A-WOO-GA!!! Red Alert! Red Alert! A-WOO-GA!!!
The marketplace of ideas is about to be shut down like a gin mill in a vice raid. Except these cops are scrupulously earnest, full of righteous certainty—the worst kind. Watch yourselves, because you know they’re watching you:
Danny Glover at Eyeblast reveals a nine-year-old NPR interview with Eric Holder regarding how the government needs to regulate Internet communications. The rumored front-runner for Attorney General told NPR that the Columbine killers may have found some of their venom through Internet access, as well as a bomb recipe or two. If the government can regulate pornography, Holder insisted while serving as Deputy AG during the Clinton administration, surely the government can restrict speech in general.
The court has really struck down every government effort to try to regulate it. We tried with regard to pornography. It is gonna be a difficult thing, but it seems to me that if we can come up with reasonable restrictions, reasonable regulations in how people interact on the Internet, that is something that the Supreme Court and the courts ought to favorably look at.
How can he fix his mouth to speak such heresy? His job, as chief enforcer of the law, is to uphold the Constitution, not defecate on it. This makes the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine (ptui!) sound not probable but certain.
Remember all the howling about Bush’s and Cheney’s stifling of dissent, how said dissent was alleged to be the highest form of patriotism? Show me their act or threat that is anywhere near as chilling to free speech as this suggestion is.
You can’t. There isn’t.