The following weekend, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, declared that Fox wasn’t actually a news organization at all: “The way we—the president looks at it and we look at it, is, it is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective.”39 Obama adviser David Axelrod agreed: “A lot of their news programming, it’s really not news. It’s pushing a point of view.”40 He added a threat, telling a CNN reporter: “Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way. We’re not going to treat them that way.”41
The substance of the threat manifested itself quickly. Although Axelrod said that Obama spokesmen would “appear on shows and participate” on Fox despite the administration’s criticism of the network, they didn’t.42 Fox itself reported the same weekend that Emanuel and Axelrod delivered their remarks on the Sunday morning news shows: “Despite calls to the White House this week, the administration did not offer a guest for this weekend’s ‘Fox News Sunday’ to talk about Dunn’s comments, although administration officials appeared on all four Sunday morning shows to speak on various issues.”43
Dunn and Emanuel had emphasized that they were enunciating the administration’s position, and Obama himself soon made that clear, saying on October 21 that he didn’t consider Fox a news organization either: “If media is operating, basically, as a talk-radio format, then that’s one thing. And if it’s operating as a news outlet then that’s another. But it’s not something I’m losing a lot of sleep over.”44
Maybe he wasn’t, but free Americans ought to have been losing sleep over the implications of his war on Fox News for the freedom of speech. In November 2009 Obama’s White House actually warned a Democratic strategist to stop appearing on Fox—or else. According to the Los Angeles Times, “shortly after an appearance on Fox,” the strategist—who remained anonymous out of fear of Obama—“got a phone call from a White House official telling him not to be a guest on the show again. The call had an intimidating tone, he said.” The Obama official told him: “We better not see you on again.” Implicit but unmistakable was the threat that “clients might stop using you if you continue.”
In strong-arming Democratic consultants to ban Fox, the Los Angeles Times explained: “Obama’s White House sought to isolate it and make it look more partisan.” Pat Caddell, Jimmy Carter’s former pollster, said that Democratic spokesmen had told him that Obama’s White House had warned them to stay away from Fox. “I find it appalling,” said Caddell. “When the White House gets in the business of suppressing dissent and comment, particularly from its own party, it hurts itself.”45
Indeed. When the president of the United States enjoyed the support of 80 to 90 percent of those who reported the news, and then he directed his energy and made full use of his bully pulpit to discredit and marginalize the remaining 10 to 20 percent, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that he simply was not a strong supporter of the right to dissent.
Without Fox News, what outlet would those who dissented from Obama’s policies have? The answer to that was the Internet—but the Obama administration had plans to take care of that also.
CASS SUNSTEIN: FREE SPEECH CZAR?
In April 2009, Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV) introduced into his Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation a “cybersecurity” bill that contained this language: “The President may… order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic to and from any compromised Federal government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network.”
Compromised in what way? By whose determination? This appeared to give the president power to shut down any portion of the Internet that displeased him. But after a public outcry, the bill was revised to read in this way: the president, in view of “strategic national interests involving compromised Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network,” may “direct the national response to the cyber threat” along with “relevant industry sectors.” It still gives the president the authority to direct the “timely restoration of the affected critical infrastructure information system or network.”46
This still appears to give the president the sole authority to decide when and whether certain information systems or networks would ever come back online. A conflict with the First Amendment and a dangerous abridgement of the freedom of speech? Sure. But with a compliant Supreme Court behind Obama and an indifferent public before him, what would stop such a measure from becoming law?
Nor was this an isolated initiative. In August 2009 Computerworld reported that “the Department of Homeland Security’s Privacy Office has approved the controversial searches, copying and retention of laptops, PDAs, and other digital devices without cause at U.S. borders.”47 The problem with such sweeping measures was that while they were intended to address security issues, they could all too easily be used to stifle political dissent.
But surely Obama wasn’t interested in doing that, was he? If he wasn’t, he gave supporters of free speech no comfort when he appointed Cass Sunstein, a professor of law at Harvard University, to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
With conservative blogs serving as key sources of information for Obama’s opponents, it wasn’t hard to imagine which blogs Sunstein might think needed to be corralled. In his book On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, which was published in September 2009, Sunstein complained that “people’s beliefs are a product of social networks working as echo chambers in which false rumors spread like wildfire.” This problem was squarely the fault of the unfettered Internet: “We hardly need to imagine a world, however, in which people and institutions are being harmed by the rapid spread of damaging falsehoods via the Internet. We live in that world. What might be done to reduce the harm?” Sunstein recommended changing libel laws to make it easier to convict someone of libel. “A ‘chilling effect’ on those who would spread destructive falsehoods can be an excellent idea.” Why would such a chill be so urgently needed? Because “falsehoods can undermine democracy itself.”48
New York Post reporter Kyle Smith observed: “What Sunstein means by that sentence is pretty clear: He doesn’t like so-called false rumors about his longtime University of Chicago friend and colleague, Barack Obama.”49 And he means to stop them not just by the compelling force of sweet reason, but by the force of law. But who would decide, in such an eventuality, what was a false rumor and what was legitimate political dissent? Why, the very ones from whom the dissenters were dissenting. And that would be the end of the freedom of speech in America.
In initiatives to block free speech on the Internet, Sunstein might find an ally in another Obama appointee, Attorney General Eric Holder, who said on NPR’s Morning Edition as far back as 1999 that the Internet would have to be restricted: “It is gonna be a difficult thing,” said Holder, “but it seems to me that if we can come up with reasonable restrictions, reasonable regulations in how people interact on the Internet, that is something that the Supreme Court and the courts ought to favorably look at.”50
Now’s his chance.
With Sunstein’s friend the president saying that he didn’t want “the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking,” in the first year of the Obama administration there was nothing farfetched about concerns over the very survival of the right of free speech.
OBAMA MOVES TO SHUT DOWN FREE SPEECH
The Obama administration’s apparent disdain for free speech and dissent from his policies wasn’t limited to rhetoric alone, or to campaigns against dissenters in the mainstream media, or even to the occasional resort to strong-arm tactics. He also moved on the legislative front. In the first months of Barack Obama’s presidency, the new administration indicated in numerous ways, large and small, that it was hardly a champion of the robust debate and hearty rough-and-tumble involved in defending one’s views in the public square. On the contrary, it gave numerous indications that dispensing with the freedom of speech altogether would suit it j
ust fine.
An especially Orwellian touch came on August 4, 2009, just days before Obama, Pelosi, and Hoyer spoke out against dissent. The White House blog “The Briefing Room” posted an item asking Americans to report on “casual conversation” that included “disinformation” or anything “fishy” said about the health-care debate: “There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to [email protected].”51
The desired effect of such a request? A chilling assault on free speech. Sen. John Cornyn saw exactly that: “I am not aware of any precedent for a President asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White House for pure political speech that is deemed ‘fishy’ or otherwise inimical to the White House’s political interests.… As Congress debates health care reform and other critical policy matters, citizen engagement must not be chilled by fear of government monitoring the exercise of free speech rights.”52
Yet that kind of monitoring seemed to be exactly the administration’s agenda. With the mainstream media solidly in liberal Democratic control, talk radio and the Internet became the primary sources of news and perspectives that differed from the White House party line—and so the administration moved quickly against those two remaining outlets for free discussion and unfettered inquiry.
The blog RedState.com revealed in August 2009 that the Obama administration was using the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to gather data on free citizens: “The NTIA is now requiring internet providers to give the government ‘average revenue per end user and data regarding type, technical specification or location of broadband infrastructure,’ i.e. your home address, IP address, how much you pay, and where the connection is at your house.” That meant that “we have a White House asking neighbors to turn in neighbors by forwarding emails—some of which will contain IP address information. And we have the White House demanding internet providers provide them with the home addresses corresponding to those IP addresses.”53
Faced with a public outcry over all this, Obama quickly began backtracking. In the wake of the branding of dissenters as “un-American” by Pelosi and Hoyer, White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton said: “The President thinks that if people want to come and have a spirited debate about health care, a real vigorous conversation about it, that’s a part of the American tradition and he encourages that, because people do have questions and concerns.… And so if people want to come and have their concerns and their questions answered, the President thinks that’s important.”54
A lot had changed for the man who just three days before this had said that he didn’t want “the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking.” Or maybe he was just saving face. For he continued his assault on the freedoms of Americans: The Washington Times reported in September 2009 that “the White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama’s promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet.”55
Big Brother was watching and waiting.
Why did Obama do all this? The Obama administration had made plain that there was no war on terror, no war on Islamic jihad. As a matter of fact, the word “jihad” had been banned from government lexicon. So why all the spying on American citizens?
And more was in the offing.
LEGISLATING FREE SPEECH AWAY
On April 2, 2009, Rep. Linda T. Sanchez (D-CA) introduced into the House the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, named after a teenage girl who committed suicide after being hounded on the online social networking site MySpace by a friend’s mother, who was posing as a teenage boy.56 The bill accordingly declares that “whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”57
The free-speech implications are obvious. Who decides what constitutes coercion, intimidation, and harassment? Who determines that sufficient emotional distress has been inflicted upon a plaintiff so as to justify the imprisonment of the defendant for two years?
Attorney and blogger Eugene Volokh painted a troubling scenario: “I try to coerce a politician into voting a particular way, by repeatedly blogging (using a hostile tone) about what a hypocrite / campaign promise breaker / fool / etc. he would be if he voted the other way. I am transmitting in interstate commerce a communication with the intent to coerce using electronic means (a blog) ‘to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior’—unless, of course, my statements aren’t seen as ‘severe,’ a term that is entirely undefined and unclear. Result: I am a felon, unless somehow my ‘behavior’ isn’t ‘severe.’”58
Representative Sanchez insisted that such concerns were unfounded. “Congress has no interest in censoring speech,” she asserted, “and it will not do so if it passes this bill. Put simply, this legislation would be used as a tool for a judge and jury to determine whether there is significant evidence to prove that a person ‘cyberbullied’ another. That is: did they have the required intent, did they use electronic means of communication, and was the communication severe, hostile, and repeated. So—bloggers, emailers, texters, spiteful exes, and those who have blogged against this bill have no fear—your words are still protected under the same American values.”59
Subcommittee hearings were held on the bill on September 30, 2009; it is still under consideration and could become the law of the land.60
NET NEUTRALITY
It sounds like a grand, noble initiative: a “free and open Internet.”61 The stated idea of net neutrality is for the government to forbid Internet service providers from doing anything to filter or block traffic on the Internet.
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, who went to Harvard Law School with Barack Obama, came out in September 2009 in favor of the broadest possible net-neutrality legislation. Genachowski explained why net neutrality was needed: “The Internet’s creators didn’t want the network architecture—or any single entity—to pick winners and losers,” he asserted. “The principles that will protect the open Internet are an essential step to maximize investment and innovation in the network and on the edge of it—by establishing rules of the road that incentivize competition, empower entrepreneurs, and grow the economic pie to the benefit of all.”62
Who could object? As it turned out, lovers of freedom could—and did. While net-neutrality advocates advertised their plan as one that would ensure a “free and open Internet,” in reality net neutrality was an attempt to limit the freedom of Internet users by subjecting what had always been a free-market give-and-take to government regulation: the FCC would control how all information reached personal computers.
“Few proposals in Washington have been sold employing such deceptive language—and that’s saying something,” observed James G. Lakely, who is the codirector of the Center on the Digital Economy for the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank. “But few public policy ideas can boast the unashamedly socialist pedigree of net neutrality.” Lakely pointed out that “the modern Internet is a creation of the free market, which has brought about a revolution in communication, free speech, education, and commerce.” But Genachowski, said Lakely, “apparently doesn’t like that. He stated last month the way Internet service providers manage their networks—in response to millions of individual consumer choices—is not sufficiently
‘fair,’ ‘open’ or ‘free.’”
Genachowski’s remedy? Lakely said that he wanted to “claim for the FCC the power to decide how every bit of data is transferred from the Web to every personal computer and handheld device in the nation.”
Lakely noted that net neutrality had strong backers among the Hard Left—backers who were generally more forthright than Genachowski about what the measure was really intended to do: “Eben Moglen’s 2003 treatise The dotCommunist Manifesto is more honest about the thinking behind net neutrality—it’s sprinkled throughout with the language of communism’s great and bloody revolutionaries. The people must ‘struggle’ to ‘wrest from the bourgeoisie, by degrees, the shared patrimony of humankind’ that has been ‘stolen from us under the guise of “intellectual property.’”
Robert W. McChesney, who is the cofounder of Free Press—which Lakely describes as “the leading advocacy group in Washington pushing for net neutrality”—said that net neutrality could accomplish nothing less than Marxist “revolution.” McChesney’s enthusiasm is not misplaced, for net neutrality would do what Marxist revolutions did in Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, and everywhere else they have triumphed: destroy private ownership and private property, transferring control over to the government.
“And in typical Marxist fashion,” Lakely declares, “innocuous words—the language of neutralism and liberty—cloak an agenda that would crush freedom. That’s the agenda President Obama’s FCC is pushing.”63
The Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act. Net neutrality. Cass Sunstein and Eric Holder both on record saying that free speech on the Internet should be restricted. The Obama administration’s agenda for the Internet was clear: in an age in which almost all the mainstream media was in the tank for the Democratic party, and the Internet had become virtually the last redoubt for genuine and robust opposition to the Obama agenda, the brave new president had determined that it must be brought to heel. And he was working hard to make that happen.
Post-American Presidency Page 26