First Amendment In The Crosshairs

For the past week we've been periodically referring to Justice Samuel Alito's recent address to the Federalist Society. Today Jonathan Tobin reminds us of the warning that Alito presented--The pandemic brought an assault on our basic rights:

The usual mainstream-media suspects wasted no time in blasting as inappropriate Samuel Alito’s address last week to the Federalist ­Society. Which is another way of saying they didn’t like what he had to say. The Supreme Court justice warned that “religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right,” that freedom of speech is also ­“becoming a second-tier constitutional right.”

He was exactly right — and his wake-up call was urgently timely: Democrats threaten to “reform” the high court by packing it with liberals, while the pandemic has imposed what Alito called a “stress test” on the Constitution, creating a new ranking order of fundamental rights.

Simply put: Basic respect for some rights is dying.

I think it's no longer arguable that Covid has been used as an excuse to target religion and worship. Now, as if on cue, to confirm everything Alito said, we learn that those fears are definitely NOT overblown. The putative Biden presidency will be appointing anti-First Amendment zealots to influential positions. Jonathan Turley is here to sound the alarm--Biden Taps Anti-Free Speech Figure For Transition Lead On Media Agency:

For those of us who have been critical of the growing anti-free speech movement in the Democratic Party, the Biden transition team just took an ominous turn.  The New York Post reports that Biden tapped Richard Stengel to take the “team lead” position on the US Agency for Global Media, including Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. As I previously addressed in a column, Stengel has been one of the most controversial figures calling for censorship and speech controls. For a president-elect [sic] who just called for everyone to “hear each other,” he picked a top aide who wants to silence many.  Since it would be difficult to select a more anti-free speech figure to address government media policy, one has to assume that Biden will continue the onslaught against this core freedom as president.  This is not the first Biden aide to indicate a crackdown on free speech in the new Administration and Biden himself has called for greater censorship on the Internet.

This seems to be driven by the great Prog Luv Affair with Red China:

These efforts are drawing upon the work of academics who are pushing for greater censorship and speech controls. The Atlantic published an article by Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith and University of Arizona law professor Andrew Keane Woods calling for Chinese style censorship of the internet.  They declared that “in the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong” and “significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with society norms and values.”

Notice how I put the bit about China in red? Clever?

But how do you like the idea of governments playing "a large role" in deciding what society's "norms and values" are? Somehow I get the idea that Goldsmith and Woods are eerily confident that society's "norms and values" will reflect their own norms and values. Huh! Go figure. Where would they get that idea? I suppose it's all part of the Great Reset.

Here's one senator who appears to be an anti-First Amendment enthusiast:

Sen. Blumenthal Urges Mark Zuckerberg to Remove Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Steve Bannon from Facebook