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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (1026090)	7/28/2017 8:46:28 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1588175

You're a Trumpist and Putinist first. It's good you're turning against the Republican party . that can only be good.

To: longnshort who wrote (1026090)	7/29/2017 5:21:52 AM
From: FJB	2 Recommendations Recommended By locogringo longnshort Respond to of 1588175

The Left’s War on the First Amendment frontpagemag.com Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. Once upon a time there was a liberal media. Like most left-leaning institutions it worked hard to prove its progressive premises. Democrats were good and Republicans bad. The police and the military were bad. Social welfare spending and diplomacy were good. Israel was bad and the PLO was good. This was the thing we used to nostalgically call media bias. We aren’t dealing with a liberal media anymore, but an illiberal media. The liberal media was content to use its institutional power as a megaphone to broadcast its views. But you could debate those views. Actual conservatives were allowed to write columns, and not just as a strategic attack on some element of the GOP the way it is now, and appear on television to offer opinions, and not just as punching bags. The liberal media was convinced it would win the argument because it was right. The illiberal media isn’t interested in winning an argument, but in silencing the opposition. It doesn’t just want to shout louder than you. It wants to use its institutional power to shut you up. This isn’t just a media phenomenon. It’s what happened across the social spectrum when the people we used to call liberals became illiberal leftists. It’s why colleges censor controversial speakers and punish dissenting faculty. It’s why the environmental debate went from scientific discussions to calls to punish, fine and even jail those who question the left’s Luddite alarmism on Global Warming. It’s why the debate over gay marriage shifted to punishing Christian bakers and florists, the arguments about Israel tilted to preventing musicians from performing in Tel Aviv and civil rights turned into a call to create “safe spaces” that ban everyone else. Diversity is no longer dressed up as an expansion, but is now explicitly a contraction. Don’t read books by white authors. Don’t hire more men. Kick Jews out of the gay rights rally. Send the IRS after conservative groups. Punch a Trump supporter in the face. Nearly every leftist cause these days is expressed by punishing someone. Arguments are won by force. The illiberal totalitarian lurking inside the liberal, as David Horowitz described it, is out of the closet. It’s a lot easier to spot illiberalism in the press and academia because they depend on the free exchange of ideas. It’s hard to spot creeping totalitarianism at the DMV or in any government bureaucracy. But it’s really easy to see the change on a college campus or in the pages of your local newspaper. And that’s where the iron curtain truly falls on the First Amendment. The modern campus is mired in trigger warnings and safe spaces. Faculty and administrators are lynched, buildings are burned, students are assaulted and dissent is ruthlessly silenced. After the election, the media launched a purge of conservative voices from social media and the internet under the guise of fighting “fake news”. The meme quickly rebounded against it, but it succeeded in embedding partisan media “fact checkers” into Google and Facebook. Many of the pitched battles fought by the press corps against the White House were about closing access to conservative media. The media was using its institutional power to impose a monopoly on the press even while wrapping its struggles with the White House in the tattered shreds of the First Amendment. The liberal media disdained conservative voices. The illiberal media had set out to silence them. Its pretext was that an unregulated press was a danger to democracy. Fake News was an emergency that justified censorship. Stripped of all the niceties, the media responded to losing a democratic election by censoring the press. It launched this attack on the First Amendment under the guise of an institutional monopoly on the press. Only the media gets to decide who is a journalist. Or which outlets have the right to operate. Within a few short years, leftist illiberalism had tossed out support for Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion. Freedom of Assembly came under fire from the Mayor of Portland who attempted to shut down a rally. The assault on Freedom of the Press knocks out the entire First Amendment.