After decades of spreading the myth that the Second Amendment only applies to the state, it looks like the media (and the left in general) increasingly wants to apply that same “logic” to the First Amendment too. I.E., there’s a growing chorus who seem to think freedom of speech and freedom of the press should only belong to “authorized journalists” of some sort. Here’s a roundup of a few posts on the subject from today:
Over at Armed and Safe, 45superman tears into an article he found about online “extremism.” The general theme of which is that the government should regulate websites because the gun-control crowd doesn’t like people being able to counter their propaganda with facts and stuff.
David Codrea at The War on Guns posts about an editorial which takes it one step further, and calls for licensing the press to silence those pesky “citizen journalists.” The editorial in question tries to justify this tyranny with the apocryphal threat of hoaxes, and cries about how CNN and others must then debunk them. Does he mean the same CNN who quite regularly fabricates “news” on its own?
Speaking of hoaxes, GamePolitics is reporting that NY Governor Eliot Spitzer is using one (and inventing a few of his own) to support his effort to censor video games. Even if the government had the power to regulate speech on the internets, how would that help when they can’t even recognize obvious satire when it slaps them in the face? Let alone when said government makes up “facts.”
So, yea, between these, and the push from the left to bring back the so-called “fairness doctrine,” other attempts to censor video games (including at least one bill to regulate action games with religious themes), or newsman Tom Brokaw saying video games and blogs are “cancerous,†it seems to me that the anti-gun left and their media darlings really do hate the First Amendment as much as the Second. And at the same time, they expect us to believe Bush is the fascist.
Pot, kettle. Kettle, pot…