Post-American Presidency (35 page)

The desired effect of such a request? A chilling assault on free speech. Sen. John Cornyn saw exactly that: “I am not aware of any precedent for a President asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White House for pure political speech that is deemed ‘fishy’ or otherwise inimical to the White House’s political interests.… As Congress debates health care reform and other critical policy matters, citizen engagement must not be chilled by fear of government monitoring the exercise of free speech rights.”
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Yet that kind of monitoring seemed to be exactly the administration’s agenda. With the mainstream media solidly in liberal Democratic control, talk radio and the Internet became the primary sources of news and perspectives that differed from the White House party line—and so the administration moved quickly against those two remaining outlets for free discussion and unfettered inquiry.

The blog RedState.com revealed in August 2009 that the Obama administration was using the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to gather data on free citizens: “The NTIA is now requiring internet providers to give the government ‘average revenue per end user and data regarding type, technical specification or location of broadband infrastructure,’ i.e. your home address, IP address, how much you pay, and where the connection is at your house.”
That meant that “we have a White House asking neighbors to turn in neighbors by forwarding emails—some of which will contain IP address information. And we have the White House demanding internet providers provide them with the home addresses corresponding to those IP addresses.”
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Faced with a public outcry over all this, Obama quickly began backtracking. In the wake of the branding of dissenters as “un-American” by Pelosi and Hoyer, White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton said: “The President thinks that if people want to come and have a spirited debate about health care, a real vigorous conversation about it, that’s a part of the American tradition and he encourages that, because people do have questions and concerns.… And so if people want to come and have their concerns and their questions answered, the President thinks that’s important.”
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A lot had changed for the man who just three days before this had said that he didn’t want “the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking.” Or maybe he was just saving face. For he continued his assault on the freedoms of Americans:
The Washington Times
reported in September 2009 that “the White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama’s promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet.”
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Big Brother was watching and waiting.

Why did Obama do all this? The Obama administration had made plain that there was no war on terror, no war on Islamic jihad. As a matter of fact, the word “jihad” had been banned from government lexicon. So why all the spying on American citizens?

And more was in the offing.

LEGISLATING FREE SPEECH AWAY

On April 2, 2009, Rep. Linda T. Sanchez (D-CA) introduced into the House the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, named after a teenage girl who committed suicide after being hounded on the online social networking site MySpace by a friend’s mother, who was posing as a teenage boy.
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The bill accordingly declares that “whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”
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The free-speech implications are obvious. Who decides what constitutes coercion, intimidation, and harassment? Who determines that sufficient emotional distress has been inflicted upon a plaintiff so as to justify the imprisonment of the defendant for two years?

Attorney and blogger Eugene Volokh painted a troubling scenario: “I try to coerce a politician into voting a particular way, by repeatedly blogging (using a hostile tone) about what a hypocrite / campaign promise breaker / fool / etc. he would be if he voted the other way. I am transmitting in interstate commerce a communication with the intent to coerce using electronic means (a blog) ‘to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior’—unless, of course, my statements aren’t seen as ‘severe,’ a term that is entirely undefined and unclear. Result: I am a felon, unless somehow my ‘behavior’ isn’t ‘severe.’”
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Representative Sanchez insisted that such concerns were unfounded. “Congress has no interest in censoring speech,” she asserted, “and it will not do so if it passes this bill. Put simply, this legislation would be used as a tool for a judge and jury to determine whether there is significant evidence to prove that a person ‘cyberbullied’
another. That is: did they have the required intent, did they use electronic means of communication, and was the communication severe, hostile, and repeated. So—bloggers, emailers, texters, spiteful exes, and those who have blogged against this bill have no fear—your words are still protected under the same American values.”
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Subcommittee hearings were held on the bill on September 30, 2009; it is still under consideration and could become the law of the land.
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NET NEUTRALITY

It sounds like a grand, noble initiative: a “free and open Internet.”
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The stated idea of net neutrality is for the government to forbid Internet service providers from doing anything to filter or block traffic on the Internet.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, who went to Harvard Law School with Barack Obama, came out in September 2009 in favor of the broadest possible net-neutrality legislation. Genachowski explained why net neutrality was needed: “The Internet’s creators didn’t want the network architecture—or any single entity—to pick winners and losers,” he asserted. “The principles that will protect the open Internet are an essential step to maximize investment and innovation in the network and on the edge of it—by establishing rules of the road that incentivize competition, empower entrepreneurs, and grow the economic pie to the benefit of all.”
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Who could object? As it turned out, lovers of freedom could—and did. While net-neutrality advocates advertised their plan as one that would ensure a “free and open Internet,” in reality net neutrality was an attempt to
limit
the freedom of Internet users by subjecting what had always been a free-market give-and-take to government regulation:
the FCC would control how all information reached personal computers.

“Few proposals in Washington have been sold employing such deceptive language—and that’s saying something,” observed James G. Lakely, who is the codirector of the Center on the Digital Economy for the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank. “But few public policy ideas can boast the unashamedly socialist pedigree of net neutrality.” Lakely pointed out that “the modern Internet is a creation of the free market, which has brought about a revolution in communication, free speech, education, and commerce.” But Genachowski, said Lakely, “apparently doesn’t like that. He stated last month the way Internet service providers manage their networks—in response to millions of individual consumer choices—is not sufficiently ‘fair,’ ‘open’ or ‘free.’”

Genachowski’s remedy? Lakely said that he wanted to “claim for the FCC the power to decide how every bit of data is transferred from the Web to every personal computer and handheld device in the nation.”

Lakely noted that net neutrality had strong backers among the Hard Left—backers who were generally more forthright than Genachowski about what the measure was really intended to do: “Eben Moglen’s 2003 treatise
The dotCommunist Manifesto
is more honest about the thinking behind net neutrality—it’s sprinkled throughout with the language of communism’s great and bloody revolutionaries. The people must ‘struggle’ to ‘wrest from the bourgeoisie, by degrees, the shared patrimony of humankind’ that has been ‘stolen from us under the guise of “intellectual property.’”

Robert W. McChesney, who is the cofounder of Free Press—which Lakely describes as “the leading advocacy group in Washington pushing for net neutrality”—said that net neutrality could accomplish nothing less than Marxist “revolution.” McChesney’s enthusiasm is not
misplaced, for net neutrality would do what Marxist revolutions did in Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, and everywhere else they have triumphed: destroy private ownership and private property, transferring control over to the government.

“And in typical Marxist fashion,” Lakely declares, “innocuous words—the language of neutralism and liberty—cloak an agenda that would crush freedom. That’s the agenda President Obama’s FCC is pushing.”
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The Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act. Net neutrality. Cass Sunstein and Eric Holder both on record saying that free speech on the Internet should be restricted. The Obama administration’s agenda for the Internet was clear: in an age in which almost all the mainstream media was in the tank for the Democratic party, and the Internet had become virtually the last redoubt for genuine and robust opposition to the Obama agenda, the brave new president had determined that it must be brought to heel. And he was working hard to make that happen.

WILL THE FIRST AMENDMENT GET US OUT OF THIS FIX?

Most, of course, will dismiss such concerns the way they always dismiss them: with a wave of the hand and an invocation of the First Amendment—as if the First Amendment were some kind of inviolate shield that cannot itself ever in any way be impeached or impugned. Would that it were so. But the Obama administration is already showing how little it cares for free speech and open dissent. And with an Obama-compliant Supreme Court (which can be achieved with a retirement or two) judging cases that challenge their actions and interpreting the First Amendment for us, what’s to stop the administration from playing ball with the Organization of the Islamic Conference
and building wonderful new bridges with the Islamic world in this way, while working to silence dissent at home?

Free speech is our most important right—our fundamental protection against tyranny.

The Democrats’ desire to silence dissent and spy on the American people bodes most ill.

In 2003, Hillary Clinton said this: “I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.”
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Does she believe the same thing now? Will she stand up to the president? Will free Americans stand up to him?

In the age of jihad, in the age of Obama, the freedom of speech is under attack everywhere. If Barack Obama championed this freedom, he could change everything. Instead, he has aligned himself with the enemies of free speech. He has reached out to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which is waging a concerted campaign to extinguish free speech in Western nations.

And the campaign to silence points of view that the elites consider inconvenient is picking up steam in other ways as well. A stultifying leftist orthodoxy is stifling dissenting voices on our nation’s campuses. In November 2009, Nonie Darwish, the executive director of Former Muslims United and author of
Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law
, was scheduled to speak at Columbia and Princeton Universities, but both events were canceled under pressure from Muslim groups on campus.

Columbia, where Ahmadinejad was welcomed like a returning king.

Just hours before Darwish was scheduled to speak at Columbia, the groups that had invited her to come to both universities, the
Whig-Clio student debate society and Tigers for Israel, succumbed to demands from student Muslim groups and canceled her speaking event. The Whig-Cliosophic Society is the oldest debating society in the United States, founded by James Madison in 1765. These are the students who are supposed to be the leaders of the future.

At Princeton, Princeton Arab Society president Sami Yabroudi and former president Sarah Mousa issued a joint statement, claiming: “Nonie Darwish is to Arabs and Muslims what Ku Klux Klan members, skinheads and neo-Nazis are to other minorities, and we decided that the role of her talk in the logical, intellectual discourse espoused by Princeton University needed to be questioned.”

KKK? Neo-Nazi? Nonie Darwish was scheduled to speak about Sharia and Israel—standing up for human rights against the jihad.

But the sponsors of her talk immediately caved. Whig-Clio president Ben Weisman said: “Our decision to co-host the event was based on our belief that by extending an offer to speak to Ms. Darwish, members of TFI deemed her views a legitimate element of the mainstream discourse and in part agreed with her incendiary opinions. By rescinding their offer, TFI indicated their understanding that Darwish’s views have no place in the campus community.”

Tigers for Israel said in a statement: “On Tuesday evening Tigers for Israel and Whig-Clio rescinded our cosponsorship of today’s Nonie Darwish Lecture. Tigers for Israel accepted the opportunity for her to speak based on a misconception about what she actually believes.

“After her anti-Islam position was brought to my attention on Tuesday afternoon by the Center for Jewish Life director Rabbi Julie Roth and the Muslim Chaplain Imam Sohaib Sultan, I conducted extensive research and discussed the issue with TFI and Whig-Clio leadership, and we decided to rescind our cosponsorship after concluding that Tigers for Israel disagrees with and does not condone Ms. Darwish and her beliefs on Islam.… As President of TFI I take full
responsibility for not vetting Ms. Darwish from the beginning, and I sincerely apologize for offending any person or group on campus, especially the Muslim community. Tigers for Israel deeply regrets the initial sponsorship and we do not in any way endorse her views.”