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’2nd American Revolution’ Looming Over Free Speech
Idea of federal rules for political discourse on Drudge, Hannity ‘scary’
WND
The publisher of “The O’Leary Report,” Brad O’Leary, warned America five years ago that the end goal for some key players in the Obama administration was the evisceration of the First Amendment, so that conservative speech could be shut down.
In “Shut Up, America! The End of Free Speech,” he noted talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh talks about a core constituency in Congress that does not believe the “free market of ideas” is good for America.
In other words, they believe “you and I aren’t smart enough to figure things out for ourselves, and … we need their help in order to form the correct points of view – their points of view,” he said.
So on Wednesday, when the chairman of the Federal Election Commission said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that there are “government officials” who “are angling to curtail the media’s exemption from federal election laws governing political organizations,” O’Leary wasn’t surprised.
But he’s not willing to retreat, and he doesn’t think Americans are either.
“I don’t think the nation would stand for one voice in the political spectrum being silenced while the other voices are allowed to say what they want,” he told WND.
Commentator Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, who repeatedly has waged battles over the First Amendment’s free-speech rights, was a little more direct.
“The First Amendment protects freedom of speech with political speech being the most protected speech. This is the most basic tenet of a free society. The First Amendment protects all speech, not just the ideas that the ruling party likes but all speech. If controls were to be imposed, who would control what’s good and what’s forbidden? The government? That is a declaration of war and peaceful men would be forced to resort to violence,” she said.
“There is no more crucial issue facing America than the war on free speech. Should the Obama administration move forward with legislation to repress speech (which is exactly what he sought to do in attacking a YouTube video in the wake of the Benghazi attacks), he will have a second American revolution on his hands,” she said.
Joseph Farah, founder and CEO of WND, WND Books and WND Films, said that as “a 35-year veteran of the press in both forms, traditional media and new, I find even the discussion of imposing federal regulations on speech, especially constitutionally protected political speech, to be scary and anti-American.”
Reposted with permission
