Fine Lines Or Battle Lines?

     It’s gratifying to note how much attention Patrice Stanton’s short piece on “Free Speech & Fine Lines” has received. Truly, the ability to depict a conflict in a visual form has more impact than any number of words. But for some of us, your humble commentator most emphatically included, words are all we have...which might be a good thing:

     I damn sure didn’t go to war for this country twice to come home and be told by a bunch of homely chicks with daddy issues, effete literary fops scandalized by the notion of resistance to Third World pathologies, and nimrod sons of politicians playing at journalism what I can and can’t say. And I don’t think most Americans are ready to have everything they speak, write, or think perused for possible hate criminality by these same goose-stepping creeps.

     We’d rather die than “live” on our knees, begging permission to exercise the right God gave us to say whatever we damn well please, whenever we damn well please, and in the manner we damn well please. And those who want to shut us up better be equally committed if they want to succeed.

     After Garland, they went too far. They showed their hand and their goal, a world where they decide who gets to say what. Imagine the same hysterical social justice drama queens who shriek about microaggressions getting to decide what you can and can’t say. Just understand, you fascist bastards, that if you want to be Nazis, you’ll need to do what the Nazis did and find some armed thugs – yeah, I’m using the word “thugs” whether you like it or not – to come stop us. Tell them to wear Kevlar.

     Please read the entire column. Then multiply it by 100,000,000. That’s roughly the magnitude of the reaction against the sort of vilification that’s been heaped on Pamela Geller...for holding a cartoon-drawing contest.

     The Left’s cat’s-paws in the media may have finally gone too far. But let’s not leave it there, shall we? Let’s take a broader look at the “progressive” campaign against freedom of expression.

---

     “You got to use all your weapons.” -- Jim Bouton

     The Left understands Bouton’s insight. The Right does not...at least, we don’t often behave as if we do.

     The Left’s attack on freedom of expression is multi-pronged:

1. Legal: By “lawfare” suits against persons who express views inimical to its aims.
2. Financial: Through boycotts and threats of boycotts against the representatives of viewpoints it disapproves.
3. Ostracism: Through thunderous media denunciations of such representatives.
4. Deceitful: By slandering or libeling those whose statements it disapproves.
5. Tendentious: By carefully choosing words and phrases that misdirect one’s attention.
6. Physical: Through actual campaigns of destruction and physical intimidation.
7. Victim-Blaming: By recasting atrocities as somehow the fault of those attacked (e.g., the attack on Pamela Geller as “her fault” for “baiting” radical Muslims).

     Not every tactic works on every occasion, but the multiplicity of them is sufficient to intimidate, even paralyze, quite a few people with important things to say – things that must be said. If you can be made to feel that all of society’s “big guns” are aimed at you, you can be induced to self-censor, and those must-be-saids might just go unsaid.

     However, if they continue to be said, even by a tiny minority of the un-cowed, anger at the Left’s suppressive tactics will build. So the Left’s agenda depends on achieving total success...and fortunately for these United States, that has proved impossible.

---

     A few months back, the following sequence of simple drawings was used to dramatize the Left’s attack on our right to keep and bear arms:

     I submit that the Left has sought to apply a similar progression to freedom of expression, albeit not principally by legal means. Yes, their mouthpieces – including the evil bastard in the White House – have railed against the Citizens United decision, but short of a Constitutional amendment effectively repealing the First one, they’ll get nowhere with that. Their campaign against freedom of expression has mainly used “political correctness:” an attempt to get us to self-censor by disapproving of us so stridently that we become convinced that we’re being naughty.

     Mind you, these are the same people who praise “art” such as “Piss Christ” and “plays” such as The Vagina Monologues. These are the same people who celebrated Andrea Dworkin. These are the same people who adore homosexual-activist parades that feature all manner of “transgressive” dress and conduct. These are the same people who lionize Emma Sulkowicz. When the “naughtiness” supports their agenda, they have no problem with it.

     A full-throated, utterly courageous counterattack is the only credible response. Moreover, it, too, must be multi-pronged:

1. It’s not “reproductive choice;” it’s killing babies in service to irresponsible promiscuity.
2. It’s not “transgressive sexuality;” it’s perversion on public display.
3. It’s not “social justice;” it’s demands by good-for-nothings for what they refuse to earn.
4. It’s not “environmentalism;” it’s a back-door attack on capitalism by closeted socialists.
5. It’s not “anti-racism;” it’s black hatred for and violence against whites.

     ...and so forth. Take especial note of what Peter Berkowitz said in his recent essay on the subject:

     Nevertheless, most of the elite media—overwhelmingly left liberal—have largely neglected to cover the left's crusade against free speech. Operating out of newsrooms, as Powers observes, in which "there is nobody to push back on their biases," reporters seem unable to detect anything amiss on campuses, in the media, and in the political arena where, after all, the draconian regulation of speech is intended to serve avowedly left-wing causes.

     That deliberate averting of the eyes by the media will only break down if we resolve to break it. Now that there are alternative conduits for the news, the Main Stream Media are losing credibility, specifically because people have noticed that they won’t cover certain subjects, and will only cover certain others in a deceitful fashion. That makes it possible for us to bring them to heel, if only we’re willing to be loud enough, numerous enough, and persistent enough.

     Once the Left has lost its control of the media, all else will follow, for without media protection, its various initiatives cannot be sustained. Decent persons, heartened by the crescendo of sentiment against their schemes, will mass to wipe them out.

---

     There’s a “potential well” to be dealt with here. Until enough persons find enough courage to speak openly and stridently against Leftist attempts to silence us, there won’t be enough persons to speak openly. That’s part of why I’ve kept on with this drivel for eighteen years now. Someone has to take the early risks. Someone has to expose himself, and at least act as if there’s nothing to fear. Someone must say what must be said.

     The battle lines have already been drawn. Which side are you on?

Repression And Rebellion

     Commentator and television host Greg Gutfeld notes an important development today:

     Hosted by Kevin Hart, guests on the Comedy Central Bieber Roast included the aging Snoop Dog, the salty Natasha Leggero, the forgettable Ludacris, and the good sport that is Martha Stewart. Many of the jokes were likely written by Redeye favorite Jesse Joyce, or maybe Kurt Metzger. The jokes won’t be retold here, but to summarize: the barbs directed at Martha were filthy, Leggero was referred to as a whore multiple times, Ross compared Shaquille O’Neal to King Kong, jokes were made at the expense of a comedian’s dead father (some by the comedian himself) – who died on 9/11. The content was racist, sexist, sizest, homophobic, transist (not sure that’s a word), and most of all hurtful. It was all a disgusting mess, for the most part (it’s a roast, people).

     In short, if any of this stuff had been said anywhere else — on campus, or twitter – the speaker would be shamed into oblivion.

     (Unless, of course, you’re Trevor Noah, and have Jon Stewart’s blessing).

     It’s the only place – and perhaps the last place for now, where you can still make jokes about illegitimacy, suffering, and death – and get away with it.

     I got the sense from watching it, that the roast has become less about ripping apart of a famous celebrity, but more a release valve in an increasing uptight, suffocating culture. The spread of manufactured moralism – where a joke or hypothetical situation (as rebel thinker Gavin McInnes posits) takes on the appearance of a threat greater than actual physical harm – is now driving real, authentic freedoms into careful pockets. The roast is more cathartic than funny.

     There’s a reason for the similarity between the words repression and pressure.

     That which we repress has a tendency to mushroom inside us. Should the pressure build beyond our capacity to withstand it, the eruption can be dramatic...and violent. This is as true of legally or socially-enforced norms as it is of a bad belch.

     The Left’s current campaign to control our thinking by controlling what we may say is having exactly this effect. Think of all the individual words their forces have tried to ban. I’ve written about this before, of course, but the Left’s campaign has moved into even higher gear in the most recent years. A good example is the attempt by the supporters of Hillary Clinton to forbid a wide range of criticisms of Her Royal Majesty as “sexist” – in truth, as verbal lese majeste.

     A bit after the original “Shamans” post cited above, I wrote in a coda:

     Linguistic taboos, bad enough in themselves, are an entering wedge for other sorts of controls. When the taboo crosses from being cause for castigation to being a justification for punishment, genuine censorship has arrived.

     Does anyone doubt that this is the next stop on the Left’s crusade? But equally, does anyone doubt that a backlash is building – indeed, as Gutfeld strongly hints, that safety valves, though they’re already opening, will ultimately prove insufficient – and that the eventual rebellion will be horrible?

---

     The dynamic that fuels censorship is bifurcated. For some, it’s a tactic employed in the implementation of an agenda. For others, it’s merely a way to enjoy what they find most pleasurable: the exercise of power.

     He who lusts for power over others is inherently evil. I trust this requires no great argument in its justification. The evil man, once he has some degree of power, will use it to acquire more, for power is a drug that doesn’t sate. However, the enjoyment of power requires that it be used. For, as O’Brien said to Winston in 1984, to enjoy your power, you must be actually coercing your victim at the moment:

     ‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’
     Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.
     ‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.’

     But this sin, like many others, carries the seeds of its own comeuppance. Driving critical and hostile speech underground makes it even more dangerous to the ruling elites than driving a religion underground. It increases otherwise uninvolved persons’ interest in what's being said, and why, and why it’s being suppressed, and whether it might be true. Of course, you can’t expect the ruling elites or their protected mascot-groups to realize any of that; they’re getting too much of a thrill out of the power they wield.

     It often seems to me as if Tyrant's Disease has a built-in antibody in the form of Tyrant's Arrogant Stupidity. This is such an occasion. Unfortunately, the cure is at least as unpleasant as the disease itself.

---

     Nothing under the veil of time is truly stable. Every life, however long, will end. Every institution, however mighty, will eventually fall. Even black holes will collapse through quantum evaporation. Even baryons will eventually decay. The one thing we can count on is that “this too shall pass away.”

     The Left’s burgeoning censorship regime, today being imposed mainly by excoriation rather than by law, will pass away as well. What follows could be unbelievably ugly; let us pray that it not be so. But the probability of a horrifying result increases with every word or phrase that’s deemed unspeakable, and every thought that’s deemed beyond the pale. It is our right and our duty to resist, not merely for the preservation of freedom in our time, but to minimize the destruction that will follow when the Left’s house of cards collapses.

     “Inevitable” is a word one should use only with great caution. But if all things must pass, then the collapse of the Left-imposed regime of speech and thought is inevitable, as is the backlash that will follow should it not be fought back while we still possess the numbers, the means, and the will.

Speak No Evil?

As public confidence dwindles in the supposedly protective mechanisms around us, we confront a choice of paths into the future:

1. We can surrender to the tides that threaten us;
2. We can become self-reliant;
3. We can close our eyes.

(Note carefully what I didn’t say. We cannot make the inherently untrustworthy agents of the State trustworthy, nor will improving their equipment, their training, or – may God help us all – their “inclusiveness” make us any safer. It’s been tried, people. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.)

He who has surrendered mentally will choose option #1. He who has resolved to survive and flourish will choose option #2. But he whose fragile mettle will not allow him to confront the evidence of the onrushing darkness will choose option #3.

It’s notable that #3 types cannot endure any dispute about what they’ve chosen to deny. That might be because it’s harder to shut your ears than your eyes. Whatever the reason, if a #3 type leans in a certain direction politically, he’ll want to silence those who’ve chosen options #1 and #2. If he’s politically or journalistically active, he’ll strive for exactly that result, whether through the law or through derision and intimidation.

Kevin Williamson gives us a look at one of the tactics employed:

The “Fox News Is Stupid and Evil” article is by now its own genre of journalism, albeit one that almost nobody does very well. In the course of attempting to enlighten some not especially bright Democrats earlier this week — hola, @mcspocky! — I went looking through a few of the so-called studies that purport to demonstrate that Fox News viewers are deeply and uniquely misinformed about public affairs. They are mostly horsepucky, as I demonstrated with this assortment of dim-witted accounts of the PunditFact “study” (which is not a study) of disputed Fox News statements, the authors of which rightly warn against using it to make general conclusions about Fox News, inasmuch as the data sample is admittedly arbitrary and biased — not out of malice or bad faith, but because the very structure of such fact-checking columns ensures that it is so, among other things by examining only disputed statements.

Other entries in the genre are not holding up well over time, either. The gentlemen-scholars of Alternet gave it their very best with a piece published under the subtle headline “Study confirms that Fox News makes you stupid.” The column contains a bullet list detailing nine outrageous things that Fox News viewers believe in error, which I have reproduced here with my comments in brackets.

The entire piece is well worth your time – Williamson, whom I have criticized in the past, does yeoman’s work in this selection – but above all, ponder his conclusion:

The Left has learned over the years that winning debates is difficult but discrediting people and institutions is relatively easy. You point the finger and yell “racist!” or “stupid!” or “stupid racist!” long enough and loud enough and it will start to stick. And for a long time, the Left did not have to do very much debating, because there was no Fox News, no Rush Limbaugh et al., and no conservative alternatives online. Now there are, and so the Left’s most pressing order of business is the delegitimization of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh et al., and conservative alternatives online. And if that doesn’t work, Harry Reid is ready to repeal the First Amendment, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is ready to see you locked up for your political views.

And when that happens, you can bet that somebody will publish a study finding that it’s the only rational thing to do.

Indeed.

---

Does anyone else here recognize the name of Theodor Adorno? You can be forgiven for it if you don’t. Yet Adorno was among the originators of the “stupid or evil” rhetorical tactic of which the Left is so fond. As he fancied himself a “scientist,” he gave it a pseudo-scientific gloss. His book The Authoritarian Personality became a basic text for the Frankfurt School rhetoricians and dialecticians who came after him. Notable among them was Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse embraced Adorno’s “conservatives are fascists” thesis wholeheartedly. As he wrote in his infamous 1965 tract “Repressive Tolerance:”

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word....

Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and 'philosophies' can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the 'marketplace of ideas' is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the 'end of ideology', the false consciousness has become the general consciousness--from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities....

[1968 Postscript:] As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for 'the other side', I maintain that there are issues where either there is no 'other side' in any more than a formalistic sense, or where 'the other side' is demonstrably 'regressive' and impedes possible improvement of the human condition.

Note the use of “false consciousness” in the above. This is a thinly veiled assertion that if you disagree with Marcuse, you’re probably stupid. Marcuse subsumes the “evil” part from Adorno’s assertions about “the authoritarian personality,” which he unabashedly identifies with political conservatism and incredibly equates to “fascist.”

(Yes, yes, the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch are already aware that fascism is a Marxist phenomenon, but some things cannot be said too often.)

Adorno and Marcuse provided the activist Left with rhetorical weapons they’ve used to campaign against freedom of expression for decades. Happily, they’ve made little progress so far. However, as the storm clouds mass above us, an increasing percentage of Americans find that they prefer not to hear the plain facts about any of them. Some of them would like to silence the rest of us and the organs we use for communication and mutual information, and are willing to sign on to the activists’ campaign to see to it.

---

A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers...and its greatest strength is a free press when ‘free’ is defined as ‘responsible’ and the managers define what is ‘irresponsible.’ – Professor Bernardo de la Paz, in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress

The political campaign to limit free expression to what political powers that be decide is “reasonable and responsible” will be presented to us under a number of rationales. Some will have a superficially attractive veneer. Others will be wrapped in the stark colors of fear. Regardless of the rationale, the aim will be to put the State in charge of what may and may not be said: an abrogation of our First Amendment guaranteed rights.

As Clarence Carson once wrote, left-liberals have long maintained that freedom of speech plus the vote are sufficient to “protect freedom.” They were insincere then; they’re showing their true colors now. All that remains is to see whether decent persons will let them get away with it.

Day Off...Mostly

Inasmuch as I’ll be having some extensive oral surgery in a few hours, I was planning simply to announce a day off from Liberty’s Torch. What actually happened was a powerful lesson about not reading Internet news sources this early in the morning:

President Barack Obama has a moral responsibility to push back on the nation’s journalism community when it is planning to publish anti-jihadi articles that might cause a jihadi attack against the nation’s defense forces, the White House’s press secretary said Jan. 12.

“The president … will not now be shy about expressing a view or taking the steps that are necessary to try to advocate for the safety and security of our men and women in uniform” whenever journalists’ work may provoke jihadist attacks, spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at the White House’s daily briefing.

Clearly, despite all my efforts I don’t catch every important development just as it develops. But wait: there’s more!

Obama’s willingness to pressure media outlets, to quit defending First Amendment rights and also to mollify jihadis, reflects Obama’s overall policy of minimizing conflict with militant Islam.

Throughout his presidency, Obama has tried to shift the public’s focus away from the jihadi threat toward his domestic priorities.

He also repeatedly praised Islam and Muslims, and criticized criticism of Islam. “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” he told a worldwide TV audience during a September 2012 speech at the United Nations.

It’s always been clear that Obama favors Islam over American interests and the Western code of justice. What’s now all too apparent is that he’s resolved to destroy the right to free expression for that reason.

Why not? Freedom of expression is a thorn in Obama’s flesh. This isn’t just consistent with his pro-Islam personal views; it’s also a perfect entering wedge for politically motivated censorship and manipulation of the media. It will provide him with a rationale for taking control of the Internet, for putting government “advisors” – armed, no doubt – into the editorial departments of major media organs, and for demanding “equal time” from any such organ that dares to act other than in accordance with his wishes.

There can be only one answer to this, short of forcibly evicting this pretender from the White House and decorating a prominent District of Columbia lamppost with his remains. Every American with any public voice, no matter how small, must immediately raise it in the strongest possible act of defiance.

Here’s Your Prophet Muhammad, Obama,
You Camel-Fellating Fairy:

Let hell come to breakfast. It’s time and past time. Now if you’ll excuse me, I should let my blood pressure drop a bit before I go under the knife.

The ABCs Of Social Fascism

The wake of the Charlie Hebdo atrocity has dragged along a development that will surprise many Americans: a fresh drive to eliminate freedom of speech.

Sara’s article is worth reading in its entirety, but the part that simply demands to be excerpted is the video she embeds:

Jonathan Turley is a self-described liberal. Indeed, he’s stated openly that though he disapproves of many of Obama’s moves on Constitutional grounds, he favors the policies involved. That marks him as unusually honest and candid for someone on the left of the spectrum. When he criticizes politicians whose orientation and policy preferences he shares, we should take him seriously.

What odds would you give, Gentle Reader, that this new campaign for censorship will become the letter of the law in Europe? How about here in America? As Turley notes in the video, Canada has already crossed that line. Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn notwithstanding, a Canadian can get into a lot of legal trouble by openly criticizing Islam or any of its major figures, past or present.

It’s even worse than you might think. A few years back there was a vilification trial in Victoria, Australia. The complainants were, of course, Muslims. The defendant tried to make his case by reading directly from the Koran:

What is car-wreck fascinating here is Judge Michael Higgins’ conclusion that simply pointing out what the Koran says now constitutes outlawed speech in Victoria. During court proceedings, when Mr. Scot began to read verses from the Koran that denigrate women, a lawyer for the Islamic Council of Victoria, the plaintiff, cut him off, explaining that reading such verses aloud is itself an act of vilification. “How,” wondered Mr. Scot, can it be vilifying to Muslims in the room when I am just reading from the Koran?”

Note this well: Presiding Judge Michael Higgins agreed with the plaintiff’s lawyer that to read certain verses from the Koran constitutes the vilification of Muslims. To the best of my knowledge, our brethren Down Under have yet to contest that “hate speech” regime.

Some patterns take longer than others to become obvious.

---

I wrote a few days ago that:

Islam is massively useful to our political class. The powers that be are grateful for the threat it presents, and for the repeated evidences of that threat it provides. It serves to justify all manner of intrusions on Americans’ rights, and all manner of incursions upon our privacy. Thus, to expect that the State will ever act against Islam, regardless of how its atrocities proliferate, is a foolish notion.

A new campaign against freedom of expression, in the name of the non-existent “right not to be offended,” fits that paradigm perfectly. You may rest assured, Gentle Reader, that that campaign will have plenty of special-interest backers. The more important question is why the great majority of the rest of us will bow before it.

In his book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg points out that laws Americans of a hundred years ago would have denounced as intolerable incursions on the rights and prerogatives of a free people are widely accepted today. Today’s Americans generally tolerate, even welcome “liberal fascism:” the unlimited use of coercive power as long as it can be framed as “for a good cause.” There are three components to this phenomenon:

First, thanks to the use of the mass media and the educational infrastructure, a great many of us have been conditioned to deem virtually everything the federal government decrees, whether enacted legislatively or decreed by regulation, as acceptable on practical grounds. In other words, as long as the overt end strikes us as a good one, we’ll bow to the means. This complete effacement of the nature of a republic – a country in which the rei publicae are constitutionally defined and governments are forbidden to meddle in any other matters – has essentially nullified the constraints of the Constitution.

Second, the media and the schools have also widened the range of government activities generally deemed beneficial. Note how this couples to the above consideration: if you’re against “hate speech,” “discrimination,” or “pollution,” how could you possibly be against laws that penalize them? The emergence of vocal, even militant special interests dedicated to such causes (and allowed de facto to go far beyond what was once considered acceptable in promoting them) puts “private muscle” at the service of government’s guns.

Third, even when an interest group was not part of the originating force for some fascist law, it might afterward deem that law convenient for its own purposes. The result is a continuing enlargement of the aggregate support of such an enactment as more groups find ways to exploit it to their own advantage.

Politicians strain to give lip service to freedom and limited government while encouraging all three of those attitudes and their consequences.

---

I’ve written before that the Left will not leave us free to speak our minds:

Just how are freedom of expression and the electoral process faring in the Land of the Formerly Free?

First, freedom of expression:

• The McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act has partly abrogated the right to free expression around election time.
• Given the new Administration and the enlarged Democrat majorities on Capitol Hill, we stand in immediate danger of the revival of the Fairness Doctrine, which is aimed at quenching conservative talk radio.
• The use of tax law to silence conservative and libertarian opinion is growing, especially as regards voluntary associations such as churches and charitable groups.
• Several liberal luminaries, among them both Cass Sunstein and Hillary Clinton, have argued for the censorship of the World Wide Web.
• Lawsuits attempting to silence a commentator who has merely stated established facts or accurately quoted an adversarial opponent are rife, and are usually allowed to go forward by the courts.
• Conservative public officials are continuously derided, assailed, and slandered, both by the Mainstream Media and by activist groups.
• Lectures and presentations by libertarian and conservative figures are heckled, massively protested, and often terminally disrupted by liberal activists. The speakers who dare to appear at such events are at continuous risk of physical assault.

The legal impediments to free expression are bad enough. When one adds the "chilling effect" of the extra-legal mechanisms used to silence pro-freedom views, the pile reaches an alarming height.

Yes, Europe has gone further down this road than America...but Obama and his brethren on the social-fascist Left are determined to follow it if they must, sprint past it if they can. As with mass shootings, they’ll use any “crisis” brought about by someone’s violent response to a spate of plain speaking as a justification for further infringements on the freedom of expression.

How far will we let this go before the musket comes down from the mantel?

Black Out The Blackers-Out

Ostrich tactics only work if your enemy is an ostrich – and an ostrich afraid of you, at that. Just now, the major networks, wholly dedicated to the protection of His August Majesty Barack Hussein Obama, first Emperor of these United States, are employing ostrich tactics: they’ve completely embargoed the most devastating revelations of the political cycle: Sharyl Attkisson’s Fast and Furious discoveries, and Jonathan Gruber’s megascandalous admissions that ObamaCare’s passage was made possible only by a systematic campaign of deceit.

To be perfectly fair to the satraps of the networks’ news divisions, the tactic has served them well in the past. Republicans and conservatives have almost never confronted them on it in a significant way. Indeed, we’ve tended to act like ostriches ourselves. We’ve disdained the Big Three as unreliably biased, turned to the alternative media for our news, and let it rest there. We’ve allowed the farce to continue unchallenged.

But that doesn’t loosen the Big Three’s grip on the national consciousness, which remains terrifyingly strong...and malevolent.

Here’s Ricochet’s Stephen Miller recommendation to the Republican National Committee:

ABC and NBC have instituted a three-week blackout — on network broadcasts, websites and social media pages — of the devastating admissions of MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. The ACA architect repeatedly boasted of deceiving the American public about legislation that cost six million people their family doctor. This should be the final straw in any relationship the GOP and RNC leadership has with these networks, period. No more debates, no more appearances on “Meet The Press,” “Morning Joe,” or “This Week” on ABC.

Boycott both NBC and ABC over failing to report on Gruber’s revelations and put CBS on final notice over the revelations that they coordinated with the Obama administration to tank Sharyl Attkisson’s Benghazi reporting. Network news is a dying religion becoming more ideologically rigid, forgoing any attempt to stay relevant in a media landscape that no longer needs them. Leave them behind. We’ve already shown that it works. Marginalize them and label them progressive news outlets and make them live by it. MSNBC came out of the progressive closet fully earlier this year and their ratings and web traffic got worse. Air America is no more and Current TV is now an unloved stepchild Al Gore gave away for oil money.

Indeed. Broadcast news departments are middlemen. They don’t produce the news; they package and resell it. Should one of the two major parties deny them access, appearances by its national figures, and the privilege of covering its conventions and other events, they’d lose a hefty fraction of their wares. Now that that party holds 31 of the 50 governorships, the majority in both houses of Congress and in 67 out of 99 state legislatures, the loss might be enough to send the networks’ news divisions into irremediable collapse.

Alternately, it might evoke a long-needed purge of network news department mandarins whose faces have been wedged so long and so deeply in the Democrats’ posteriors that they’ve become inured to the taste and aroma.

On a tangentially related matter: have you followed the broadcast networks’ coverage of developments in Ferguson, Missouri? Have you felt adequately informed by it? Were you aware that private citizens and businessmen in that city have been buying guns and ammunition faster than local retail stores can stock them? That Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and Al Sharpton have been egging the black mobs on? That the mouthpieces of those mobs have threatened “demonstrations” – mass violence – in 90 cities nationwide unless Officer Darren Wilson, not even the subject of an indictment yet, is convicted of murder?

Feeling safe in your home, Gentle Reader? I did, once long ago. I check my own armory a lot more often these days than I did back then.

(Cross-posted at Liberty's Torch.)