Forget the Alien & Sedition Acts, the Palmer Raids, the Red Scare or the McCarthy Hearings.
The greatest threat to freedom of speech and press in American history is the scam known as “campaign finance reform.”
Government tyrants and despots have a thousand ways to influence elections to promote more powerful government. They secretly (and sometimes openly, through “public service announcements”) fund the news. They get to stage free press releases and conferences while their opponents must pay for ads to compete with them.
But government officials and their worshippers seek to limit (private sector) money in politics–especially money which pays for political ads which promote freedom, free-enterprise, smaller government or deregulation.
In Wisconsin, the entrenched pro-government forces became so concerned in 2012 that Republican governor Scott Walker’s recall election efforts may have been supported by the evil Koch Brothers that they staged midnight raids and seized millions of pages of emails and other documents. They steadily leaked stories about investigations of government-critical politicians to the press but prohibited the same politicians from publicly defending themselves.
[In 2013 there were] paramilitary-style, pre-dawn raids on the homes of unsuspecting private citizens. With floodlights trained on the targets’ homes, armed officers threatened to beat doors down with battering rams; rifled through rooms; and seized phones, computers, and bank records without allowing the subjects to contact their attorneys. Groggy families awakened to the sound of police boots running through their homes were told that they could not tell anyone what had happened.
Their crime? Supporting conservative causes in Wisconsin.
Years of personal, intimate emails and messages of Wisconsinites who oppose all-powerful government have apparently been gathered and kept by Wisconsin’s “campaign finance” authorities.
