Instapundit » Blog Archive » RICHARD HASEN: Speech in America is fast, cheap and out of control. He says that like it’s a bad … "In the old days, just a handful of TV networks controlled the airwaves, and newspapers served as gatekeepers for news and opinion content. A big debate back in the 1980s and earlier was how to enable free expression for those who did not own or work for a media company and wanted to get a message out." More below. "In 1995, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh wrote a remarkably prescient Yale Law Journal article looking ahead to the coming Internet era. In “Cheap Speech and What It Will Do,” Volokh foresaw the rise of streaming music and video services such as Spotify and Netflix, the emergence of handheld tablets for reading books, the demise of classified advertising in the newspaper business, and more generally how technology would usher in radical new opportunities for readers, viewers and listeners to custom design what they read, saw and heard, while at the same time undermining the power of intermediaries including publishers and bookstore owners.
To Volokh, these changes were exciting and democratizing. But 22 years later, the picture of what the cheap-speech boom has wrought seems considerably darker. No doubt the Internet has dramatically lowered the costs of obtaining information and spurred the creation and consumption of content from radically diverse sources. Anyone with an idea can now get it out on Facebook, Twitter or any number of other sites accessible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. And cheap speech has been a boon to those fighting oppressive regimes around the world, as truthful messages and relevant information can spread despite government censorship efforts. Less positively, cheap speech has undermined mediating and stabilizing institutions of American democracy, including newspapers and political parties, with negative social and political consequences." The problem is not free speech or cheap free speech; the problem is that local governments are unwilling to act to control the Democratic Parties leftist, progressive, and violent militant wing, the Antifa. In Charlotte, a pathetic handful of tepid KKK, and neo-Nazi showed up to rally about the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. The Antifa countered, violently, as usual, and one of the KKK adherents acted rashly and drove his car into the Antifa protest killing a woman. Tragic. This violence was nothing more than the old busted Democratic Party militant wing (KKK) having a dust-up with the new shiny Democratic Party militant wing (Antifa). The tragedy was that a young woman lost her life. All of this was avoidable if the police in Charlotte had kept control of the demonstration/counter demonstration. But local government, which is overwhelmingly progressive is unwilling to do this for fear they will appear to be anti the Democratic Party's new shiny militant wing, Antifa. Either police counter all violence or they do not, but the consequences of failing to counter and hold accountable one violent group is that group will quickly become entitled to violence. In the end, one can expect such policy to reward with violence, serious injuries, and deaths. A reward richly reaped in Charlotte. This is the rich history of all Fascist movements and their violent, militant wings. Hasen fails to understand that political parties and newspapers are not dampeners of violent extremism, but promoters. They do so subtly, but they do so through advocacy, or in the case of political parties by claiming that rational people decrying all violence equally, are evil; this is the real reason that the media is criticizing President Trump's statements that all violence is deplorable. The media personalities like Joe Scarborough, Wolf Blitzer, and so many others, want the Antifa violence to continue. They like the fact that this violence suppresses one of the political parties and the mostly apolitical American middle. It is time the American middle awakens to the fact that the media is the enemy seeking to destroy the middle class. The goal of the media is to bring a socialist system to the US. Socialism is nothing more than feudalism applied to the industrial economy. The goal is to enserf the masses as the media, and the Democratic Party has done in California with high housing prices, high costs of living, and cost-lowering perks for the wealthy and the more affluent upper middle class like subsidies and tax credits for residential solar, and EVs. Trump has many policies which I detest, but he is a bomb thrower who is destroying the establishment political structure in both parties and the media. All of which, must be raised to the ground. Either America will be remade under the Trump Presidency, or we will become a psuedo-Euro Socialist state with its -1% economic growth, its 10%+ unemployment, its massive welfare state, and its looming implosion. The President is correct to fight all violence regardless of what the violence promoting Democratic Party wants. If you are against violence, you will need to stand with the President on this issue whether you like his stances on other issues or not. The alternative is the fixation of America as but one more withering, pathetic Euro socialist state.
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