Freedoms under attack

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The First Amendment to the United States Constitution spells out five rights that are guaranteed by our government. If you ask any random person on the street what those rights are, most would fail.

They would be able to name some but not all five. Take a moment. How many do you know? One that most people are familiar with is freedom of speech — closely related to my favorite, freedom of the press.

Our founding fathers saw the need to stop the government from controlling its citizens, so the first amendment keeps our elected officials from just that.

These freedoms cannot be denied by the government. But, they are currently under attack by a mob, a far-left mob to be more specific.

The mob is made up of those who want to control dialog. If you do not agree and conform to them 100 percent, you are to be shut down by any means necessary. Apologies count for nothing as they try to stifle any speech that does not conform to their rigid standards.

The following is just some of the evidence.

• The editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Stan Wischowski lost his job last week for giving the green light to a headline. You may wonder what caused the publication to fire their editor of 20 years, who had diversified their newsroom and helped the paper win a Pulitzer. The headline that lost him his job, “Buildings Matter, Too.”

• A white lecturer from UCLA, W. Ajax Peris, is under investigation for, in part, reading MLK’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ out loud to his students.

• A progressive data scientist at a research firm accurately retweeted an African American Princeton scholar’s work showing that peaceful protests are more effective over violence. He was fired for it.

• A black female principal of a Chicago high school is under pressure to resign because, among other ‘problematic’ acts, she urged students to “not participate in violence or looting.”

• James Bennet lost his job recently as the editorial page editor of the New York Times for running an anti-protest editorial by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton entitled, “Send in the troops.”

• Reporter for the Intercept, Lee Fang is being called a racist for daring to tweet an interview he had with a black man who said, “I always question, why does a Black life matter only when a white man takes it?... Like, if a white man takes my life tonight, it’s going to be national news, but if a black man takes my life, it might not even be spoken of… It’s stuff just like that that I just want in the mix.”

Matt Taibbi, a progressive contributing editor at Rolling Stone, published an article on Friday entitled “The American Press Is Destroying Itself.” Look it up on the Internet. It is worth your time.

In it he says, “The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.”

Closer to home the publisher of the Washington Missourian Bill Miller was forced to resign last week after running, what was considered to be, a racist cartoon. The cartoon, while insensitive, did contain an element of truth — the complete stupidity of the “Defund the Police” movement.

Taibbi noted in his article that polls show 65 percent of Americans oppose defunding the police, including 62 percent of Democrats, with just 15 percent of all people, and only 33 percent of African-Americans supporting it. With all the coverage it’s been getting and the support from many Democrats in power you would think that most Americans want the police to be eliminated.

Taibbi understands that all of this, “guarantees that opinion writers and editors alike will shape views to avoid upsetting colleagues, which means that instead of hearing what our differences are and how we might address those issues, newspaper readers will instead be presented with page after page of people professing to agree with one another. That’s not agitation, that’s misinformation.”

When a mob can control what is or is not published, said on Facebook, or tweeted on Twitter then we have lost our freedom of speech.

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The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is a part of the United States Bill of Rights, adopted in 1791, that protects (1) freedom of speech, (2) freedom of religion, (3) freedom of assembly, (4) freedom of the press, and (5) right to petition.