What’s that line? Scratch a ProggieLib, uncover a wanna-be tyrant?<\/p>\n
Joe Biden transition official wrote op-ed advocating free speech restrictions<\/a><\/p>\n President-elect Joe Biden\u2019s transition team leader for US-owned media outlets wants to redefine freedom of speech and make \u201chate speech\u201d a crime.<\/p>\n Richard Stengel is the Biden transition \u201cTeam Lead<\/a>\u201d for the US Agency for Global Media, the US government media empire that includes Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty.<\/p>\n Stengel, an Obama administration alumnus, wrote last year in a\u00a0Washington Post op-ed<\/a>\u00a0that US freedom of speech was too unfettered and that changes must be considered.<\/p>\n He wrote: \u201cAll speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I\u2019m all for protecting \u2018thought that we hate,\u2019 but not speech that incites hate.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Stengel offered two examples of speech that he has an issue with: Quran burning and circulation of \u201cfalse narratives\u201d by Russia during the 2016 election.<\/p>\n \u201cEven the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?\u201d Stengel wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a fair question. Yes, the First Amendment protects the \u2018thought that we hate,\u2019 but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw.\u201d<\/p>\n Stengel wrote that \u201cour foremost liberty also protects any bad actors who hide behind it to weaken our society,\u201d adding, \u201cRussian agents assumed fake identities, promulgated false narratives and spread lies on Twitter and Facebook, all protected by the First Amendment.\u201d<\/p>\n Stengel until recently worked as a\u00a0paid MSNBC contributor<\/a>. He led the\u00a0National Constitution Center from 2004 to 2006, and was under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs from 2014 to 2016 during the final years of the Obama administration.<\/p>\n \u201cSince World War II, many nations have passed laws to curb the incitement of racial and religious hatred. These laws started out as protections against the kinds of anti-Semitic bigotry that gave rise to the Holocaust. We call them hate speech laws, but there\u2019s no agreed-upon definition of what hate speech actually is. In general, hate speech is speech that attacks and insults people on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin and sexual orientation,\u201d Stengel wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s time to consider these statutes. The modern standard of dangerous speech comes from Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) and holds that speech that directly incites \u2018imminent lawless action\u2019 or is likely to do so can be restricted. Domestic terrorists such as Dylann Roof and Omar Mateen and the El Paso shooter were consumers of hate speech. Speech doesn\u2019t pull the trigger, but does anyone seriously doubt that such hateful speech creates a climate where such acts are more likely?\u201d<\/p>\n USAGM and VOA leadership ranks were gutted this year as Trump-nominated CEO Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker, sought to reform the agency. Pack\u00a0fired and suspended executives<\/a>\u00a0over a pro-Biden video produced by VOA Urdu and for allegedly faulty security checks in hiring foreign workers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What’s that line? Scratch a ProggieLib, uncover a wanna-be tyrant? Joe Biden transition official wrote op-ed advocating free speech restrictions President-elect Joe Biden\u2019s transition team leader for US-owned media outlets wants to redefine freedom of speech and make \u201chate speech\u201d a crime. Richard Stengel is the Biden transition \u201cTeam Lead\u201d for the US Agency for … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61810"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61813,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61810\/revisions\/61813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}