- BitsBlog - https://bitsblog.com -

Gingrich And Free Speech

Captain Ed…. [1]

Newt Gingrich has tried to position himself as the premiere conservative candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential primaries, a mission made easier by the list of front-runners already in the race. However, he may have taken a stumble yesterday when he posited that freedom of speech may have to be curtailed in order to win the war on terrorism: [2]

A former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, is causing a stir by proposing that free speech may have to be curtailed in order to fight terrorism.
“We need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we actually literally lose a city, which I think could literally happen in the next decade if we’re unfortunate,” Mr. Gingrich said Monday night during a speech in New Hampshire. “We now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren’t for the scale of the threat.”

Speaking at an award dinner billed as a tribute to crusaders for the First Amendment, Mr. Gingrich, who is considering a run for the White House in 2008, painted an ominous picture of the dangers facing America.

“This is a serious, long-term war,” the former speaker said, according an audio excerpt of his remarks made available yesterday by his office. “Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people.”

Gingrich has an odd sense of place for his new campaign crusade. At a dinner that honored people who took risks to maintain our First Amendment freedoms, he basically told them that their work was in vain. To add even more confusion, Gingrich also took the opportunity to bash John McCain for his own attack on political speech with the BCRA — and rightfully so.

Gingrich left the specifics out of the proposal, which makes this somewhat vague. Does Newt propose limiting political speech that supports radical Islamists? Does he want to restrict the exercise of religion by Muslims in radical mosques? Could he be proposing both? Until we get more specific about the restrictions, specific criticism will be difficult to stage, and perhaps that’s his intent.

However, it isn’t difficult to defend the First Amendment in principle, and we need to do that now. The First Amendment has always had an exception for speech that incites a movement to violently overthrow the government of the United States, and I’m all for enforcing that. However, if Gingrich believes that we can win the war by silencing American citizens, then he is fighting the wrong war on behalf of the wrong principles. All he is doing is replacing one bogeyman (political corruption) for another (terrorism); in essence, he’s no different from McCain.

I guess I’m not as alarmed as Ed, though I am a bit curious about what Ed calls the lack of specifics.  I’m willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt until those specifics come out.

One of the specifics that seems to get right by Ed, is the issue of this kind of thing affecting American citizens, specifically.  Is Gingrich, in fact, talking about American Citizens, or is he talking about Non-citizens, to whom the left has been trying to attribute constitutionally guaranteed rights, which until recently have only BEEN guarenteed to citizens? There’s a big difference, and it seems to me the latter wherein lies the majority of the kind of thing Gingrich is talking about, or so it seems to me.

Gingrich is correct that there is a serious threat, and he’s right to concern himself with it. He is, as few others are, famous for an active mind and a willingness to ‘blue sky’ about issues, as he has here.  If we assume Gingrich is talking about non-citizens, here, the general thoughts tend to run parallel to my post of the other day [3], as regards the Patriot act.

I’ll be interested to see what else he has to say on the topic, before I make a more cut and dried comment.

I should note that one of the reasons I’m willing to give this guy a little slack on quotes, is that I wonder about the context.  Consider that we’ve heard little form the man for years. Now suddenly that he’s become a background player, he gets all this press attention? Sorry, but I can’t help but wonder if the overly eager press is an indication that his words were being taken out of context.  It’s always a consideration when story like this pops up, particularly when a Republican is considering a Presidential run.

As I say, I will be interested to see what the next couple of weeks brings regarding all of this.  I will withhold judgment on the matter until then.