Biden’s Media Transition Chief Wants to Gut the First Amendment to Prohibit “Hate Speech” — That Is, Speech Some Censor Hates

Biden transition team’s head of state-owned media sees ‘DESIGN FLAW’ in First Amendment, advocates law against ‘hate speech’

14 Nov, 2020 22:43 / Updated 20 hours agoGet short URL

Biden transition team's head of state-owned media sees ‘DESIGN FLAW’ in First Amendment, advocates law against ‘hate speech’

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Richard Stengel, the point man on state-owned media for Joe Biden’s transition team, has said protection of hateful speech that can provoke violence is a “design flaw” in the Constitution and should be fixed with “new guardrails.”

Stengel, a former MSNBC contributor, is transition team leader for the US Agency for Global Media, which includes broadcasters Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. He’s likely to head the agency if Biden becomes president in January. Ironically, that means Washington’s foreign propaganda outlets, which traditionally have promoted America’s founding principles, would be overseen by a man with restrictive views on the most fundamental of those tenets – freedom of speech. Also on rt.com Under Biden, Big Tech’s censorship goons will make conservatives nostalgic for the days of relatively free speech in Obama era

“All speech is not equal,” Stengel wrote last year in an op-ed published by the Washington Post. “And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting thought that we hate, but not speech that incites hate.”

Stengel gave the example of “sophisticated Arab diplomats” who had questioned why constitutional rights would allow a US citizen to burn a copy of the Koran. “It’s a fair question,” he said. “Yes, the First Amendment protects the thought that we hate, 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.” Read more ‘Censorship Rubicon’? Big Tech burying Biden-Ukraine story either wakes up Republicans or drives nail in their political coffin

Another example that Stengel cited was alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. “Our foremost liberty protects any bad actors who hide behind it to weaken our society,” he wrote. “Russian agents assumed fake identities, promulgated false narratives and spread lies on Twitter and Facebook – all protected by the First Amendment.”

Stengel added that it’s time to consider hate-speech laws, like those enacted by other countries to discourage incitement of racial and religious tensions after World War II. He argued that mass shooters Dylann Roof and Omar Mateen were consumers of hate speech, which created a climate that made their heinous crimes more likely.

Stengel, formerly editor of Time magazine, was a US State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the Obama-Biden administration. He referred to his former State Department role as “chief propagandist.”

“I’m not against propaganda,” Stengel reportedly told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018. “Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think that’s awful.”

That Biden would choose a media chief who calls for restrictions on free speech came as little surprise to Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe, who tweeted: “Of course he does.” Another Twitter commenter took issue with Stengel’s free-speech curtailments being based on the offended party’s propensity for violence: “They are 100 percent advocating differential speech protections based on decibel level of complaints.”

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Jews Target Free Expression in Fight Over ‘Hate Speech’

The tyrannical assault on the First Amendment and freedom of speech, thought, and inquiry has reached a whole new level, as establishment spokesmen and media outlets openly advance the notion that America needs “hate speech” laws.

In a recently published op-ed in The Washington Post, Richard Stengel, a former high-ranking State Department official under President Barack Obama and a former editor of Time magazine, argued that the United States should consider enacting “hate speech” laws similar to the tyrannical laws in many European countries that criminalize such things as “Holocaust denial” and “incitement of racial and religious hatred.” These types of laws have effectively been used to persecute and punish any individual investigating complex and disputed aspects of history, particularly relating to WWII, as well as those who criticize massive Third World immigration into the West, refugee resettlement, globalism more generally, and other politically incorrect topics.

“All speech is not equal,” Stengel hypocritically argues in his op-ed. “And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails. I’m all for protecting ‘thought that we hate,’ but not speech that incites hate.”

The very concept of “hate speech,” long promoted by organizations such as the ADL and SPLC, essentially amounts to any criticism of any aspect of the New World Order agenda and the forces behind it. Freedom of speech, thought, and historical and scientific inquiry, bedrocks of the American political tradition specifically and Western civilization more generally, have increasingly been undermined and eroded by private entities such as Google, YouTube, and Twitter that censor and punish dissenting opinions on their platforms. Individuals expressing politically incorrect opinions also increasingly face the risk of becoming targets of radical leftwing organizations and activists, such as Antifa, that work tirelessly to publicly shame and expose “thought criminals,” often leading to social ostracization and loss of employment.

With establishment figures openly pushing for “hate speech” laws, the Senate and House have both established Bipartisan Task Forces for Combating Anti-Semitism, an initiative lobbied for by the Zionist lobby dominating Capitol Hill in an effort to punish those who criticize Israel and the pro-Zionist policies promoted by the D.C. establishment. Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the ADL, praised the recently established task force, arguing that “we must all come together to fight the rise in anti-Semitism that threatens communities everywhere.”

Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, likewise has called for more laws to combat anti-Semitism, especially online anti-Semitism.

“After three decades, anti-Semitism has now reared its head,” Lauder said in part during the recently concluded Second World Jewish Congress International Meeting of Special Envoys and Coordinators for Combating Anti-Semitism. “We want laws that really mean something.”

Of course, to them, anti-Semitism is not just about racism against Jewish people. It includes criticism of Israel as a way to muzzle opposition to that country’s policies.

Additionally, local and federal officials have even launched investigations into harmless flyers simply declaring “It’s OK to be White” at various universities across the country in an effort to determine if those responsible for posting the flyers committed a “hate crime.”

At Oklahoma City University School of Law, investigators are searching for the man who posted the flyers “to determine his intent and whether the actions are a hate crime,” according to a local ABC affiliate in Oklahoma. Similar flyers were posted on the campus of Western Connecticut State University recently, prompting an official investigation by local and state police as well as the FBI. University President John Clark described the posting of the flyers as “an attack on our university community” and assured students that his office is “making every effort to see that those responsible are caught and properly punished.”

The trouble is, even if the posters of these flyers only intended to state the obvious in protest of the vilification of white people especially on college campuses and never intended violence, it wouldn’t matter to leftists. Once their identities are exposed, they will be harassed, threatened, fired from their jobs, and likely driven from society all because they had the audacity to try to push back against the establishment today.

NB: This article was originally published by American Free Press on November 25, 2019. Subscribe to America’s last real newspaper today!

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