Obama’s Folly: Censoring Americans

Faster, Please! » Obama’s Folly: Censoring Americans by Michael Ledeen

Hobbesian rules of suppressing language they don’t want to hear.

“For,” Hobbes wrote in his masterpiece, Leviathan, “the actions of men come from their opinions, and the way to govern men’s actions…is to govern their opinions.”

Therefore, the ruler must impose a rigorous censorship on all publications. He must select the censor — in Hobbes’s words, “who shall examine the doctrines of all books before they are published”

No doubt all leaders have wished that one time or another that they could simply ban offensive or annoying ideas from the minds of their citizens, and even democratic leaders have tried to eliminate such words from the public square. “Hate speech” is now banned by force of law in many democratic countries, and, if its definition is sufficiently expansive, can be used to silence opponents. We see this at work in some of the recent efforts to silence administration critics by calling them “racists.” Racism falls under the “hate speech” rubric, therefore “racists” can be silenced.

Politicians aren’t the only ones who followed the Hobbesian rules of suppressing language they don’t want to hear. “Educators” have been doing the same thing for decades, with the foreseeable results: an increasingly ignorant population, with real knowledge replaced with politically correct stereotypes and myths. Have a look at this scary report.

Efforts of this sort usually don’t work very well in America, although they have been more successful in recent years. We’re very fractious people, we love to argue, and we don’t take kindly to efforts to muzzle us. Even newspapers and journalists who are normally sympathetic to President Obama get angry when they are locked out of major events, as they were at the nuclear security summit in Washington. This prompted the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank to erupt: “World leaders arriving in Washington for President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit must have felt for a moment that they had instead been transported to Soviet-era Moscow.”

John Derbyshire also pointed out:

Barack Obama's much-mocked speech last Sunday. Speaking at Hampton University, a historically black college in Virginia, the president said, quote: "You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations … information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation … All of this is putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy …"

...The same blinkered mentality displayed by the president shows up in an article Elena Kagan published in the University of Chicago Law Review back in 1996, title, "Private Speech, Public Purpose: the Role of Government Motive in First Amendment Doctrine." Kagan argues that Congress can pass laws restricting freedom of speech if it does so with good intentions, the meaning of the word "good" there to be interpreted, of course, by left-liberal law professors like Elena Kagan and Barack Obama.

This is a horrible and poisonous doctrine. That it should have been offered by a candidate to the Supreme Court, and endorsed by the U.S. president, reminds us — as if we needed reminding! — that these are times in which we must hold on tight to our liberties, if we are not to lose them for ever to logic-chopping law professors.