Oh, this will be fun!

–|PW|–

–The Net needs “gatekeeping,” said Hillary Rodham Clinton to a select group of important people and special reporters last week, demonstrating yet again the government’s tendency to be wrong.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/archive/1998/02/22/BUSINESS904.dtl

Further:
–”We are all going to have to rethink how we deal with this,” she answered, “because there are always competing values. There’s no free decision that I’m aware of anywhere in life, and certainly with technology that’s the case.”

Although technology’s new developments are “exciting,” Hillary continued, “There are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function. What does it mean to have the right to defend your reputation, or to respond to what someone says?”

So the fuse was lit several years ago. It just takes the right judge on the bench to make it so.

Be very afraid.

Here’s what he said after that opening:

This isn’t ‘somebody on CNET’, this is Brad Smith, one of the six FEC commisioners, saying that they are going to do this. That they’re going to have to do this.

“Produce one member of Congress who will go on record supporting any such measure”? What’s it got to do with members of Congress? This doesn’t need any members of Congress to do a damn thing. Congress has already made the law, the judge has already ordered the FEC to enforce it, and the three Democrats on the commission refuse to appeal that order. Unless Congress does something, this is going to happen. So the onus is on you to produce one member of Congress who will go on record calling for the repeal of McCain-Feingold, or amending it to exempt web sites, email lists, etc.

John McCain and Russ Feingold: first created the idea of two classes of speakers, “journalists” who have the right to free speech, and the rest of us, whose speech is regulated.

Barney Frank: attempted to permanently codify this, including official government licenses for “journalists”, in a Constitutional Amendment. This was to my knowledge the first time the First Amendment has ever been under direct threat of repeal.

However, that repeal was later made redundant by the Supreme Court, which weakened the First Amendment enough that the FEC no longer needs a Constitutional Amendment to censor political speech. Barney Frank’s vision of two Constitutionally separate classes of citizens, the journalists and the censored, has come to pass.

The one thing we don’t have to do is be silenced by McCain-Feingold. “Approved” journalists might constitute a de-facto aristocracy, but they’re still Americans, and so long as we can find one patriotic journalist who will offer his or her website as a “bomb shelter” for blogs, a “free speech zone” if you will, blogs can soldier on under the protective “legitimate journalist” credentials of their patron. If it comes to that.

What’s amazing is that this new censorship is championed in large part by the Left. While the Right obsesses over naked breasts, the Left is aiming straight for the jugular: regulation of political speech.

I think left-wing politicians have lost so consistently and often they’ve come to believe the system is rigged, and the First Amendment, being part of that system, must also be rigged. “Money = speech” is their shorthand for this belief. The Left has thus abandoned social libertarianism in favor of a broadened theme of Marxist class struggle.

The belief that money, speech, and power are interchangable is not so much a nuanced understanding of capitalist exploitation, though, as of cognitive dissonance at work: the Left doesn’t want to believe that their message is what is costing them legitimacy. That MoveOn outspent the Swift Vets by something like 10:1 is a fact they block out of their minds.