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Newt Gingrich Says Free Speech May Be Forfeit
At a dinner honoring those who stand up for freedom of speech, former House speaker Newt Gingrich issued his opinion that the idea of free speech in the U.S. needs to be re-examined in the interest of fighting terrorism. Gingrich said a "different set of rules" may be needed to reduce terrorists' ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message. The article has few details of what Gingrich actually said beyond the summary above, and no analysis pointing out how utterly clueless the suggestion is given the Internet's nature and trans-national reach.
FP
I can't find a way to mod Newt Gingrich down as "Troll", "Flamebait", or "Redundant". Can someone help me?
Ninjas use italics.
People need to understand that the reason we have freedom of speech and the right to bear arms is so that the people of this country can, if necessary, reshape the government WITH FORCE.
-Bill
Gingrich holds no elected office.
In short: I will defend to the death the right of Mr. Gringich to make a total ass out of himself, even when he's going directly against my cause. That is the beauty of Free Speech.
Free speech is also about allowing me to tell Mr. Gringich to go fuck himself.
I read the internet for the articles.
It's uncanny how recent law changes and the subsequent cries for more control and less freedom in the US mimic the changes that take place in "Animal Farm"...
It appears that Newt is just another pig, and the American constituency are the remainder of the barnyard animals. You need to find some mules with voices to nip this in the bud before it goes any further.
Why do we let them be in charge?
Terrorism is bad. It really is. It does not follow that it is so bad that we need to re-examin our fundemental rights.
Far more people die at the hands of run-of-the-mill criminals, in automobile accidents, of heart disease, and of AIDS. The number of Americans who were killed by terrorists last year was laughably small (Even our president calls those guys in Iraq insurgents and not terrorists, just in case you wanted to lump them in).
So why give up free speech? Privacy? Protection against unreasonable search and seisure? To stop the "scourge" of terrorism that didn't bomb a single target you can actually name last year?
These guys want power over you. They want to arrest you for mere suspision, they want to detain you for disagreeing, they want to hold you as long as they want without a trial, and they want to beat the confesion out of you when time alone doesn't make you change your tune. Then they want ot take the false info you gave them and proclaim "Look! We stopped this terrorist!"
Don't give it to them. Don't give them your rights. Anyone who says you need to make that kind of sacrifice, he's the one you want to kick out of office.
TW
As usual, there is more than meets the eye, especially when the original article is from the "Union Leader"..
From a fairly robust article in the Boston Globe I dug up with a quick Google News search for "Gingrich":
MANCHESTER, N.H. --Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Monday that First Amendment rights need to be expanded and cited the elimination of McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms as one solution.
Noting the thwarted London terrorist attacks this summer, Gingrich said there should be a Geneva Convention for such actions that makes those people subject to "a totally different set of rules."
From this Globe article (hardly a conservative-friendly paper) it appears Gingrich's "totally different set of rules" has not to do with freedom of speech, but with the Geneva Convention as applied to terrorists, which is a whole 'nother bag of worms in and of itself; however, the question remains as to how the OP managed to spin what seem to be two separate points into one decidedly negative message.
Does anyone have the actual transcript of his speech there so we can figure out who's full of BS and who's not? Think about it -- if the man is even THINKING of running for President in '08, he certainly isn't going to get elected if he runs on a platform of RESTRICTING basic freedom of speech.
The intellectual laziness of current conventional political thinkers really galls me. One thing that all of the Founding Fathers agreed on is that a free society presents some difficulties and challenges, but that it's well worth the extra effort freedom requires.
It may be that to maintain our liberty we will be more vulnerable to terrorist attack. Well, that's a price of freedom, but one that with a sensible and progressive foreign policy we can attenuate.
All of the Founding Fathers knew that a free society is inconvenient for our leaders. It makes it a little harder to govern a nation that is free to say and do what they want as long as it doesn't step on the toes of others. It's one of the reasons Jefferson, Washington and others maintained that we've got to keep religion out of the government, because religion proposes easy answers, shortcuts if you will, to get people to behave a certain way.
But the Great Men of the Enlightenment knew that the price of being unwilling to do the hard work of Liberty is darkness for all mankind.
There was a time that America's willingness to work at staying free was a beacon to the world. It provided encouragement to young men and women who lived in Totalitarian societies and kept a flame of hope alive for those who suffered under tyrants. The desire of lazy leaders to skip over the inconveniencies of things like warrants, habeas corpus and free speech, along with the notion that the natural resources of the world are ours to command, have turned us into the object of hatred instead of the hope of the world, which is the natural place of a free people.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Actually, one could view the Bill of Rights as our own "Tough Guy Manifesto", thus:
1) You can't tell me what to believe, or make me go home and shut up.
2) I'll go armed and defend myself, thank you.
3) You can't make me let someone else live in my house.
4) This is MY house; if you can't demonstrate a compelling need to snoop, stay the fuck out.
5) This is MY shit; keep your greedy hands off it. And don't go accusing me of Evil without evidence.
6) If you've got evidence, lay it on the table. And no fair getting a confession by pitchforking me in the ass.
7) I ain't guilty just on YOUR say-so.
8) You can't keep me in jail just because you want to.
9) As to the rest of my life, you can't tell me what to do or not do.
10) And neither can your big fat uncle in Washington.
Yeah, the Founding Fathers framed it in far more polite language, but the intent is the same. They understood standing up for yourself and not letting the gov't push you around -- your own or anyone else's. That was, after all, what the War for Independence was all about.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
However, we do know from past experiences that Newt Gingrich doesn't believe in Free Speech. He spearheaded and passed the Telecommunications Decency Act of 1994 if you recall, which made it a federal crime punishable by prison and a $200,000 fine to transmit anything offensive over an electronic medium.
When interviewed he openly stated that he knew it was unconstitutional, and that he didn't believe in free speech.
The law was stricken, not for being unconstitutional, but for being unenforcible.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
More to the point, we already lost a city this decade - New Orleans. It wasn't lost to some surprise terrorist attack noone foresaw, either. Talk about being behind the curve.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I'm inclined to disagree with Newt on this and at the same time I want to do everything possible to get the barbaric bastards who keep killing innocent people. It's tough and it's only going to get tougher. The world is about to get really scary, I'm afraid.
Of course we want to stop the barbarians from taking over. After all even though Tacitus' "let them hate us so long as they fear us" has a terrifying echo in today's politics, but then look what happened to Rome in its quest to stop the barbari and what happened to the world when the barbarians won. Neither prospect is something we want for our future.
Personally I see a direct correlation in the methods used to deal with extreme violent racist groups in the US (like the Klan, the American Nazis, etc and their descendants)and the means to destroy Al Qaeda and their ilk without destroying the very thing we are fighting for. Even Bush claims that Al Qaeda hates freedom and that our freedom needs to be defended, and to a certain extent he is correct on that although he's clearly not properly defending freedom. If we lose our freedom, our openness, our ability to accept and assimilate immigrants, we will cease to be the country that we once were, and never become what we were meant to be. If we are no longer America we are no longer on the right side of the struggle. If we are no longer America the terrorists win because their goal in this war is to destroy what we are and replace it with an autocracy, preferably a theocracy, and to manipulate us with their terrorist acts.
In this country there are a lot of groups preaching hate and violence, just like Al Qaeda. They even advocate violent overthrow of the government, which is often the limit set for acts of expression becoming criminal acts. In many other countries, Germany for instance, the mere presence of these groups and what they say would be illegal. But in our country it is different. Our country was founded on Enlightenment philosophy, like the famous saying of Voltaire's* "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." This means that some people will express things that are distasteful to us, even evil in our eyes, but the fact they think these things is not itself a crime although some acts they might commit in the context of such beliefs definitely are.
In any case, we have found with other groups that it actually serves society's interest to allow these groups to freely express their opinions. There is the philosophical and educational benefit that these viewpoints are then out in the open and therefore can be openly rebutted, and that perhaps those individuals might change their minds with the right kind of rebuttal (whereas if they hid their ignorance and their "shameful" beliefs no one would be able to show them why they are wrong). But more than that, from a law enforcement standpoint if people say what they believe then we know who they are and can watch what they do. When people believe in violence and say so they may be more closely observed so the actual acts of violence might be thwarted. Their groups can be infiltrated more easily when they are more open about what they do, and this is how we reduced significantly the impact of our own homegrown terrorists.
I hate to resort to analogues from movies, but there is a scene in the original "Planet of the Apes" where a kind of reversal of the above takes place. The "subversive" chimpanzees are espousing "heretical" views and Dr. Zaius says "let them talk" in response to the members of the council that want to force the chimpanzees to be silent. In that case there was no freedom of speech but even then the benefit of allowing people who you want to quash to speak was recognized, if only from the standpoint of giving them enough rope to hang themselves. In our case the only heresy we should legitimately wish to quash is that of intolerance and violence. Even so by allowing these groups to speak freely everyone gets to know who they are and