My Newswithviews column this week, “Republican Cowards,” had to do with… well, Republican cowards.
I got a lot of emails about this, almost all of them enthusiastically agreeing with me. But there was one bad apple in the barrel.
This guy said he hoped the FBI would swoop down on me for sayin’ these bad, bad things. Free speech is one thing, he said, but… this? Way out of line! You just can’t say things like that!!! Unless, of course, you’re a Democrat and the president is Donald Trump. Then there’s absolutely nothing you can say that’s out of bounds.
I grew up thinking I lived in a country in which I had a God-given right to free speech, that the government had no power to take away from me. Why did I think that? Because everybody said so. Because the First Amendment to the Constitution, the law of the land, said so. Right there in black and white, for anyone to see.
Now we’ve got all these characters out there–almost all of them Democrats–who think the government should restrict the content of Americans’ speech. They think you should be free to say only things approved by the government. And woe unto you if you don’t!
This is alien to America, it is not American, it has crept into our culture from somewhere outside, then hatches into a parasite that attacks us from within.
But hey! That’s what President Trump’s no-longer-in-office “impeachment” trial is about, isn’t it? Show the proles you can’t buck the ruling class, even if you’re a billionaire like Donald Trump. Throw a scare into us! If they can do this to him, what chance have I got?
How things change! When I was undergoing “orientation” to prepare for Rutgers University, every other word out of their mouths was about the glory, the glamor, and the absolute sheer necessity for… Dissent! It was an end in itself, it was the highest civic virtue, and anyone who doesn’t dissent is a villain and a dastard. Etc., etc.
Let’s see how much dissent they tolerate, now that they’ve got their monkey in the White House.