PROTECT Political SPEECH From the TECH OLIGARCHS With The CIVIL Rights Act of 2019

Socio-Political-Journal...

We have a historical template for the solution, or at least a major part of the solution, to the once creeping, now galloping, repression of free speech in America.

"If you haven't noticed that freedom of political speech in America is under increasingly effective assault by the left, you haven't been watching. Over the internet, over lunch with colleagues, in every university classroom, indeed, everywhere in America, the wrong word, the wrong thought, can spell banishment or professional and personal destruction, or both.

"Among the worst aspects of this crisis is that high-tech forums, access to which is now essential to disseminating political argument and appealing for electoral support – Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – increasingly bar or obstruct the sharing of conservative views. Without a dramatic statutory restatement of Americans' First Amendment right to free expression, the nation is in the fast lane to an Orwellian world where "correct" thoughts and public statements are mandatory and "incorrect" ones lead to exclusion from polite society and personal destruction.

. . . "The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and its close relatives, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, supposedly prohibited government denial of equal protection of the laws or discrimination in voting rights against former slaves.

"But nothing in the Civil War constitutional amendments protected minorities from private discrimination. In consequence, there followed one hundred years during which private racial discrimination, and not merely in the South, constituted a major barrier to full and fair participation in American society for the former slaves and their descendants.

"The solution the nation found for this problem in 1964 was that year's great Civil Rights Act, which, among other things, prohibited discrimination on the basis of race by private employers and all places of public accommodation.
"The First Amendment's protection of free expression is a limitation only on governmental action. The Founders never dreamed that the major private institutions of the Republic they were establishing would seriously limit freedom of speech for Americans. But beyond any dispute, the day has come when exactly that evil is occurring.

"We have a historical template for the solution, or at least a major part of the solution, to the once creeping, now galloping, repression of free speech in America. It is high time for a new Civil Rights Act extending First Amendment freedoms to major private actors – to internet forums, large employers, and the entire K-12 and university systems. 

"If conservative leaders and Republican office-holders had pushed back consistently against the 30-year process that has brought America to this sorry point, perhaps we could have avoided the necessity of a statutory cure. But, as on so many other fronts, they failed their voters and the nation.

"Now, nothing less than a great new reaffirmation of First Amendment freedoms by Congress and the president can restore the unfettered right to open public inquiry and political discourse on which the United States was founded." . . .

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