George Rebane
That is the title of the important lead editorial (here) in the 30jan21 WSJ, and very relevant to the ongoing discussions and debates on these pages. The whole notion of speech-based sedition arose with the Federalists who essentially ran the government of the newly born United States. The Federalists and their agencies, did not consider themselves as a political party, they simply saw themselves as THE government when they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Therefore, any speech that opposed them or their ideas opposed the government, and was therefore by definition seditious. The Democrats of today have overwhelmed themselves into the same government positions and the same mindset.
Today the WaPo again supplies one of the abundant confirmations of this by arguing that the Federalists’ stratagems with such legislation and its enforcements did not go far enough, and was therefore “flawed”. This is buttressed by Democrats who “increasingly see domestic enemies wherever they look, and are devising ways to use levers of power to restrict, regulate and boycott opposition. It’s an extraordinary and ominous turn in a democracy.”
Progressive media are ratcheting up their war cries against opposing cable news organizations like FN with histrionics declaring that the outlet’s “role in the 400,000 U.S. lives lost to the pandemic and in the disastrous attack of Jan. 6” has been “deadly.” Their call is for sponsors to “walk away” and “withdraw from Fox News so long as it functions as an extremist madrasa.” (emphasis mine) Corporatist allies regularly echo a former Facebook executive on CNN declaring that “we have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences.” This politically monopolist “trend arrives when one party runs nearly all of Washington and has the loud support of virtually every elite cultural institution and many of the largest corporations. Social-media firms increasingly respond to government pressure in content decisions. With progressives filling out the administrative state, expect politicians and regulators to find new ways to put their thumb on the scale.” And that is exactly what we are witnessing in the ongoing destruction of our First Amendment rights.
The country’s Left is already renewing its call for reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine to enforce its new draconian desiderata for suppressing free speech. All this is done under the noble aegis of “regulating misinformation”, necessitated, according to Axios, by the government doing “next to nothing to regulate misinformation on large tech platforms”, with liberal fact-checker Politifact piling on with the need for “regulations and new laws” to marginalize right-wing media.
Returning to the Federalists of our early years, today we see “the liberal temptation to define their point of view as the only legitimate one—to view themselves as ‘the government’, rather than one of two parties—is growing stronger.” In such an environment of growing political and physical dominance, people like me have every reason to fear for our livelihoods and lives. In these pages local leftwingers grow more strident with their threatening reports of far-left organizations making lists that contain names of everyone from wrong-thinking bloggers and commenters to supporters and former employees of our recent President Trump. Their message is that they know where we live, and they will come for us at their pleasure when the time is right.
I’ll close this by underlining a most recent and proximal example of such a far-left reader in the person of Steven Frisch, CEO of the cynically named Sierra Business Council. Over the years he has regularly visited RR to accuse me, mine, and conservative readers in general of racism, Nazism, white nationalism, white supremacism, insurrection, sedition, treason, … . His tone of late (e.g. see comment stream here) has definitely adopted the larger-than-life institutional ‘we’ when he talks about the thoughts and future fortunes of the ‘you’ consisting of us unredeemable redundants, especially those uneducable wrong-thinkers who have had a lot of birthdays.
Today we are seeing the reprise of how Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party monopolized German politics in the 1930s by visibly militarizing its civil society with armed units of the SA and SS under the guise of defending the nation against home-grown seditious communist terrorists preparing for insurrection. Now our Left are the proto-communists, marching under the more benign socialist banner, who claim to construct needed defenses against ascendant far-right, domestic Nazism. And following Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the Democrats and their lamestream media are accusing their opponents of exactly what they are doing in the city streets, around government buildings, and inside state houses where they are busy generating policies and laws that will transform America.
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