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The Liberal Vice Squad

from the prolific Kevin Williamson at National Review, A Nation of Vice Principals: [1]

Where the Left has power, it will use that power to try to crush dissent, debate, and criticism. It isn’t conservative student groups chasing nonconformist speakers off of college campuses or demanding indoctrination sessions. But it isn’t just the campus P.C. police, either. No, it’s the real police, too.

When the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not ban the showing of a film critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton, practically every Democrat in the country lined up behind efforts to censor that movie, and Harry Reid introduced a bill into the Senate repealing the First Amendment in order to facilitate such censorship. Mrs. Clinton of course supports banning films critical of her, but so does Bernie Sanders. Senator Elizabeth Warren idly dreams of prosecuting corporate executives who think — imagine! — that they can go around “saying whatever they want about Washington policy debates.”

The people who have the audacity to call themselves “liberals” are busily building an emerging police state. Don’t look for the heroic entrepreneurs behind Facebook or Twitter to spread the word about that.

The question is no longer whether conservatives will be marginalized and stigmatized on university campuses but whether Mrs. Clinton and Harry Reid will succeed in having them imprisoned for their views. The question is no longer one of manners and intellectual honesty on college campuses but whether Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will succeed in instituting federal censorship of political speech under the guise of “campaign-finance” regulation. The Left has been very clear in its aims: Defending the government’s position during the Citizens United arguments, Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm L. Stewart told Justice David Souter that the law should allow for banning books if the government decides those books constitute illegal political advocacy. The fact that money changes hands when a book is commissioned, printed, and distributed makes that a “campaign-finance” issue.

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