Liberals Hate the First Amendment

My own politics began to mature while in college when simply publishing a letter to the editor from a student the academic Left rightly saw as an enemy resulted in their launching an all out effort to destroy my reputation. It wasn’t that I agreed with the student. All I did was acknowledge his right to be heard in one instance, regardless of how repulsive some of his other views may have been.

The academic Left, more so than the student body, went after me, not the student. They simply refused to accept that someone with the authority to act as a gatekeeper of sorts as regards to different viewpoints would dare give voice to someone they strongly opposed. I found their approach so stifling and, in essence, evil for trying to destroy me, though only a mere messenger, I began my journey toward the Right as I explored my differences with the Left. But it has always been their willingness to stifle free speech that led me to see the Left as a far greater threat to individual liberty in America than is the Right.

Over the years, that understanding of the Left has continued to be reinforced, not refuted. And there are some prime examples of it in today’s news cycle.

Progressive Republican Lisa Murkowski has forced a Right-leaning talk radio host off the air in Alaska, simply because he disagrees with her. Yet, she is attempting to portray her opponent, Joe Miller, as seeking to do the very thing of which she is guilty.

Meanwhile, Comedy Cenrtral has embraced the misguided and repugnant notion that it can control the media, even on public property. That instinct isn’t only illiberal, it’s un-American. Thanks to new media it will not work. See link, or below for Big Journalism’s own live-blogging of yesterday’s event in DC.

As the Left was once fond of saying, however disingenuously, the revolution will be televised. What they will soon discover, thanks to Constitutional American democracy on November 2nd is, this ain’t their long-haired, and too long in the tooth, Liberal Arts professor’s revolution. It’s the American people’s, a great number of which strongly disagree with the institutional Left.