Outsourcing the Erosion of First Two Amendments

The MSM and the Left went bonkers again last week when the White House barred CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins from a Rose Garden event after Collins blurted out a staccato of questions at a news conference with EC president Jean-Claude Juncker.  The subject of the press conference was the resolution of tariffs between the US and the EC but Collins refused to leave and shouted out a number of off-topic questions about Michael Cohen.   I do not agree with the White House barring her but It’s also the case that Trump is being treated by the MSM in a completely different manner than Barack Obama was.   The MSM seized on the response to the White House as yet another indication that Trump is hostile to a free press. 

Leaving aside the question of whether an independent press exists anymore, the Collins incident is an appropriate jumping off point to talk about the indirect ways in which the Left continues to violate the spirit of Constitutional guarantees.  The Left really doesn’t like the 1^st Amendment and the 2^nd Amendment.   But it has had little luck denting them directly, so it has turned to a new tactic.

It outsources it. If you can’t do it yourself, find someone to do it for you.

And it has worked.

Over the past few years, the Left has attacked religious freedom in the courts, and it is openly contemptuous of Christianity.   It has brought lawsuits against Little Sisters of the Poor, Hobby Lobby and the cake bakers for not knuckling under to their demands.   But it has had a bad run of luck using the courts directly to force believers into subordinating their loyalties to the State.

But the Left has been more successful at chipping away at Constitutional protections by recruiting allies.

While the Left howled at Trump for banning the rude, out-of-line Collings, Twitter and Facebook have purportedly “shadow banned” conservatives, either curtailing where they show up in feeds, or in the case of Twitter, dropping their followers.   There have been other reports of users being flagged for “hate speech” for voicing opposition to Muslim immigration or gay marriage.  Increasingly, social media is becoming a more important platform than the MSM.   So shutting down particular points of view may carry more import than banning a single rude cub reporter.  But because the management and staff of the social media giants are merely allied with big government progressives and are not government, they are largely free to insult notions of free speech and stifle speech they don’t like.  Government can’t lay siege on free speech but others can.

It has worked wonderfully for the Left in academia.  “Safe spaces” have proliferated.  Schools have imposed “free speech zones.”   Universities have set up hot lines to report offensive speech.  They have permitted hecklers and disrupters to shut down conservative speakers.  Much has been written about on this topic, so I won’t delve deeply here.  Suffice it to say, with a few exceptions (The University of Chicago, I am proud to say, being one of them), most colleges have been willing allies in the Left’s attempt to curtail free speech rights.

Nongovernment entities have similarly stepped in to assist government impinge on 2^nd Amendment rights.   Barack Obama tried to circumvent Congress in a number of ways in his zeal to take away 2^nd Amendment rights.  He issued executive orders placing restrictions on ammunition.  He attempted to cut off financing to the arms industry by “operation chokepoint” which subjected banks that loaned money to firms in that industry to a higher level of scrutiny and possible criticism.

Obama’s leaving office didn’t end it.  Since the Parkland shooting, Dick’s has stopped selling “assault-style” weapons and destroyed the ones it had in stock.  Walmart announced that it would stop selling guns to anyone under 21 (never mind the anomaly that a 20 year old could do a tour of duty in Afghanistan and prevented from buying a weapon).   Citibank and Bank of America announced that they would no longer lend to firms in the arms industry.   Now, thought, at least we know where the Left is headed with guns.   Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens argued for the abolition of the 2^nd Amendment in a NTY op-ed piece earlier this year. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/john-paul-stevens-repeal-second-amendment.html)

In the interim, they will try to water it down with “commonsense gun control” and by enlisting their corporate partners to make it difficult to exercise the right to bear arms.

Even though Ms. Collins needs to learn some manners and something about protocol, the White House should not have banned her from the next event.   But we also need to be honest about private companies and institutions taking away rights otherwise guaranteed under the Constitution.  The same people that gripe about NFL owners punishing players for exercising their free speech rights during the national anthem are fine with Walmart and Dick’s deny citizens’ access to arms guaranteed under the 2^nd Amendment.

 Obama’s hot mic comment about people “bitterly clinging to their guns and religion” had real meaning.  While the Constitution has made it difficult to snuff out guns and religion in our society, the Left has been successful in recruiting allies to try to do it indirectly.