Dear attorneys general, conspiring against free speech is a crime: Glenn Reynolds in USA Today:
I wonder if U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, or California Attorney General Kamala Harris, or New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman have read this federal statute. Because what they’re doing looks like a concerted scheme to restrict the First Amendment free speech rights of people they don’t agree with. They should look up 18 U.S.C. Sec. 241, I am sure they each have it somewhere in their offices.
Here’s what’s happened so far. First, Schneiderman and reportedly Harris sought to investigate Exxon in part for making donations to groups and funding research by individuals who think “climate change” is either a hoax, or not a problem to the extent that people like Harris and Schneiderman say it is.
Read the whole article -- you need to pay attention.
George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four described “crimethink” as entertaining thoughts unacceptable to the government. Decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court anticipated this horrific hypothetical when Justice Robert Jackson wrote:
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
— West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)
== Power Line, Scott Johnson
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