The enemy within

In Defense of Jason Richwine

Thought and speech crime are defined by professional liberalism and its favored client groups, who without exception assume the pose of victims and use it for intellectual and political terrorism ordinarily short of actual violence.

Nobody outside of America is the most constant and serious threat to American freedom of speech or of thought.

Nearly all of the danger comes from within, and it is a royal pain in the butt and a deliberate assault on democracy.

Still, Charles Murray is full of beans, pretending that thought and speech crime in America are recent inventions of the left that have ruined an academic, political, and general culture that, back in the good of days of the 1950’s and 60’s, basked in the sunshine of uniform and universal liberty.

He is completely ignoring the Cold War phenomena of the McCarthy period when it was the right that terrorized the left.

And in his absurdly celebratory allusion to the First Amendment and ratification of the Bill of Rights, he ignores that it was only the federal government that people denied control of speech or the press, reserving exactly such control as the time-tested and valued prerogative of the individual states.

Not to mention the almost immediate betrayal of the First Amendment by the Federalist Party of John Adams, the then party of the right, with its Alien and Sedition Acts aimed at silencing the voices of the Jeffersonians, the then party of the people.

True enough, the shoe today is on the other foot.

But it hurts badly enough not to exaggerate and pretend this is the only shoe that has ever pinched.