Tag Archives: Free Speech

News

Obama’s appointee supports regulating free speech on the Internet

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Consider this article by Kyle Smith. (H/T Jihad Watch)

Excerpt:

When it comes to the First Amendment, Team Obama believes in Global Chilling.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor who has been appointed to a shadowy post that will grant him powers that are merely mind-boggling, explicitly supports using the courts to impose a “chilling effect” on speech that might hurt someone’s feelings. He thinks that the bloggers have been rampaging out of control and that new laws need to be written to corral them.

…Sunstein is President Obama’s choice to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Cass Sunstein’s new book explains how he would like to regulate free speech.

Sunstein questions the current libel standard – which requires proving “actual malice” against those who write about public figures, including celebrities. Mere “negligence” isn’t libelous, but Sunstein wonders, “Is it so important to provide breathing space for damaging falsehoods about entertainers?”

Recall my previous post about the Democrat bill that would criminalize blogging.

Excerpt:

Under a recently-introduced bill, H.R. 1966, bloggers would face up to two years in prison if they “harass” public figures by criticizing them in a “severe, repeated, and hostile” manner, and thereby cause them “substantial emotional distress.”

This makes me think also about my previous post about the Democrat Speaker of the House in California who said that dissenting speech is terrorism.

The Road to Serfdom

The greatest economics book of the 20th century was F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom“, which is analyzes the history of socialism and fascism in Nazi Germany and Russia. This book is #1 on Human Events’ Top 10 books every Republican should read.

Human Events writes:

Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) was an Austrian economist awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974. He defended capitalism and individual liberty against collectivism. In “The Road to Serfdom,” he describes how government planning of the economy leads to tyranny. President Reagan cited Hayek as one of his favorite economists. “To decentralize power is to reduce the absolute amount of power, and the competitive system is the only system designed to minimize the power exercised by man over man,” wrote Hayek. “Who can seriously doubt that the power which a millionaire, who may be my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest bureaucrat possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends how I am allowed to live and work?”

I have a friend who is a Democrat, and every time I run these steps toward fascism by him, he never objects to them. There is a powerful impulse on the left towards controlling people’s choices to reproduce, earn, spend and work. Democrats believe that they are enlightened, so enslaving others is permissible for them. People today are willing to trade their liberty for a government handout, such as socialized health care.

News

What is the Chief of the Human Rights Commission like?

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I was browsing on “The Blog of Walker”  and I found some links to a speech given by Jennifer Lynch, the head fascist at the Canadian Human Rights Commission. It’s interesting because she is exactly the kind of person that I would expect Obama to put in charge as the Free Speech Czar, given his record of suppressing dissent.

Take a look at his post:

First there was the speech.

…Now she’s actually going to go mano-a-chicko with Ezra Levant on the Roy Green Show! Well…sort of. I guess the excitement would be too much for her delicate constitution, so she’ll be on the show after Ezra’s had his say, or even before – it doesn’t really matter as long as she doesn’t have to deal with that icky fellow who’s been keeping her up at night with head-aches and upset stomach these past few months ( although I’m just guessing as to that).

Mark Steyn links to other responses to the the speech. But let’s focus on Ezra Levant’s response.

The speech given by Canada’s Chief Fascist

Here is a post written by free speech activist Ezra Levant about Lynch’s hate-filled speech:

On Monday, Jennifer Lynch, the chief commissar of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, gave a speech to her fellow censors at the human rights industry’s annual trade show in Montreal. It was such a grotesque speech, any self-respecting government ought to fire her for uttering it. It revealed Lynch’s complete misunderstanding of the nature of human rights, the right of citizens to question their government, and the government’s proper attitude towards peaceful criticism.

It was the speech of an angry bigot.

It showed Lynch to be temperamentally unsuitable for any public office, especially a prosecutorial office with powers similar to those of real police. She’s bitter, vindictive, paranoid and motivated by anger and vengeance. If she was a real cop, answerable to an internal affairs branch, she’d be put on leave and investigated for her rage-filled rant.

Lynch’s speech was that of a bureaucrat at war with Canadian citizens. It was a speech of a bully who seeks the power to destroy those who oppose her.

… Lynch’s speech, in which she catalogues her enemies and denounces them, was a formal, public utterance, vetted by the CHRC’s half-dozen PR staff. It was clearly written by Lynch herself – the personal venom of it just couldn’t be faked.

He then goes on to provide excerpts of the speech that are particularly hateful and bigoted.  Witness the secular-left in their full fascist flowering! Unhinged and unmasked. This is what they learn in university – that there way is the right way and that all dissent to their agenda proceeds from racism, sexism, etc.

My friend Andrew sent me an article from Canada’s National Post about her speech.

Excerpt:

Contrast such criticism, though, with the chill writers and other public figures feel knowing that if their words offend any minority favoured by a rights commission, the commissioners may, on behalf of the complainant (and at taxpayers’ expense), compel testimony, seize documents, search private offices and impose fines and other penalties. The CHRC, too, has a frighteningly undemocratic 100% conviction rate in hate-speech cases.

These laws were brought in by the secular-left in Canada. We just elected the secular left here in the United States. Can we expect the same kind of suppression of free speech from Obama?

Recall that the Democrats have already put forward a hate crime bill and a bill to criminalize blogging, with sentences up to 2 years. The hate crimes bill passed the House, while the blog-crime bill is still in committee.

Will Canada’s Chief Fascist debate?

Ezra “debated” her on Saturday on the radio. (H/T Blazing Cat Fur)

But she would not go against him head-to-head. Instead she wanted to speak after him, so that she could not be corrected or rebutted. There you see the full expression of the left – they cannot stand that you are allowed to talk back to them, and they want to silence you – regardless of evidence.

This is how Darwinism and Global Warming are being put through by the secular-left right now. Stifle dissent, choke off debate, malign your opponent’s motives, coerce them with the force of government.

I will update this post with Ezra’s reflections on the “debate”.

Further study

Podcasts

Free speech: Mark Steyn radio interview and Ezra Levant radio debate!

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UPDATE: Welcome visitors from Blue Like You! Thanks for the link Joanne!

Canadian/American free speech activist Mark Steyn on the line with Chicago radio show host Milt Rosenberg. Commercial free!

Extension 720 – Mark Steyn – June 1, 2009

URL : http://www.wgnradio.com/media/mp3file/2009-06/47337079.mp3

Duration : 1 hours 29 mins 26 secs

He re-caps the history and outcome of his trial in Canada for offending Muslims, and goes on to discuss his previous book “America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It” and his new book “Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight Of The West“. He reviews the state of free speech, Western Civilization, single-payer health care, welfare, anti-Western attitudes in education, and the 2008 election results.

BONUS

Ezra Levant reports on his debate against secular-leftist professor Lucie Lamarche on CBC radio. Note that the start time is 1:12 into the show. Press pause, let the clip buffer for a few minutes, then drag the slider to the 1:12 position.

Last Sunday I was on Michael Enright’s CBC radio show, The Sunday Edition, debating human rights commissions along with Keith Martin, the Liberal MP, and a nutty professor called Lucie Lamarche.

You can listen to the show here — it’s the May 31 edition. The debate starts at about 1 hour and 12 minutes into the show.

[Lamarche] loses her grip at 1:25 when Enright challenged her on the lack of due process and natural justice in HRCs. Her first response is to dismiss the horrors of HRCs as my own personal story. When I pushed back, citing the very section of the Alberta act that allows warrantless search and seizures, and pointing out that targets of HRCs don’t get legal aid, she just collapsed, saying that “discrimination is about attitudes… and transformation. It’s not only about due process.”

Oh. So to hell with the law or fairness. Guys like me need to have our attitudes transformed. It’s not law. It’s brutal politics pretending to be the law.

I like this Lucie Lamarche — for her honesty.

After a few minutes of her reading her talking points — likely authored by the battallion of PR flacks at the Canadian Human Rights Commission — she just stops pretending that HRCs are about justice. They’re about politics and propaganda — making political dissidents like me conform to the “official line”. And the high costs? That’s just an additional punishment for our thought crimes.

Seriously: when she ran out of her prepared talking points, she said what she truly believed: this was about transforming attitudes.

Ezra also hints at which kind of people fight back to defend human rights, and what kind of people destroy human rights:

Readers, do you think that Orwell or Solzhenitsyn would call Lamarche a defender of human rights, or a destroyer of them?

Do you think that giving the state the power to transform your attitudes is a protection of your freedoms, or an abridgement of them?

Do you think that Lucie Lamarche follows in the footsteps of dissidents who challenged the conventional wisdom, like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi — or is she a descendant of the censors and bullies who tried to shut those two up?

Do not miss this debate podcast! Ezra is on fire!

And remember: we know that the secular-left believes in pounding down the good and lifting up the evil, so that moral judgments become impossible and no one feels badly for being morally evil. Remember Evan Sayet’s explanation for how progressives think: moral equivalence, postmodernism and moral relativism. And atheists do not have the ability to resist Islamo-fascism: they want to be happy, not to be heroes.