I'm much more worried about Democrat attacks on free speech and freedom of assembly than I am about Trump making suggestions that are unconstitutional. Why? Because it will be the Constitution itself that protects us from Trump overstepping the bounds.
OTOH, if Democrats continue on the track they are on, what's to stop these freedoms from becoming eroded? What's to stop a future judiciary from carving out exceptions? Yes to freedom of speech but not from certain viewpoints. Yes to freedom of assembly but certain groups must not be allowed to coalesce.
Newspapers are choosing to downplay the many attacks that have gone on since Trump's run for office starting gaining traction. In Democratic strongholds, Democrats attacked people trying to attend rallies, sometimes injuring them. My first thought was 'these people are just like the Nazi brownshirts' in their viciousness. And this was well before I became seriously inclined to vote Republican. By the end of the campaign, it did become one of the reasons I voted a straight R ticket.
At least one rally was cancelled completely--Chicago. At the times, newspapers shifted the blame to Trump, i.e. he should have known better than to go into Chicago. Completely ignoring the freedom of assembly issue underlying the whole thing.
Several weeks ago, at the Univ. of Washington, a Democrat protester shot a Trump supporter in the abdomen. The young man was in critical condition, on life support, for several days before disappearing completely out of the news. The only news coverage at the time was a local Seattle paper which said the 'shooter, an Asian, was pleading self-defense because the Trump supporter was a white supremacist.' Bystanders said the Trump supporter, who was unarmed, was actually just trying to stop a skirmish between two other people.
You may not realize the full extent of the attack on free speech that occurred at Berkeley. Well before the event itself, more than 100 faculty members wrote a letter to the administration demanding that Milo Y. not be allowed to speak. That letter, and the names and signatures, are in the public record. When I scanned it, it looked like most were women :(. Almost all were from the English and history departments which made me sad because that was my original college degree program. I finished college with a deep respect for the bloody history that preceded our having these freedoms enshrined.
The meme now is that it was anarchists that caused the trouble and liberals are blameless. The protesters themselves are just young idealists. The problem is that to take this position requires one to ignore the faculty members who attacked freedom of speech in their letter. In fact, there have been many instances of faculty asking the administrations of colleges to keep conservative speakers from speaking on campus. As well as this being a attack on freedom of speech, this shows a complete disregard for those campus Republicans who are paying tuition like everyone else.
It's not enough to dismiss what's going on to "air-headed college students". And who the heck are the real Nazis in this whole scenario? Most of all, where are our respected newspapers? I'm reminded that the first line of defense to go down in Nazi Germany was the newspapers.
When people say "first they came for....", the implication is that it was for the Jews. It wasn't. The first was those German citizens who started assembling around speakers who were trying to warn the public against the dangers of a man like Hitler. The Hitler brownshirts broke up those assemblies with violence. Later, the freedom of assembly was abolished by law. The second to go were the media--newspapers and radio. |
