With the downbeat of “Enough with the rallies, Mr. President,” the Star Tribune recently began an editorial that summarily dispensed with one of our most important constitutional rights. Unthinkingly liberal, frequently foolish, sometimes outright embarrassing, the Star Tribune editorial board reached a new and quite dangerous low in its hatred of President Trump.
The putative reason in calling for the end of such gatherings was Trump’s rally the other week in Phoenix. It was a tour de force of honesty. “It’s time to expose the crooked media deceptions,” Mr. Trump said. He added, “They’re very dishonest people.” The Star Tribune daily validates these observations.
The violence after the rally ended came exclusively from Antifa. The false narrative generated by Charlottesville was that a few extremists somehow embodied all Trump supporters. You may have noticed this is never said about Muslims when Islamic terrorists strike. Nor was it said when a Bernie Sanders supporter tried to kill Rep. Steve Scalise and before that, when another actually killed two people in Portland.
When Trump accurately said at the time that there was “violence on both sides” in Charlottesville, he was subjected to one of media’s fiercest, most sustained firestorms.
As we know, he was completely correct, with no less than Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein agreeing about Antifa and their trademark violence. At the time of the editorial, however, media had successfully obscured that fact with a false narrative, hence the Star Tribune’s call for shutting down free speech, political speech, in the name of “public safety.” The editorial notes there were no serious injuries after the Phoenix speech but one can practically read the disappointment between the lines.
The piece is so badly written I can only assume Patricia Lopez penned it.
The newspaper claimed that the rallies “serve little purpose” given that the next presidential election is not until 2020. This misses the very essence of free speech but here was a board that thinks too highly of themselves setting itself up as the arbiter of what rallies should be held, when and for what reasons. They’d have made good Loyalists in 1776.
“Wait until things calm down,” said part of the media that was stirring things up. The single greatest source of division in the country now comes from the mainstream media, impossibly angry to this day that they were unsuccessful in stopping Donald Trump from becoming president. Trump’s rallies are enormously effective and withering in their accurate portrayal of the media captured by the Regressive Left. No wonder the third rate minds on the editorial board would like to see them stop.
The editorial even includes fake news, as if to prove the comprehensively dishonest nature of all things Star Tribune. Falsely, it claimed that the Secret Service’s budget was practically spent because of Trump’s travels, which of course would include rallies. In fact, the Secret Service said the “issue is not one that can be attributed to the current Administration” and that it “has been an ongoing issue for nearly a decade.”
Leave it to the Star Tribune editorial board to limit your constitutional rights while feeding you fake news. If a correction has been issued, I’ve missed it.
Organized opposition on the Regressive Left means that things won’t calm down, a constant state of boil being the goal. The Star Tribune launched a war on the First Amendment by endorsing what is known as the heckler’s veto, where one or a few can negate the free speech rights of many others. The Supreme Court has uniformly and consistently rejected this idea.
The Star Tribune recently announced that it was collaborating with the far left special interest group “ProPublica” in seeking out and destroying “hate speech.” There is no such thing in American law and recently the Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed this in its “Slants” ruling. These are political goals advanced by dangerous idealogues masquerading as an impartial newspaper.
Media are in no position to give dispensation, or condemnation, as to what is or isn’t permissible speech. Everyone, not just editorial boards, is free to find some speech obnoxious, repulsive or anything else. But no one, so far, has any standing to say that that speech must not be allowed.
The stakes are rather high for the future of the country. We see far too often individuals in Europe being prosecuted for opinions the authorities have declared off limits. Corporate media, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other internet platforms are controlled by people who would like to bring this totalitarian approach to free speech to America.
Pretentiously, after last year’s election the “Amazon Washington Post” developed it’s own tagline “democracy dies in darkness.” But that isn’t entirely true, as the Star Tribune’s editorial and ongoing war on free speech demonstrates.
Democracy can die in the open, in the light and with the advocates of its murder thinking themselves deserving of approval.
Resist.
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In addition to Alpha News, John Gilmore is also a contributor to The Hill. He is the founder and executive director of Minnesota Media Monitor.™ He blogs at MinnesotaConservatives.org and is on Twitter under @Shabbosgoy.
With respect to last Sunday’s column, Gilmore would like to thank Cole Mathisen, for reasons well known to him.
John Gilmore
John Gilmore is an author, freelance writer & former opinion columnist for Alpha News. He blogs at minnesotaconservatives.org & is @Shabbosgoy on Twitter