There Is No Defense Part 2: Silencers

Reactions to the earlier piece in this short series have been exactly what I expected: A blend of outrage and gratitude, roughly in equal measures. However, a few correspondents have written to ask for tactical direction: i.e., how best to counter the agendaists in practice. And yes, the earlier essay was a bit low on that sort of detail.

In the usual case, the deeds of evil men are best combated by publicity...if the surrounding society is overwhelmingly moral and ethical. Let's leave aside for the moment the question of whether America in the year of Our Lord 2013 satisfies that qualifier. What is the evildoers' best countermeasure to the tactic of public disclosure by those who would thwart them?

Exactly: Enforced silence.

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Have a gander at this:

I just posted a piece at The Huffington Post about Robert Van Tuinen, a student at Modesto Junior College in California who was told he would not be allowed to pass out Constitutions on Constitution Day....

I note:

Not 10 minutes after Van Tuinen began handing out copies of the Constitution, a campus police officer arrived to stop him. Van Tuinen was informed that anytime someone wants to pass out anything on campus, it must first be registered and approved by the Student Development office.

And as my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), writes in a press release today:

Upon arriving at that office, Van Tuinen talks with administrator Christine Serrano, who tells him that because of “a time, place, and manner,” he can only pass out literature inside the “free speech area,” which she informs him is “in front of the student center, in that little cement area.” She asks him to fill out an application and asks to photocopy his student ID. Hauling out a binder, Serrano says that she has “two people on campus right now, so you’d have to wait until either the 20th, 27th, or you can go into October.” Van Tuinen protests that he wants to pass out the Constitution on Constitution Day, at which point Serrano dismissively tells him “you really don’t need to keep going on.”

Modesto Junior College is an element of the California Community Colleges System -- an institution of the State of California. If memory serves, California, like the other 49 states of the Union, is bound by the Constitution of the United States, "the supreme Law of the Land." Amendment 1 to that Constitution guarantees the right of free expression -- "freedom of speech, and of the press" -- immune to Congressional displeasure. Inasmuch as Supreme Court decisions have declared the various rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to have been "incorporated" against interference by state governments, this would appear to be a clear violation of Robert Van Tuinen's civil liberties -- and grounds for a big, fat lawsuit against the administration of Modesto Junior College.

With FIRE on the case, we might yet see that come to pass. But there's a larger topic here, so permit me to move on from this instance of silencing, however egregious.

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A man can be denied his rights in a number of ways. The most insidious of all is to prevent him from learning of them in the first place. He who does not know his rights is unlikely to assert them and has little chance of defending them.

Similarly, a society can be kept from learning of rampant evil by suppressing all disclosure thereof. If the evildoers have ways to block such news from reaching the channels by which we would learn of it, they can continue on in near-perfect safety.

There is rampant evil in America. The overwhelmingly greater part of it is being perpetrated by persons in public office, high, middle, and low, elected and appointed. They labor ceaselessly to keep their identities and deeds out of public view, in which effort they have a great deal of support from other evildoers who control the major organs of popular news dissemination.

They have been appallingly successful. Consider the handling of the Benghazi atrocity alone:

During the second portion of a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing about Benghazi Thursday on Capitol Hill, the majority of Democrats on the Committee left the room and refused to listen to the testimony of Patricia Smith and Charles Woods. Ms. Smith is the mother of Sean Smith, an information management officer killed in the 9/11 Benghazi attack. Charles Woods is the father of Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, who was also killed....

The only Democrats who stayed were Ranking Member Elijah Cummings and Rep. Jackie Speier.

The indefatigable, invaluable Bryan Preston adds a few details:

Patricia Smith, mother of slain U.S. Foreign Service information officer Sean Smith, testified that she met with President Obama, Vice President Biden, and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the day the four Americans’ bodies were returned to American soil. Smith says that the three and other senior administration officials lied to her about the cause of the attack.

“I was told a few things,” Smith told the remaining members of the committee, “and they were all lies. Obama, and Hillary, and Panetta, and Biden, and Susan [Rice] all came up to me at the casket ceremony. Every one of them came up to, gave me a big hug. And I asked them ‘What happened? Please tell me.’ And every one of them says, ‘It was the video.’ And we all know that it wasn’t the video. Even at at time they knew it wasn’t the video. So they all lied to me.”

Smith also said that all of the officials said that they would “check up” on what happened and get back to her. To date, she has heard from none of them.

“I don’t count,” Smith said, “the people of America don’t count. The only thing that counts is their own selves, and their own jobs.”

Charles Woods, father of slain Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, also testified. In his soft-spoken voice, Woods also leveled grave criticisms at the Obama administration.

“It’s been over a year since four brave Americans were tragically killed in Benghazi,” Woods said. “And after one year we know very few answers. We’ve been asking for the last year. We don’t know much more than we did a year ago.

“Two of my heroes while growing up were John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King,” Woods said. “Rev. King made the statement, that ‘Justice delayed is justice denied.’ It’s been over a year. We have no justice. We have very few truthful answers that have been provided.”

Given the behavior to date of the Obamunists -- in which I include every last member of the Democrat caucuses in both houses of Congress -- it strikes me as near to certainty that all the Democrats who fled the chamber possess knowledge about what happened a year ago in Libya that they prefer to keep to themselves, for political reasons. If they were to remain for the testimony, the witnesses might call upon them to speak, with cameras recording their responses. Can't have that.

That's agendaism at work. The Democrats' sole agenda item is to retain and enlarge their power over these United States and every living soul in it. (Granted that there are some Republicans who'd like to do that for their own party.) It's a perfect demonstration of the willingness of the agendaist to jettison all moral and ethical principles when his agenda is threatened.

Feeling that old "take the musket down from the mantel" impulse yet, Gentle Reader? If not, why not?

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It's never been clearer how important it is to have channels of information distribution that defy all attempts to put them under political control. Before Fox News and the rise of the World Wide Web, we had little, if any, hope of learning anything the social-fascist Left, and its wholly owned subsidiary the Democrat Party, was willing that we should learn. Now that alternatives exist and are functioning to contradict the dominant media narratives, the Left's most ardent desire is to find a way to silence them. Needless to say, any easier targets will be picked off with regulation, licensing, or litigation, according to which of those weapons is most applicable.

As I've written innumerable times before this, a free society requires freedom in three aspects to sustain its freedom: education, weaponry, and communications. Granted that in a society that enshrines the freedom of speech as a sacred right, there is also freedom not to speak. We cannot compel the evildoers to testify against themselves. But they are striving to silence those who, however they manage to do so, learn of evil deeds and seek to disclose them. It's critically important that they be defeated.

"The greatest crime is silence! Record everything, record..." -- Jewish historian Simon Dubnov as he was being dragged off to Rumbula to be executed by the Nazis.