“Liberals”, 2004: “Question authority! Free speech is *the* most essential right!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Progressives”, 2019: “Free speech is too dangerous for people without tin ‘journalist’ badges to be using”
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In the old Soviet Union, citizens used to joke that when a shortage of butter was anticipated, the state media would start running stories on how *bad* butter was for you.
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I couldn’t help but think about this over the weekend. And not *just* because our media is resembling the old Soviet media more and more, either.
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Following on the NYTimes’ op-ed <\/a>on free speech being too “dangerous” for mere proles, NPR’s “On the Media” – which is to the big media what a fawning mall cop is to your local blue-and-white – took up the same refrain<\/a>, giving Marantz a full hour to reiterate his claim (and in so doing giving a whole new spin on “physician, heal thyself”). …it’s all a rationalization for turning speech over to the “professionals”, to whittle that right (or “right”) down to a size that proles can handle. And we’re seeing a *lot* of this lately; how checks and balances are just tooooo haaaaard, and the Bill of Rights is just tooooo complex for the herd to deal with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Makes me think of Soviet Radio. Apropos nothing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Just saying, Democrats – I liked y’all better 15 years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Liberals”, 2004: “Question authority! Free speech is *the* most essential right!” “Progressives”, 2019: “Free speech is too dangerous for people without tin ‘journalist’ badges to be using” In the old Soviet Union, citizens used to joke that when a shortage of butter was anticipated, the state media would start running stories on how *bad* butter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,30,4,130,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lefty-alt-media","category-liberty","category-media","category-tc-media-bias","category-liberal-tyranny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72406,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72405\/revisions\/72406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Oh, they wrap it in a dirty-sounding word, “absolutism” – but like the NYTimes piece… <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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