The View From 1776

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Evidently I failed to make my principal point clear in my earlier posting, Orwell’s Dictionary, which was:

“Today’s politically-correct NewSpeak in the United States works in a similar fashion to Big Brother’s NewSpeak, not to describe events, but to suppress discussion of the opposing side of a question. ”

Reader David Airth posted the following comment:

I am sorry to see that you have found it fit, here, to waste time on such a person as Ann Coulter, a kind of a degenerate of the news media. She writes and speaks well but her message is garbage. In your support of her I hear the pot calling the kettle black. She is the mud racker. Her kind introduced the technique. Now that its is been used against her she is crying - Mummy!

Speaking of Big Brother NewSpeak, this is a technique the Bush administration has been using to befuddle and cower many of its citizens. If you are going to call a duck a duck please don’t leave anybody out.

My reactions are the following:

First, the point to be made about NewSpeak is, not whether the stifled messages are good or bad, but that a foundation stone of a constitutional republic, a principle to which even liberal-Progressives at least give lip service, is the First Amendment’s right of free speech.  Most commentators, beginning with the 1735 case of John Peter Zinger, have stoutly defended freedom of the press, which means the right of individuals to publish or to say things that others may find objectionable, the legal remedy being suit for slander or libel if things published or spoken are untrue and if injury results.

This English-American principle goes back much further in history.  Its most celebrated expression was John Milton’s 1644 “Areopagitica,” in which he argued that Parliament should not have the power of prior restraint, that is, the right to censor and or prohibit the printing of political or other views.

Let’s stipulate that the First Amendment applies to government, not private, censorship.  But let’s also note that every school in the land is financed to some extent by taxpayers’ funds, from the Federal, state, or local levels.  Our schools are quick to prohibit any message that suggests a connection with Christianity or the Jewish religion (not, of course, the secular, materialistic, non-religious, ethnic Judaism that characterizes Hollywood and most of the media today).  Whenever such cases have been taken to Federal courts the schools have almost always lost and been compelled to permit equal voice to non-liberals.

Second, Mr. Airth is correct in describing Ann Coulter as a muck-raker, though not in the sense I suspect he intended.  The term muck-raker was not a pejorative applying to the writer, but to the writer’s subject.  It came into use in the 1890s to describe “McClure’s Magazine” investigative reporting articles written by Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens.  They targeted such things as monopoly abuses by Standard Oil Company and unsafe and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago packing plants.

Ann Coulter follows in that tradition.  No one has ever sued her, because everything she writes or says is substantiated by the public records.  Liberal-Progressives (their new terminology for socialism) hate her because she has a humorous way of eviscerating them.  Miss Coulter has not, as Mr. Airth implies, cried, “Mummy!” because people have attacked her.  In the UConn situation, she was not permitted to speak because of loud music and heckling, which university officials made no attempt to defuse.

To repeat, the issue is not that her views were attacked, but that no one in the audience was permitted to hear her views.

Liberal-Progressives, needless to say, have no objection to Michael Moore’s attacking everything and everybody not identified with socialism.  You can be certain that, had conservative students attempted to drown out Mr. Moore’s presentation with loud music, campus police would immediately have hauled them off to the slammer.

Refusing to permit Ann Coulter to speak, but welcoming Michael Moore is what I mean by today’s NewSpeak.  It is a form of censorship, definitely not an example of freedom of speech.

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