Forget the Alien & Sedition Act prosecutions. Forget Lincoln’s arrests of pro-secession newspaper editors. Forget the Palmer Raids of World War I, the “Red Scares,” the imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs or the McCarthy Hearings of the 1950s.
By far the greatest threat to freedom of speech and press that America ever faced was and is, “campaign finance reform.”
Campaign finance “reformers” mask their agenda under cloaks that appeal to a mass audience: “Money Isn’t Speech!,” “Corporations Aren’t People!,” etc.
Yet their agenda threatens to gut the very heart of the First Amendment.
Here is a news story about the FEC (the Federal Election Commission) voting recently for new policies which empower the federal government to monitor and control political advertising or paid political discussion on the internet.
This move paves the way for the federal government to monitor political blogs, political news sites, and ideological content on the web. It empowers the agents of the U.S. government to investigate who pays for what, and which show/video/post/article is secretly a campaign ad.
Every single claim made by campaign finance reformers is untrue. Hillary lost to Trump despite spending SEVERAL TIMES more money on her campaign than Trump. Then the “campaign finance reformers” shifted to a claim that “Russia” secretly influenced American voters to vote for Trump.
