...So I guess we can forget that sonorous horse crap about the First Amendment protecting ideas that "society finds ... offensive or disagreeable." The left's new model is a public-private partnership to prohibit speech unacceptable to Joy Ann Reid....
"In 2017, as fear and loathing of Donald Trump seized the nation, a U.S. mayor got a four-star resort to cancel a conservative conference by threatening to withdraw police and fire protection.
"With all the media blubbering about "attempts to DESTROY our democracy" and violations of "constitutional norms, " it's remarkable that this Howitzer blast to the First Amendment has received barely any attention, much less the front-page coverage it deserves, not even from the conservative press.
"The banned conference, you see, was about immigration.
"Wow, our elites really don't want Americans thinking about immigration! (Remember, kids: It's a right-wing conspiracy theory -- and racist, to boot! -- to think that liberals are using mass immigration to change the country.)
"The sponsor of the conference was VDARE, a long-standing immigration website espousing ideas that are basically identical to Trump's 2016 immigration promises -- both before he made them and after he broke them. The main difference is that the arguments on VDARE are expressed in proper English, and the writers actually believe what they say.
" As the 2016 election demonstrated, these ideas are quite popular with a certain segment of voters. Not everyone, just enough to elect a president no one thought could ever be elected, who was loathed by the media, and who was outspent 2-to-1.
"Named for Virginia Dare, the first European born on U.S soil, VDARE promotes the novel idea that U.S. immigration policy should benefit Americans. (Obviously, that includes white, Hispanic, Asian and black Americans -- whom, by the way, mass immigration hurts the most.) Naturally, therefore, it has been designated a "white supremacist" website by the country's largest hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center.". . .
