Obama's Secret Plan To Repeal the First Amendment

A number of conservative bloggers are warning that if Obama is elected one of the first things he will do is to take away our right to free speech. Of course, I am a big supporter of free speech, except when it comes to yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater (or even in not-so-crowded theaters showing An American Carol), indecency (Playboy, books by James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov, anything gay), and anything that undermines the war effort (The Dixie Chicks, news organizations). But an Obama presidency will take us back to 1984; the book, that is, not the year (which wouldn't be so bad).

“Conservative-friendly media better get ready,” warns Brian C. Anderson. “Should Barack Obama win the presidency and the Democrats control Congress, as now seems likely, they will launch a full-scale war to drive critics — especially on political talk radio — right out of legitimate public debate.”

He cites some shocking proof of Obama’s intention to curtail the free speech rights of conservatives. When the NRA tried to run ads targeting Obama, his lawyers sent “bullying” letters to stations that ran them, according to Anderson. If Obama is elected, lawyers will be free to send bullying letters to anyone they want. You will have to be careful of what you say or write lest a lawyer get wind of it and fire off a bullying letter.

But there’s more. When a 527 group, the American Issues Project, tried to get stations to run ads linking Obama to terrorists, says Anderson, Obama’s campaign “complained” about the ads to the Department of Justice that AIP had broken campaign finance laws and “spooked” some stations from running them. Republicans value the free speech rights of 527 groups and would never do such a thing. If 527 groups can be stopped from smearing political opponents, our democracy is certainly in peril.

But that’s not all. When two conservative writers appeared on Chicago's WGN-AM Radio attacking Obama, Obama supporters flooded the station with, Anderson reports, “rage-filled phone calls and e-mails, making the program more difficult to conduct.” Have you ever heard anything so frightening? Imagine if conservatives bombarded someone with rage-filled phone calls and emails, not that we would, of course. Liberals would be horrified. According to Anderson, the show had “invited the Obama campaign to send a representative to respond; the campaign preferred to answer with digital brownshirts.” If the Nazis had been able to send rage-filled emails and make harassing phone calls to Jewish shopowners instead of beating them up, smashing everything in their shops and sending them to concentration camps, we might all be speaking German today.

“These crude efforts are only a start,” says Anderson. As soon as Obama gets in office he will restore the Fairness Doctrine, which could force radio and TV stations to let liberals on the air! Sure, Obama says he is opposed to reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine, but Obama is a liar, which means that the opposite is true of whatever he says. So we can be fairly certain that he actually does support reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine, unlike John McCain who also says he is opposed to the Fairness Doctrine but is not a liar.

If the Fairness Doctrine is reinstated, warns Glenn Reynolds, “I think I'll start an organization to flood the FCC with complaints whenever there's media bias from any of the big networks.” This will give the FCC less time to investigate all the complaints it now gets from people concerned about dirty words and wardrobe malfunctions. Bono will have free reign to curse whenever he wants and Janet Jackson will be able to go on television, even on Sesame Street, wearing only pasties. I'm sure Reynolds would hate for that to happen, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

When Obama reinstates the Fairness Doctrine, there’s an “even chance,” according to Stephen Green, that it will apply to blogs! “If (when?) it happens, I’ll break that law,” says Green, trying to put on a brave face. “I will break it with all due malice and in full knowledge of the possible consequences. I’ll shout ‘Fire Obama!’ in a crowded theater. And then, for the first time ever, I’ll ask for reader donations. Because I’ll going to need them, lots of them, to pay for the lawyers.” I think I'll start asking for donations now.

Although Green admits he was drunk when he wrote this, it can’t be dismissed as the paranoid ramblings of an aging, drug-addled Libertarian. “Republicans, given the kind of power the Democrats are about to accrue, would maybe take away your right to get a completely totally naked chick to grind on your lap in a publicly licensed bar,” says Green. “The Democrats will do their damnedest to take away your right to speak.” I’m sure we can all agree that putting the Pussycat Dolls in jail would be preferable to shutting up Rush Limbaugh.

But even if you take Obama at his word (and who would be naïve and stupid enough to do that?), and he doesn’t impose the Fairness Doctrine on blogs, if he is elected this modest blog and all other conservative blogs will have to shut down. That’s because Obama supports something called "network neutrality," which would prevent telecom companies from charging exorbitant rates for use of the Internet that only conservatives can afford. By letting just anyone use the Internet at low prices, corporations would be forced to let liberals stay on the web (unlike, say, on talk radio) and the Internet will slow to a crawl, which will cause people to start reading newspapers, which are all controlled by liberals. The conservative voice will be virtually silenced, except for the homeless guy ranting on the corner.

I am taking a great risk in writing this. By publishing this on my blog, I have probably earned a spot on Obama’s enemies list. If he is elected, he will probably shut down my blog, have the IRS initiate a tax audit against me, eavesdrop on my phone calls and break into my office looking for embarrassing information. Imagine electing a President who would do harass its enemies like that.

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