Those Demanding Free Speech Limits to Fight ISIS Pose a Greater Threat to U.S. Than ISIS by Glenn Greenwald.
From the post:
In 2006 — years before ISIS replaced al Qaeda as the New and Unprecedentedly Evil Villain — Newt Gingrich gave a speech in New Hampshire in which, as he put it afterward, he “called for a serious debate about the First Amendment and how terrorists are abusing our rights — using them as they once used passenger jets — to threaten and kill Americans.” In that speech, Gingrich argued:
Either before we lose a city, or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up (terrorists’) capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech [protections] and to go after people who want to kill us — to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.
In a follow-up article titled “The First Amendment is Not a Suicide Pact,” Gingrich went even further, arguing that terrorists should be “subject to a totally different set of rules,” and called for an international convention to decide “on what activities will not be protected by free speech claims.”
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Greenwald writes that limits on freedom of speech are not a historical nutty-idea from the past but are being raised by Cass Sunstein (Obama adviser) and Eric Posner (law professor).
Even the advocates of limits on free speech concede the legal system won’t, yet, accept limits on freedom of speech, that could change.
Imagine telling parents in the 1990’s that post-2010 that allowing strangers to fondle your genitals and those of your children were a prerequisite to air travel.
Who would have said then they would meekly line up like sheep to be intimately touched by strangers?
Or allow their children to be groped by strangers?
But both of those have come to pass. With nary a flicker of opposition from Congress.
Read Greenwald’s post in full and know that limits on freedom of speech, like restrictions on your right to travel (rejection of state driver licenses as identification), violation of your personal space (groping at airports), are not very far away at all.