Free Speech and the Authoritarian Left (new Constitution Minute)

I’ve said many times on this webinar that the rise of the authoritarian Left is the central challenge of our time.  We have seen this rise in the Obamacare individual mandate, the anti-Trump riots, and in the way the gun grabbers won’t quit.

I went back through the news on free speech for the last few months and there it is again - the rise of the authoritarian Left and the central challenge we must face.

In recent months, an angry mob chased Ted Cruz and his wife out of a restaurant and broke Tucker Carlson’s front door. These are not constitutionally protected activities.

Unions are flouting the Janus decision, requiring workers to take steps to get out of forced dues and refusing to issue them refunds.  Liberals in Massachusetts tried to overturn the Citizens United case with a ballot initiative limiting political spending. California passed a law requiring pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise abortion but, thankfully, the law got knocked down.  The University of California at Berkeley tried to keep Ben Shapiro and other conservative speakers off its campus, but was forced to change its policies and pay $70,000 in damages.  Shawnee State University got sued for punishing a professor who refused to use a transgender’s pronoun of choice.  A high school in Wisconsin banned pro-gun T-shirts.  Another high school, this one in Texas, tried to keep cheerleaders from putting Bible verses on their banners.

New York is pressuring banks and insurance companies not to do business with the NRA and the NRA took the state to court.  Atlanta had to cough up $1.2 million for terminating a fire chief for his religious beliefs.  The Seattle bus authority blocked Pamela Geller when she tried to put ads on city buses.  James O’Keefe got sued for secretly recording government officials, but he won in court.  Prager University lost its first case against Google and YouTube, but is back in court challenging the tech giants’ censorship of its videos on state constitutional grounds, while the first case is on appeal in federal court.

Those are some of the First Amendment cases that came up in the last few months.  I tracked some other stories that technically don’t involve the First Amendment, but show you how the overall climate for free expression is turning hostile, thanks to the authoritarian Left and its allies. 

A document leaked from Google said the big tech firms have lost their free speech culture and moved toward censorship.   Google employees discussed manipulating search results to bury conservative media, in order to swing the upcoming 2020 elections. A hundred Facebook employees felt compelled to form a group to fight the lack of ideological diversity within their ‘intolerantly liberal’ company. 

The European Parliament moved to ban ‘hate’ speech across the entire EU, calling for special police to prosecute and jail critics of radical Islam, the gay agenda, open borders, transgenderism, etc., etc.  By the way, don’t you dare call Muhammad’s practice of child marriage ‘pedophilia’ because that would be blasphemy and you would be a criminal, the European Court of Human Rights ruled.  People in the U.K. are being asked to report their friends and neighbors to the police for making insulting comments.  I wonder if ‘stop your whinging’ qualifies.

Meanwhile, the big daddy of them all, the leftist and Islamist-controlled United Nations wants to criminalize comments about migrants in its recent pact on worldwide migration.  It’s not the first time the UN has attacked free speech.  Why do we send the UN money, again?

Connect the dots and what have you got?  The authoritarian Left is on the march.  Whether it’s unhinged mobs, gender pronouns, or cheerleaders in Texas, the rise of the authoritarian Left is the central challenge of our time.  It is our duty as keepers of the Republic to meet this challenge head on, and put the enemies of free speech in their place.