. Prominent conservatives and even some former officials have made disturbing statements about wanting the government to crack down on free speech.
Here's one of the examples I provide:
Nov. 2006: At an awards banquet in Manchester, NH, Newt Gingrich said that America must re-examine the First Amendment and that the country may require a "different set of rules" in order to hinder terrorist propaganda and recruitment. "We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade" he said.
He indicated his stance on due process rights when discussing the need to distinguish between terrorist speech and non-terrorist speech in a subsequent interview. He claimed that "if you give me any signal in the age of terrorism that you're a terrorist, I'd say the burden of proof was on you." It is interesting to note that the banquet was named the Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment Award Dinner. The New Hampshire Union Leader claimed that the banquet "fetes people and organizations that stand up for freedom of speech."
The most disturbing example is the recent "sharia" report released by conservatives and ex-government officials. As my post points out:
The report explicitly advocates banning Muslims "from holding posisions of trust in federal, state, or local governments or the armed forces of the United States" if they "espouse or support" sharia law. It equates advocacy of sharia with sedition and recommends prosecuting it as such. The report also talks of banning immigration to the US by Muslims who adhere to sharia.
One of the most revealing sections of the report takes issue with Supreme Court rulings in the late 1950s and 1960s that overturned certain laws against subversion and sedition.
Beginning in the 1960s [...] the Supreme Court drastically reinterpreted the First Amendment, gradually extending the original guarantee of American citizens’ right to engage in political speech, to include a constitutional protection to (a) subversive speech that could be construed as "advocacy," rather than incitement to imminent lawlessness, and (b) the speech of non-Americans. Bowing to elite opinion, which scoffed at fears of communist penetration of our government and institutions, Congress (in such legislation as the 1965 Immigration Act, the 1978 McGovern Amendment, the 1989 Moynihan-Frank Amendment, and the 1990 Immigration Act) gutted the statutory basis for excluding and deporting individuals based on ideological beliefs, regardless of their subversive tendencies – at least in the absence of demonstrable ties to terrorism, espionage or sabotage.
It's very obvious to me that these people want to outlaw a good portion of Islamic religious practices as well as leftist activism. I think that the exploitation of the Juan Williams thing is very cynical.