02 Nov If Hillary Wins, Free Speech Will Suffer
This week the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled Ayaan Hirsi Ali an anti-Muslim extremist. That’s like labeling Bill Clinton a loyal husband. Patently absurd.
While the SPLC’s statement is demonstrably ridiculous all by itself, it is also relevant to the potential presidency of Hillary Clinton, and to free speech.
If you don’t know, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was raised an Ethiopian Muslim and made her way to America to become ultimately an outspoken advocate for women’s rights. She speaks about how badly women are treated in many Islamic cultures.
But by SPLC standards, she is an anti-Muslim extremist. Because she speaks truth about how women are treated under Islamic law, sharia, and how they are treated as property and second class citizens in many countries around the world. They label her this way to try to shut down her speaking.
And it’s not just the SPLC, though they are notorious. Left-wingers in America resort to scorn, ridicule, name-calling and shunning as their response to people who express viewpoints they do not share. And they do it to silence political opposition. One prominent example is labeling support for traditional marriage as “hate speech,” which is common in left wing America.
YouTube recently restricted access to some of conservative talk show host Dennis Prager’s videos that are part of his brilliant Prager University series, citing “community flagging” and “sensitive content.” Particularly bizarre and revealing was their censoring of a video about free speech by Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal. None of these videos were remotely profane, pornographic or even slightly inappropriate. They just contained conservative viewpoints that leftists cannot tolerate.
Hillary Clinton is on the same page with these left wing thought police.
Respect for free speech will suffer under a Clinton presidency. Hillary actually said that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed” so that her abortion agenda is passed. And, as described in Robert Spencer’s words, Hillary “along with others in the Obama Administration and Barack Obama himself, knowingly and actively aided the advance of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s campaign to restrict the freedom of speech and stigmatize counter-terror efforts as “hate speech” ?
The First Amendment free speech guarantee only means that the government cannot for the most part restrict free speech. But jurisprudence protecting free speech is only as good as the quality of thinking of our judges.
So what will happen to free speech if a President appoints judges throughout the federal court system who uphold restrictions on speech that is “offensive” or “hateful”? Could the college campus “safe place” “trigger warning” mentality that dictates no one has to ever hear any viewpoint they do not like, end up impacting First Amendment jurisprudence?
It may sound far-fetched now, but much of what happens on college campuses today would have been far-fetched even 20 years ago.
Free speech is a fundamental building block of America, and too many on the intolerant left would happily crush it, to silence opposition.